Shadow

The Postmodernism Generator is something I enjoyed very much when it first came out. I vaguely remember having played a complaint letter generator developed by a UI professor even before that. 

There is a real purpose for tracking it down today — I have to say I was amazed that it still is in service: I plan to run some studies on reading comprehension, and the random rubbish generated from this machine would be a great control. 

When I told my idea to Steve a month ago over at the Randy’s Pizza, he actually suggested that I test on post-modernism texts. Poor Steve has served on the APT committee for years, where he had to read tons of papers from the most irrelevant fields, including post-modernism. After the first 3 lines, he told me, his eyes would keep scanning, but his mind would be drifting…

Test it yourself:

 Realism in the works of Tarantino

Martin d’Erlette
Department of Peace Studies, University of California, Berkeley

1. Madonna and neocapitalist narrative

"Truth is a legal fiction," says Baudrillard; however, according to Drucker[1] , it is not so much truth that is a legal fiction, but rather the fatal flaw, and thus the defining characteristic, of truth. Any number of materialisms concerning the futility, and some would say the stasis, of dialectic sexual identity may be revealed.

"Society is part of the collapse of art," says Marx. It could be said that if realism holds, we have to choose between neocapitalist narrative and subcultural theory. Textual postconceptual theory holds that narrative comes from the masses.

The characteristic theme of Long’s[2] analysis of realism is a self-referential reality. But Scuglia[3] states that the works of Gibson are an example of cultural capitalism. The main theme of the works of Rushdie is the role of the writer as observer.

Thus, the subject is contextualised into a neodialectic nihilism that includes consciousness as a paradox. If capitalist discourse holds, we have to choose between neodialectic nihilism and subdialectic cultural theory.

But Debord uses the term ‘realism’ to denote a mythopoetical whole. Lyotard promotes the use of neocapitalist narrative to read and attack art. It could be said that the ground/figure distinction prevalent in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh emerges again in Midnight’s Children, although in a more neopatriarchial sense. Foucault’s model of realism implies that reality is capable of social comment.

 Refresh the page and you get something completely different. It’s all random. Read the fine prints:

The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link. If you like this particular essay and would like to return to it, follow this link for a bookmarkable page.

The Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars, and modified very slightly by Josh Larios (this version, anyway. There are others out there).

This installation of the Generator has delivered 1593897 essays since 25/Feb/2000 18:43:09 PST, when it became operational. It is being served from a machine in Seattle, Washington, USA.

More detailed technical information may be found in Monash University Department of Computer Science Technical Report 96/264: "On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility Using Recursive Transition Networks". An on-line copy is available from Monash University.

More generated texts are linked to from the Communications From Elsewhere front page.

If you enjoy this, you might also enjoy reading about the Social Text Affair, where NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal’s brilliant(ly meaningless) hoax article was accepted by a cultural criticism publication.

Well, looks like I’ve got a lot of homework to do. There are a lot more text generators around than when I last played with the Dada Engine. Recently a bunch of MIT graduate students have mocked up some random conference papers and had a 50% hit rate (n=2). Here is a list of text generators on their list:

Other generators:

• The Dada Engine, another tool that generates random text from context-free grammars
• List of text generators from elsewhere.org (on the right)
• Barath Raghavan’s Systems Topic Generator
• An essay generator
• SBIR grant proposal generator
• We initially based SCIgen on Chris Coyne’s grammar for high school papers; Chris is now making neat pictures with context-free grammars.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2005 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Research, Odds'n'Ends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.