Gerhard Stickel was from 1976 to 2002 Director of the influential and important Institut der Deutschen Sprache (IDS, Institute of the German Language) in Mannheim. (For his scientific career look up this or here.)
Although not an artist himself, Stickel appears in this repository of digital art because of his outstanding contribution to algorithmically generated poems. He called those texts,
… [read more]Gerhard Stickel was from 1976 to 2002 Director of the influential and important Institut der Deutschen Sprache (IDS, Institute of the German Language) in Mannheim. (For his scientific career look up this or here.)
Although not an artist himself, Stickel appears in this repository of digital art because of his outstanding contribution to algorithmically generated poems. He called those texts, that he began generating in 1965, “[”Autopoems":Artwork@29]".
To quote him on his view of automatic text generation:
“The computer was only used to simulate a limited aspect of the human process of linguistic formulation, in the way in which this aspect presents itself formally, and not in which it is substantially well-founded.”
“The Autopoems are therefore by no means creations of an ‘electronic brain’, but rather the product of human planning that avails itself of the astonishing performance of an installation of this kind.”
Stickel views the machine as lacking any kind of semantics. It does not aim to communicate and, depending on the way it is programmed, can only produce syntactically correct sentences (“correct” relative to the running program’s features).
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