Ultimate Cheese Massage (100 Poèmes Surréalistes)
Ultimate Cheese Massage (100 Poèmes Surréalistes) (2015) is a video and print project inspired by YouTube's auto-generated 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.
Paying homage to the movement, I read André Breton's definition of Surrealism, aloud, in French to a speech-to-text software when it expected to hear English. I repeated the same definition 100 times.
Surprisingly, the software generated 100 different English results. I then analyzed the results to see what the software picked up.
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. The rest of the results & analysis are available here. ☀︎
A special thank you to Noa Kaplan for her support.
Medium: Paper, video
Process: Collage
Video ratio: 16:9
Book dimensions: 10.5cm x 28cm
Publication: 2015