Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Self Portrait(s) [As Other(s)] response

This was my first encounter with algorithmically generated literature, and more often than not, I simply found the results amusing, as far as their actual content. I found myself engaged more by the attention that this format draws to the generalized format of the biography, or the shorter biographic article or blog. It looks at the expectation that such articles are meant to show, and the fact that such literary formats are formulaic and algorithmic by nature, perhaps emphasizing routine aspects of the subject's life that may or may not be as sequentially important as the article proposes.

Secondarily, I found the intentionally conflicting data amusing, as it could have easily been prevented with a few lines of code. This intentional discontinuity could be making a number of symbolic points, but ultimately, it just served to remind the reader of the mistakes as intentional, to prevent from being taken too seriously.

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