The Dance of Dripping: Auto-Generating Text

The Rules are no Game [MAOD] by Markus Huemer: The ZKM/Center of Art and Mediatechnologie will house a networked installation based upon Jackson Pollock’s image »No.32«. The floor of the area is covered with a reproduction of Pollock’s said picture as a reference to »The Dance of Dripping« and to »All Over«. Two text projections with auto-generating sentences are randomly projected on two screens. The visitors are both receptors and producers of the projected texts. In order to read the text, the audience will move to and fro, triggering an Internet-mechanism through the sheer act of walking on Pollock’s picture. It is this mechanism that generates the text, and each visitor’s movement will lead to the generation of a new line of text. Additionally, when the visitors approach one of the projections in order to read the texts, the sentences will be generated on the second projection. Thus the two projections communicate with each other and the visitors, paraphrasing the relative positions of the visitors within the exhibition space from a point-of-view that is situated on the Net, i.e., outside the exhibition.
All generated texts will use the subjunctive mode (conjunctivus irrealis and potentialis) and the texts are accessible on the Net via any Internet gateway. What results is an inversion of the »classical« exhibition situation–here, Art watches the audience and reacts to their actions with a continuous transformation of its self. By their movement in the space, the visitors will revive the »Dance of Dripping« on the »prefabricated« Action Painting by Pollock, their actions being monitored and »interpreted« by the Net generating the textual response. Through this immersion into the »virtual outside« the visitors will lose their status as subjects and become the objects of a description by the Net. [via Regine on we-make-money-not-art] [Related]