A search engine poem which is part of a set of 88 scripted poems, scriptpoemas (2005-).
searchSongs captures the stream of words of Lycos' live search. This stream of words might be understood as an expression of collective desire, as the net's melody of yearning, which is played by thousands of people, who at any moment try to reach the desired by means of a search engine. This melody of yearning is made audible by searchSongs. Words contain playable tones of the musical notation system (c, d, e, f, g, a, h, c, fis, ces ...). On one side searchSongs' web interface shows the stream of words of the live search, on the other side there are lines of musical notes below which transform playable letters in musical notes. Non-playable letters define the length of a tone. In ancient Greece there already was a notation system of letters which was used for indicating the pitch of a tone, and the length of a tone was marked with a symbol written above the letter. A traditioned example is the Seikilos epitaph dated from the second century B.C. The most well known example of a word set to music by a letter notation system is the B-A-C-H motif, which Johann Sebastian Bach repeatedly used in his compositions. searchSongs refers to traditional letter notation systems like the Seikilos epitaph and the B-A-C-H motif. searchSongs accentuates the correlation between letters and notes in a more determined and concrete way. Furthermore the theme of musical improvisation is juxtaposed by a random generator, and the strict rules of the musical notation system is antagonized by algorithme. In this respect at the end the subjective search is being objectivized by the melody of the searchSongs. However the searchSongs keep their personal momentum by making it possible for visitors and listeners to interactively insert own words into the stream of words and take part in playing music. SearchSong is a highly complex mesh of language and music interaction between human being, machine and net communication, between text input, musical notation, programming and a real-time stream of words of a live search.
More than 50 years ago a calculator generated a literary text for the first time ever. This happened in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1959 Theo Lutz wrote a programme for Zuse Z22 to create stochastic texts. Following Max Bense’s (Stuttgardian philosopher) advice, he took sixteen nouns and adjectives out of Kafka’s "Schloss," which the calculator then formed into sentences, following certain patterns. Thus, every sentence began with either "ein" or "jeder" ("one" or "each") or the corresponding negative form "kein" or "nicht jeder" ("no" or "not everybody"). Then the noun, selected arbitrarily from the pool of sixteen given nouns, was linked through the verb "ist" ("is") with the likewise arbitrarily chosen adjective. Last, the whole construction was linked up through "und," "oder," "so gilt" ("and," "either," "thus") or given a full stop. Following these calculation instructions and by means of this algorithm, the machine was able to construct sentences like: EIN TAG IST TIEF UND JEDES HAUS IST FERN(A day is deep and every house is distant)JEDES DORF IST DUNKEL, SO GILT KEIN GAST IST GROSS(Every village is dark, thus no guest is large) For the performance of "searchLutz!" I use a web conversion of Theo Lutz’s programme that I wrote in PHP. The web interface generates stochastic texts on the basis of Lutz’s algorithm but permits additional word input. The nouns and adjectives of the original vocabulary can be replaced by the audience during the performance by using a terminal. Furthermore words from the live search of the search engine could infiltrate the text generation process. In 1959, computer texts were connotated as literary texts in two ways: Firstly through the "Kafka" vocabulary used, and secondly through corrections carried out by Theo Lutz. In a printed copy of a selection of stochastic texts he had edited, Theo Lutz corrected little grammar mistakes and missing punctuation marks by hand, and thus, contrary to programming acted as a "traditional" author. During the performance we refer to these literary features (or one could almost say there is no escaping from one’s humanity) of the first computer-generated texts in two ways: First we do so through the co-authorship of the audience, secondly we have a professional speaker who is reading the so produced computer texts directly off the screen and is thus performing them as they were generated.
