Spoon-Viewing

After viewing Allison Parrish's 2015 EyeO lecture, there were a few things that stuck with me. The first thing, and what probably struck me the most was her opinion that the role of the AI bot in art should not be to replicate what a human artist might do, but rather to go into spaces that a human would not go into. Parrish demonstrated this point with her example of semantic space and how her bots typically attempt to navigate into the empty parts of this semantic space, effectively going somewhere where people would not be able to systematically go on their own.

I was also struck by how humorous generative literature can be. Much of Parrish's work appears to have a humorous element to it, and this might be by design, but I would not be surprised if much of this actually is the result of how we interpret language. Often times, absurd, nonsensical pairings of words are humorous to us. This is, of course, exactly what Parrish's bots produce.