Head Writer of Clickhole, Jamie Brew, is used to whipping up content for the satirical website from The Onion that parodies clickbait websites such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy.
With the multi-media creative experience “Sweet Dreams and Goals and Objectives and Demands”, Jamie brings a collection of texts, songs, and narrated fragments generated using a ‘predictive text emulator’ computer program to the walls of Gallery5 for the month of July.
“This exhibition features various pieces of writing created using a computer program I wrote that first ingests a text or collection of texts, then uses the source material’s basic word sequence patterns to supply the writer (me) with suggestions for words.
The program is “memoryless” in that it only models very local, word-to-word patterns. It has no understanding of broad structure, or even of whole sentences. So the arc of the piece remains still somewhat under my control, even though my word choices are limited to repetitions of sequences that have already occurred. To me, this is an exaggerated version of how language sometimes seems to operate anyway. It’s also fun.
The project (and the exhibition title) arose from some experimental writing using the predictive text feature of my smartphone, which supplies three suggestions of likely next words for you to type.”
