the bad news is that you previously missed the importance of this event is a series of imagined exhibition titles for the UCSB Media Arts and Technology (MAT) Program’s End of the Year Show, starting 50 years in the future through the year 2084. The titles were exhibited in the hallway of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCSB on the occasion of M.A.D.E., the 2019 MAT End of Year Show, and remained on exhibition there through May 19, 2022. A longer poem comprised of these titles was recited in performance during the M.A.D.E. event in 2019.
The titles were generated in collaboration with a predictive keyboard using botnik.org. The predictive keyboard was fed a diet of Wardrip-Fruin and Monfort’s The New Media Reader, aeronautical terminology, mathematical terminology, meteorological terminology, and a list of common animals. This semantic buffet was so curated as to not only parody media art speak but to anticipate how a hypothetical, MAT-enmeshed David Bowie might source materials for the task of AI cut-up title-ogeny. The composition of the words was constrained by the suggestions of the keyboard, but also benefited from a degree of human selection. Regarding our selective criteria, there was an effort to adhere to some English grammatical norms, to pepper the titles with some of the more singular terms within the dataset, and to maximize comic effect. This work invites meditation onto how and where meaning and narrative arise between the creative process and artistic exhibition/interpretation.
FULL POEM
the bad news is that you previously missed the importance of this event
the bad news is that you previously missed the importance of this event
an even more profound labyrinth of deconstructed ideologies
the mythinformation can navigate absolute chow
siren emergent
gutenberg dragon
dramatic ubiquitous
erudite hallucinations
symphony warscape
rocket eye radioactive
satellite arithmetic for the cultural thunderstorm
sea dragon of the new mesopotamia
back to the atmosphere research of the fragmented
wind vector of the negative spacelab
magic engineers for the neural resistance
weather watch for a new improvisational
the season is digital entropy
a period of abnormally warm media
silver visible cyclical classical
we also have an embodying function
we also called the computer human
in museums of a geometrical abandonment
the volcanic promises of the digital finite
chameleon garden party
utopian arithmetic for the frontier body
we need a set of integers greater than the tornado of meaning
back into the body of the new euclidean
in this end a real tyrant could be any sort of feedback
air that originates in the tropics of mathematics
an algebraic giant clam that studies parasitic libraries
numbers that can predict results for the first fiction philosophers
weather facsimile of our institutions up the encyclopedic tree
in both the digital individual and the chaptered reality caves
satellite instruments who the engineers of shrimp murder
electronic offended
mindstorms ideological
cultural helix
humanist knife
turing symbiosis
viscerally mathematic
viscerally cyborg
symphony crayon
morphing immutable
renaissance mainframe
hammerhead mcluhan
ratio anomaly halfway in each enraptured electrical caterpillar
and the principles of algebra moved infected neurons from the gutenberg associative to the redemptive hand of the new divine knife
sea slug of mathematics
the decay of mathematics concerned the toothed topological
a drought of memory
radiative numbers that accompanied others
back beyond our humanity to the bottom of all clawed promises
megahertz zebra