An interactive installation that generates texts through a combination of user input and autonomous web crawlers (web bots).

“The interactive installation operates with a keyboard as interface, an Internet connection and two video displays. Poetry Machine is a word processor that extracts associations. The sources of information for this self-composing poetry machine are the gigantic pools of information on the Internet. When a word is typed that is as yet unknown to the poetry machine, the program will send out autonomous “bots” to the Internet to collect texts in which the word in question occurs. This action of the bots, searching sites and documents, can be watched on a plasma screen by the side of the installation. In this interaction of machine words and human text, Poetry Machine creates a new écriture automatique, where language is no longer the exclusive domain of human thought but also that of the internal logic of computers.” (from the project description page on the Media Art Net web site).

Starter Links: Poetry Machine 1.0 | Median Kunst Netz / Media Art Net | Poetry Machine 1.5