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I set out on this project with the goal of writing a computer program to generate my term paper my graduate studies seminar this fall. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about Keith Tyson as one of the artists for my paper, and he has spent many years working with various systms he has built to automate various parts of the creative process, including his Artmachine from the 90s, which is the first one I really fell in love with--it generated detailed descriptions of works of art that he would then go and make. It seemed like an attractive parallel gesture to write a program to write my paper about him. Developing this project additionally let me indulge my interests in natural language processing and natural language generation. I wanted to investigate text generation programs as (1) labor saving device and (2) an analagous process to his artmaking machines.

I set out to simultaneously pursue the development of two papers. One, the paper that became dadengine termpaper (the programmed paper), and the paper that became robertengine termpaper (the hand generated paper). Along the way I also picked up travesty termpaper, another computer generated paper of slightly different quality and method than the dadaengine termpaper.

I wanted to specify the minimal structure necessary to produce a legible paper. I pursued the development of the computer generated and robert generated papers simultaneously, and any effort that I put into structuring the computer generated paper could be recycled into structure for the robertengine termpaper.

The computer generated termpaper was not going to have any structure that I didn't put there. I suspect that it can't generate as reasoned, rational argument. (Of course, you may wonder if I could either...)

I'm not sure whether it really worked to recycle structure for the robertengine termpaper. This was a totally backwards way to write an essay.

I came in with an open mind, trying sincerely to make the computer version work. Starting with the postmodernism generator, I stripped out references that were irrelevant or false, and began to load it up with actual information from the research that I had done. I’ve turned in the travesty termpaper under my real name, and the robertengine termpaper under a pseudonym to fulfill the requirement for the class.

I also chose Matthew Barney and Natalie Jermemijenko, the two other artists I am most interested in at the moment to feature as the 2nd and 3rd points of my paper.

Travesty Termpaper: [txt] [doc]

really really long Travesty Termpaper. 10,021 pages. Buy it by the foot! [txt]

DadaEngine Termpaper [doc]

RobertEngine Termpaper [doc]

Reflections on the construction and use of the dadaengine termpaper. Vis200.db

The text below contains my reflections on the project as I progressed.

BEGIN:

This is something like setting monkeys down at typewriters, for an unlimited amount of time—knowing that by hitting out every combination of letters they will eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare.

There is also a cognitive filtering happening here. I am sifting through the critical writing and interviews, and selecting important ideas and passages. In part this project is an excuse to read through the source material carefully, repeatedly. This kind of reflection and filtering may lead me to piece together a thesis after all.

I don’t believe that assembling grabbing interesting quotes with all of their scattered quotes is any way to pull together a coherent thesis. Really, I just think that assembling all of the relevant passages, in red, is an ineffective strategy for paper-making. They lose all context.

After repeated uses of the dadaengine termpaper, I begin to get a sense of language as just another kind code. Coded meaning. The thing doesn’t do anything more than string together lengths of words, but some of the results begin to convey meaning.

20041130

I am pursuing co-development of my term paper and dadaengine termpaper, leading with dadaengine termpaper. I am trying to specify as little structure as is possible to produce a sensible essay about my artists. The formal and rhetorical structure that I specify for the program may come in handy for the actual writing of my paper. The background search that I did to pull together references for the footnotes will be useful.

If I actually got a program to generate a paper solely based on input texts, it would raise some really interesting questions around issues of authorship, plagiarism and citation.

Is this just another play for attention, like the other sports projects and such: look at my technical skills, how well I can program.

In some ways, this is a test of resourcefulness, a challenge. I want to see if I can pull this off. If I can do it. Affirming my technological strength. Grabbing some achievement which I can pull off and go show people.

20041201

Is this project silly? Maybe it would be better to put in all of my effort to write a really good paper. Out of this effort, I am going to have a program which writes a non-sensical paper that sort of mentions and addresses issues and artists that I am interested in. Am I going to solidify my mental framework, or elucidate anything for myself with that lame ass paper. I guess I will understand the limits of outdated text generation programs from the mid 90s. Which maybe was the local maximum in the curve of natural language generation development and theory. It would be great to actually pull together something that works, but those technical issues have been out there, people have dedicated themselves to this development, and the systems they make don’t work that well. So then, if this program is some humorous one-liner, couldn’t I have gotten it done much more quickly and with less effort. Maybe I am a romantic technologist, believing that I can pull something true and something real out of this technology. And that I can make a new way of writing.

While the dadaist text synth programs are generally seen as amusements, I think there is some core of truth in them: language is just a code. Meaning is constructed through patterns of words, although sometimes the layers can be quite complicated, or with symbolism and metaphors simple word by word pattern analysis can not capture the meaning. What I like about the text synthesis programs is that they by scrambling text and producing random strings, the illuminate the coded, pattern grammar aspect of text.

Secondly, by generating a jargon-laden academic text automatically, there is a comment on the obfuscation of meaning in critical theory writing through the use of complex syntax and esoteric, obscure academic terminology. Maybe natural language is better.

