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Mark

Ultimate Cheese Massage (100 Poèmes Surréalistes)


A project that was inspired by YouTube's poor Closed Captioning. I found that the combinations of words often yielded bizarre yet beautiful poetry. They reminded me of the Dadaist cut poems and Surrealist's experiments with writing in the 1920s. I decided to pay homage to the Father of Surrealism, André Breton.

I read Breton's definition of Surrealism, aloud, in French to a speech-to-text software when it expected to hear English. I repeated the same sentence a total of 100 times.

Surprisingly, the software generated 100 different English results. I then analyzed the English definitions to see what the software was able to pick up from the French readings.

The project defines a moment in time as it was still possible to “trick” the software and yield something completely & consistently random.

The first four results are in the video excerpt below. To see the rest of the results & analysis click here.

A special thank you to Noa Kaplan.
Mark
© 2023 Elisa Michelet
Mark