Exhibited at gallery or event

To Pray Without Ceasing is a web app that autonomously prays for people. It searches Twitter for expressions of need (e.g. "I need somebody to hug me right now" or "I need more money in my bank acct wtf"), especially those tweeted by users who have few followers and who are perhaps in need of solicitude. It then issues prayers for them using a variety of NLP techniques. Visitors to To Pray Without Ceasing must activate the system's prayers in a simple but symbolically significant way: they must light a candle (while making sure not to move the cursor too fast; one must proceed mindfully in sacred space). The action of lighting a candle is designed to make the system not "interactive" but rather what Robert Pfaller would call "interpassive"; the visitor delegates the work of praying---the practice of religion itself---to the machine, yet she still can feel vaguely responsible for whatever good work it does, whatever good words it utters. The system prays in different ways over the course of 24 hours, evoking the "Liturgy of the Hours" ("Horae Canonicae"). After 24 hours the sequence begins again, praying for a new batch of needs discovered on Twitter from the previous day. Thus the humble and pious work of paying attention to the needs of strangers is never finished.

A “book post” is placed in the UiB Humanities Library during March 2021, consisting of a table/desk with two stools by it, near a wall.

Four books are on the table/desk (left to right, in alphabetical order by title): Articulations (Allison Parrish), Golem (Nick Montfort), A Noise Such as a Man Might Make: A Novel (Milton Läufer), and Travesty Generator (Lillian-Yvonne Bertram). Each has a hole drilled through it in the upper left and is secured to the table with a cable, creating a chained library. The books represent the work of four participants in an SLSAeu panel about computer-generated literature.

A Kodak carousel slide projector is in the middle of the table/desk, projecting small, bright images and texts onto the wall. Slides presenting covers and contents of the five books are shown continually during the exhibition. The selections will be made in consultation with all author/programmers and with their approval.

The stools allow two readers to sit and peruse the books. The table is wide enough to allow readers to do so while socially distanced.

The presence of a functioning “obsolete” slide projector, and the establishment of an “obsolete” chained library within the Humanities library, suggests to visitors that the book is also obsolete — while it is, at the same time, a perfectly functional technology. The dissonance of presenting computer-generated text via film slides and analog projection resonates with the decision that this group of five author/programmers has made: to present our computational writing in codex form.

The chained library is both practical and symbolic. Given that this is a library exhibit, the cables prevent people from relocating the books as one typically does in a library. They also emphasize that while we value ubiquity and portability in the digital age, at the same time we want things tethered, grounded, and available at the expected location. This suggestion will be strengthened by the similarity between the way these books are tethered and the way computer equipment is secured to a desk.

The projection of course alerts visitors to the availability of the books. Even if visitors do not choose to sit and peruse these books, the projected texts allow them to see and read computer-generated writing from recent years. Those who only view the projections nevertheless get a sense of the wide variety of approaches and the many textures of language that are seen in this sort of experimental digital writing.

“I live on Earth at the present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing –a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process– an integral function of the universe.”

– Buckminster Fuller, from I Seem to be a Verb, 1970

‘Bucky’ Fuller’s well-known quote, originally published in his book I seem to be a verb, (1970) contrasts human participation in the material world (which Fuller suggests can be described with nouns) and the ongoing evolutionary processes which influence and shape that world (which Fuller suggests can be described with verbs).

The web-based "A.I. seems to be a verb" (2021), automatically identifies and maps speech, not only as linguistic functions (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc.) but also across a spectrum of sentiment from negative to positive, in order to generate a complex array of paratextual supports (typeface, page-design, rules and symbolic elements and word-prompts) used in the visual representation of the text to the screen. The entire process happens in real-time, providing an uncanny ‘mise-en-abyme’ experience which contemporaneously engages the participant’s auditory and visual responses to language construction.

Distant Affinities is a work of recombinant cinema about machine intelligence attempting to process, narrate and mimic sentient being. Through subtitles, the omniscient AI narrator cycles through media that has been captured from the network and attempts a narrative interpretation of the patterns of human behavior. Disparate data points and discontinuous video loops resist being systematized or narrativized. The distances or gaps between the text and video fragments suggest what remains outside the domains of surveillance and narrative. An allegory of the vagaries of networked life existing within larger webs of living and non-living systems, the work shows a world coming apart, but also transforming into a more spacious mode of being made of errant language, creaturely life, isolated gestures and mutating interfaces.

Distant Affinities is programmed to oscillate between a probabilistic distribution of media elements and controlled narrative sequencing; between poetic montage and spatio-temporal continuity. Video, audio and text fragments appear on the screen in semi-indeterminate arrangements, depicting the chaotic flux of a technological world endlessly changing and repeating itself with each user click. Clicking on certain fragments “zooms in” voyeuristically on moments of individual lives, full of their own complex cycles of sensation, memory, thought, embodied and disembodied living. Loops, nested and at various scales, are employed to convey a fractal temporality. The intention of the work is to create an ambient and fluid experience, at times adrift in indeterminate structures and processes and at other times stimulating in the viewer a search for meaningful patterns.

Meet Me At The Station is a surreal and lyrical 10 minute experience for for 360 cinemas, domes, virtual reality headsets. A scientist is trapped in the future due to a time-travel accident. His only hope is to travel through dreams, but dreams can also turn into nightmares.

Turing‘s assembly line is a cross between a gameart/artgame and an elearning (automatic learning) project. It was simultaneously developed for the amazing plato systems (automatic learning, 1960+) and for the web. It has been created by the Swiss artgroup AND-OR.ch (René Bauer and Beat Suter) in 2020.

