Posts matching tags 'dadaism'
2006/7/17
Seen in a recent spam message, from one "Fawlty Towers":
vob psp gpAlong with a graphic containing a pitch for penis-enlargement pills or something of that sort, though that part is not important. It appears that these spammers are mining blogs and/or news sites for text, randomising it in some way (possibly using Markov chains), and reconstituting it in an attempt to get around keyword-based spam filters; and whilst they are doing so, they are providing the much put-upon recipients of their otherwise worthless and noisome messages with a sort of automated Dadaist poetry capturing the current zeitgeist. Zen Thanks indeed.
adapts still literary
issues gender poltiical leavens message firstrate
Pets Sports Religion
Ferry Corsten Toca Race
fact
families higher leaflets
Zen Thanks
Torrone loaded
Author Software Handheld
Medical
Chicano cyberpunk performer discusses visionary RUSirius Duncan
Novell microbes
viewer winzip proxy proxify
revered foolish habit. generally credited
wavelike coarsely
Realtime Sweeper spyware
coupleof
station Engineers DNA Nanowire Assembly
ABs Blacks
pointers articles
OperaThis speedy recently widgets.
punish letting Hizbollah menace
Triggers Manhattan
guessing painting. racist
protocol thatthe garbage
culprits whether
Kiwis trapped kills strikes BEIRUT: killed least punish
Treatment Exercises
Under
mail.The phrases auxiliary Compare: Youve Talebones
beside song Thus roughly
2006/5/19
The Smithsonian Magazine has a good article on the history of the Dada movement:
When Dadaists did choose to represent the human form, it was often mutilated or made to look manufactured or mechanical. The multitude of severely crippled veterans and the growth of a prosthetics industry, says curator Leah Dickerman, "struck contemporaries as creating a race of half-mechanical men." Berlin artist Raoul Hausmann fabricated a Dada icon out of a wig-maker's dummy and various oddments--a crocodile-skin wallet, a ruler, the mechanism of a pocket watch--and titled it Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Age).
Duchamp traced the roots of Dada's farcical spirit back to the fifth-century b.c. Greek satirical playwright Aristophanes, says the Pompidou Center's Le Bon. A more immediate source, however, was the absurdist French playwright Alfred Jarry, whose 1895 farce Ubu Roi (King Ubu) introduced "'Pataphysics"--"the science of imaginary solutions." It was the kind of science that Dada applauded. Erik Satie, an avant-garde composer who collaborated with Picasso on stage productions and took part in Dada soirees, claimed that his sound collages--an orchestral suite with passages for piano and siren, for example--were"dominated by scientific thought."
In Cologne, in 1920, German artist Max Ernst and a band of local dadas, excluded from a museum exhibition, organized their own--"Dada Early Spring"--in the courtyard of a pub. Out past the men's room, a girl wearing a "communion dress recited lewd poetry, thus assaulting both the sanctity of high art and of religion," art historian Sabine Kriebel notes in the current exhibition's catalog. In the courtyard, "viewers were encouraged to destroy an Ernst sculpture, to which he had attached a hatchet." The Cologne police shut down the show, charging the artists with obscenity for a display of nudity. But the charge was dropped when the obscenity turned out to be a print of a 1504 engraving by Albrecht Dürer titled Adam and Eve, which Ernst had incorporated into one of his sculptures.
Born the same year as Duchamp--1887--Schwitters had trained as a traditional painter and spent the war years as a mechanical draftsman in a local ironworks. At the war's end, however, he discovered the Dadaist movement, though he rejected the name Dada and came up with his own, Merz, a word that he cut out of an advertising poster for Hanover's Kommerz-und Privatbank (a commercial bank) and glued into a collage. As the National Gallery's Dickerman points out, the word invoked not only money but also the German word for pain, Schmerz, and the French word for excrement, merde. "A little money, a little pain, a little shit." she says, "are the essence of Schwitters' art."
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/1/21
Mark Dery looks at spam subject lines as Dadaist found literature:
If only Tristan Tzara had lived to read spambot subject lines, some boiler-room hacker's idea of a foolproof strategy for bluffing your way past spam-killer defenses. "Be godparent or osteology," admonishes today's first hunk of junk mail, a Dadaist ultimatum if ever there was one. What mental-ward wisdom hides in this love-it-or-leave-it, my-way-or-the-highway dualism? Does it mean: If you're not part of a social network, bound by family ties, you've got your nose in the boneyard? "Ragweed conjunct Sherlocke," the next spam asserts, cryptically. A reference to Conan Doyle's mythical detective?
But why the antique terminal "e"? Intriguingly, this one makes use of the market-tested alt.music formula of stringing together three unrelated words to generate a record title or bandname guaranteed to inspire hours of beer-bong explication de texte, as in Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or The Butthole Surfers' Locust Abortion Technician or Independent Worm Saloon or the Mother of Them All, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. Do spambot programmers in offshore sweatshops have a secret sweet spot for the Captain? Or is there a neurocognitive reason for our requirement that three's the magic number when it comes to dream-logic word games? I've archived mails with Beefheartian subject lines such as "biracial Auerbach crankshaft," "boil longleg Kant" (those of us with little patience for the bewigged old dear couldn't agree more) and the painful-sounding "hardwood pancreatic departure".
(via bOING bOING) ¶ [no comments]
2005/4/14
Someone has written a program for generating random computer-science papers, designed to scam dubious conferences, apparently with some success:
One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to "fake" conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (for example, check out the gibberish on the WMSCI 2005 website). Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005!
The authors intend to attend the conference in question and deliver a randomly-generated talk.
A sample of its output (without the authentic-looking graphs), excerpted from a paper titled "Refining DNS and Suffix Trees with OWLER":
We have taken great pains to describe out evaluation setup; now, the payoff, is to discuss our results. We ran four novel experiments: (1) we deployed 86 Atari 2600s across the underwater network, and tested our checksums accordingly; (2) we ran 34 trials with a simulated instant messenger workload, and compared results to our hardware deployment; (3) we measured flash-memory space as a function of ROM speed on a Motorola bag telephone; and (4) we asked (and answered) what would happen if mutually replicated vacuum tubes were used instead of I/O automata. All of these experiments completed without LAN congestion or 10-node congestion.
I take my hat off to them. When I wrote the Postmodernism Generator, all those years ago, I was sceptical of the possibility of successfully generating convincing random text in a more objectively verifiable field, such as computer science. I guess that, if those responsible for reviewing the paper aren't bothered to actually read it and attempt to assemble a mental model of what it states, one can get away with anything.
2003/8/25
The LJ Times, a generative art hack which populates a newspaper-style page with random LiveJournal entries and Associated Press photographs. Quite amusing.
(Hmmm... the LiveJournal XML feeds offer a veritable cornucopia, or perhaps an Augean stable, of postings, most of them all but meaningless to people who don't know the poster, and thus functionally indistinguishable from computer-generated text or cut-up art. (The blogosphere at large can be said to have similar properties, though not all of it is in one convenient location.) I'm surprised more artists haven't harnessed these founts of commentary to power generative-art installations.)