Ant Wars

An online generative piece describing eternal conflict on the planet of the ants, here.

This is the first piece of text generation I've done for around a year. My earlier examples include oXology, Ranges and You don't need to know that. As the French computer literature pioneer Jean Baudot pointed out, the point of such procedures is setting up the conditions for “accidental word associations” that have a “stylistic effect” and “aesthetic value”, although you could argue that there's nothing accidental about it. For Baudot, generating these random collisions is something more suited to a machine than a human. He states that “it would be impossible to perform such a task ourselves, because man is essentially opposed to randomness and incapable of behaving or performing in a random fashion”. We could, of course, implement such a procedure using dice or coins, but we couldn't do it every four seconds, as I do here in Ant Wars. The role of the machine, therefore, is not so much to do what we can't, but to do it faster, automatically and repetitively, without the complications of fatigue or boredom. Machine as collaborator. Machine as extra brain.

Baudot quotes are from Baudot, J. (1968). Automatic sequence generation. In: Reichardt, J.Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts. London: Studio Internation. p. 58, which is available online here.