As player you are not a user of the universal machine, you are Alan Turing‘s universal machine yourself. Please, sit down and begin to work!

You will receive task after task. You have to decide if you want to execute a task or if you don‘t. Of course you will also encounter some errors among the tasks. No program and no coder is perfect! You may even be confronted with exceptions, forkbombs ... and more.

Will you be fast enough? How many operations are you able to execute per minute? How long can you keep up the assembly line?

Turing created a slave, that works without thinking, without argueing and without any motivational design - the universal machine is just a bookkeeper with pencil and paper. Therefore Turing serialized everything to simple tasks in a line. He mechanized logic thinking to an assembly line job. And today almost everything is based on this universal (bookkeeping) slave from cars and excel sheets to servers, computers, smartphones and AI. But more and more this universal serf or slave is somehow pushing us to the edge and turns us into “fun slaves” of computers and processes.

The project explores the politics of erasure and the temporality of voices within the context of digital authoritarianism. Unerasable Characters II presents the sheer scale of unheard voices by technically examining and culturally reflecting the endlessness, and its wider consequences, of censorship that is implemented through technological platforms and infrastructure.

The project collects unheard voices in the form of censored/erased (permission denied status via the official API) text, including emojis, symbols, English and Chinese characters, which is based on one of the biggest social media platform in China called Weibo. A daily scraping script is used to fetch those text via Weiboscope, a data collection and visualization project, developed by Dr. Fu King Wa from The University of Hong Kong, in which the system has been regularly sampling timelines of a set of selected Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers or whose posts are frequently censored.

Consisting of a custom-software (written in Python and p5.js) that scrapes the erased “tweets” from Weiboscope on a daily basis, the project presents the archives in a grid format. Each tweet is deconstructed into a character-by-character display that occupies a flashing unit for a limited period. The duration of each ‘tweet’ is computed from the actual visible time on Weibo, and the visual will transform from a busy canvas to an empty one with all disappearance of text. The program will then fetch a new set of archives and the cycle will repeat endlessly. It takes an average of 4 hours per cycle to empty the screen.

Unerasable Characters II raises questions regarding not only data capture from a corporational perspective, but also the matters of who might be the readers in digital platforms like Weibo, and even the wider influential audio and web conference platform like Zoom, where online events were being censored globally. The project further points to the operations of censorship that requires different levels of collaboration between corporations, states, human labours, the intelligence of machines and algorithms, but more importantly is to examine the contested notions of "violation of policies" (rule of law) as the seemingly common argument of corporations, as well as wider issues of censorship and the threats to free speech and academic freedom.

Autography is an interactive artwork, in the form of a software application, that automaticallygenerates evolving 3D graphic characters that resemble human hand-writing. The intention is tocreate a form of automatic writing made by a machine (instead of by a human). Automatic writingis commonly understood to be a form of unconscious expression, where a human in a fugue orsimilar state writes automatically. The writing often resembles hand-writing but tends to lookmore like scribble. The perceived value of automatic writing is dependent on the apprehensionthat human beings possess a subconscious (or unconscious) that can be interpreted through theact of automatic writing. The technique was popular amongst early 20thC aficionados oftheosophy and early psychology. Surrealist artists such as Andre Masson used the technique todevelop semi-abstract artworks, whilst later authors and artists, such as Henri Michaux and CyTwombly, employed the technique to develop highly sophisticated paintings and 'writings' thatquestioned both the authenticity of the artist's mark-making and the semiotic potential of writing.Jackson Pollock's late paintings can also be interpreted within this framework. This work exploresthe posthumanist potential for machines to create automatic writing, raising the question ofwhether a machine might have an unconscious, whilst at the same time critiquing the idea thathumans may. Autography functions as an interactive 3D application. Once downloaded you cannavigate its 3D space, within which the automatic writing evolves, using your mouse/trackpad andkeyboard. You can use your mouse/trackpad to pan around the 3D space. Holding the 'shift' keyon your keyboard, whilst holding down your mouse-button and moving the mouse up/down,allows you to zoom in and out of the 3D scene. You can mix these mouse and keyboard actions togain more control of the navigation and explore the evolving writing, from a distance or close-up.Passing through the textual plane of the writing reveals a "dark mode". Pressing the key 'b' onyour keyboard returns the scene's camera to its original location and orientation, restoring theoriginal view of the scene.

Code snippets from several programming languages, appropriated and adapted for the inclusion of poetry.

A programmed – but inoperable – poetry sleeps in the public space of a city: printed on cushions placed on the benches of a gallery, it awaits for the uneasy discovery of the visitor. A poetic operation, programmed to be seen only, inscribes, in a digital technology of inverted materiality (a code stuck on the wrong medium, i.e., a fakescript), the progressive erasure of love. A code thus falsified, integrating programming languages with syntactic coherence, semantic ambiguity, but pragmatic inefficiency, aims at inscribing poetry – or love, the experience of poetry --, in the liquid (open, watery, unstable) space of a city. Against (defamiliarizing) our digital condition: a poetic programming extracted from the mediaphere, printed in the ecosphere. In search of what is vague, a poetry-space-public signaling the dazzling digitality, our networked condition. A poetry programmed for a space (a gallery): a gesture in search of impossible recognition, the recognition of a certain human reality. Lost? p0es1s as esthesia restoring information as exchange, dialogue, touch, presence. A digital poetry in space - reconditioning the machine, transforming transparent appliances into illegible devices.

by rt to pt, with advertising soundbites speeches + - slogans advertisements jingles. constellation ?! Combinatory