20041202

What I have is a list of descriptive terms and concepts for the artists and issues, and a mechanism for constituting those terms into a jaron-heavy but essentially senseless text. The terms serve no discursive function. And while listing terminology helps me provide a detailed description of individual elements of the works, it does nothing to help string those elements together into frames of reasoning and thesis. If anything it tangles me up in articulation of description and does not leave me a chance to focus on chain of reason. So how do I get myself out of this trap? And what does this mean for the dadaengine termpaper—is it possible? So this functions as a parody of jargon in discourse. It is specific terminology minus discursive structure. I’ve tuned it more specifically towards the artists and people that I am interested in, but it is not helping me get anywhere exploring the warring concepts and approaches behind the work. I’d like to assemble a metastructure of artistic inquiry which situates the approaches of Jeremijenko, Barney, and Tyson in an overall structure, and suggests a new approach out of those.

I knew from the beginning that this was doomed to fail, and that I would have to provide all of the structure to this. I did this to fail. Can I make it a beautiful failure? I can make the program adhere more strictly to the form of a paper: program in a thesis and subtheses. Have the sentence generators stay on topic and on artist for the course of an entire paragraph. Have the paragraphs stay on subthesis for the course of the entire section. Remove all false invented references and academic texts. Include quotes that seem important to me. But first I will have to come up with a structure:

Situating the works of Barney, Jeremijenko, and Tyson in a metastructure of artistic inquiry.

observation of outside world
Jeremijenko, Vollman

valuing subjective observation
blogservatories
vollman blurring line between fiction and reality

Physical duress
Barney, Vollman

Systems of resistance to elicit production

Application of outside paradigms to artmaking [this is problematic, calling something “outside” artmaking]
strength resistance
metaphor of programming

prolific output
Tyson
Vollman

You know, this form of the essay is a structure as well. There are conventions of thesis, elaboration, support, support, support, conclusion, etc. in essay writing. With the program I am working against two structure of restraint, the system of program structure and the system of conventions of written argument. Writing the term paper by hand, I am dealing with only one structure of restraint, the system of written argument.

Revising the dadeengine termpaper is simultaneously reductive and additive, I remove the parts that don’t work and then put in arts that do. I’ll end up with a totally specific and relevant paper, but no thesis or insight.

I could stick with Natalie and Keith Tyson: he invented a technology or system of restraint to interact with. Natalie makes ironic technology and does ironic science, with the agenda of opening scientific discourse and broadening the forums and means of inquiry. Keith Tyson is focused on traditional fine art craft in a way that Natalie is not. He puts his resources as a fine arts craftsman at the service of and in tension with an objective, random system. This is a strategy to complicate the attribution of authorial intent, and put the onus for construction meaning on the viewer. Natalie works with a great deal of authorial intent, working in a didactic manner akin to political and social activism. Natalie is not engaged in the same way with traditions of art craft, she is more directly engaged with the traditions and methodologies of scientific research. Flat out I have an ambivalent relationship to scientific pursuit. Formal scientific method is such an incredibly clunky structure. [quote by ZAMM] That is her system she is struggling against. Scientific research establishment and formal traditional scientific method. She has chosen that as her structure of resistance to struggle against. How does she work against her constraints? She is pushing to open up new spaces of opportunity within the system. A reassertion of the physical self is a reaction and antidote to increasingly technological society. Tyson pushes art craft at the disposal of objective randomness. His intent comes in authoring the pseudo-objective, pseudo-random system.

Picking a restraint, a self-imposed system of discipline or restraint, is picking a field of action. Tyson, Barney, and Jeremijenko are all exploring a field of action, and mapping out the space that emerges from the interaction of their action and the external restraints.

There are other things going on here than the systems of restraint, and masochism.

The failure of passive resistance – characterized mainly by noncooperation – as an artmaking strategy. Or is it.

Leads towards a generalized idea of cultural production, beyond the white box and taking art as the activity which participates in cultural discourse. Keith Tyson and Matthew Barney are much more heavily engaged with traditional artworld participation. Tyson happens to be working with

Have I learned four new words here, at grad school? Didactic. Discourse. That’

Why am I structuring this essay around language of competition and opposition? That’s a tired old trope, and one I reflexively rely on. Its based on violence. A tired trope of analysis.

Vollman, violence to the formal system. Exposing himself to violence, of the real-world sort. Fictionalizing autobiography, based off of living experience.

Jeremijenko
strategy of public experiments

Smart artist makes machine do the work.
Smart artist works on the machine.
Smart artist makes the machine tell the artist what to do.
Smart artist breaks the machine, violating type form.
Smart artist struggles against the machine.
Smart artist takes a critical attitude towards the machine, suggesting opposite possibilities.

A physical art. A conceptual art. Beautiful concepts. Beautiful forms. Beautiful systems.

20041203

I’m writing the robertengine termpaper now. I was looking up the details on this reference to van Gogh wishing he were strong and hard in this article about Matthew Barney, by Seward. This has gotten me thinking about one of Natalie’s criticisms of art school and art education: that in art school you learn to have these heroic artist types as our intellectual models, and that this is somehow incredibly damaging (?) or dangerous(?) or at least it is problematic in some sense. What is wrong with artists as intellectual heros? That focusing on artists doesn’t teach us about the real world and making money or something?

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