Hyperrhiz 11
Textbots
Jean-Pierre Balpe
Citation: Balpe, Jean-Pierre. “Textbots.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 11, 2015. doi:10.20415/hyp/011.g01
Abstract: A collection of Facebook and other textbots, authored by Jean-Pierre Balpe using automatic text generation.
Artist's Statement
My work is based on automatic text generation. That means that the software I have realized from about thirty years is based on dictionaries and knowledge representations. It works in French because my dictionaries in other languages are too poor, but I have also created some works in English, Spanish and German. I use my textbot in very different contexts: websites, videos, Facebook, installations, shows on stage or on Internet. My purpose is to simulate the functions of the human writer's brain, but a writer with no limits, writing an infinite and never the same text so that a reader can never read the same text. It is for me a new form of literature, the literature of the flow age, the age in which we are now embedded where there is so much information that we have to face our inability to master all of it. With my textbots, and because I'm not directly the author of the texts, I have created a lot of heteronyms which are fake writers, each of them with their specific styles. Some of them have their own Flickr or Facebook pages, for instance: Marc Hodges, Germaine Proust, Maurice Roman, Louis Ganançay; some of the characters of their writings have also their Facebook pages: Ronald Cline, Benjamin Cooper, Louis Ganançay, Rachel Charlus, Monsieur Roman... So the boundaries between fiction and reality are very fuzzy and a reader can navigate infinitely inside that fictional world.
View Facebook Textbots
Featured Authors:
Featured Characters:
View Other textbots
- Let Germaine Proust generate a French Haiku for you.
- Personal Blog of the Character Monsieur Roman
- The Image Texts of Maurice Roman