These are not fully formed recipes, ratios adept and perfectly timed pinches of salt. They are starting points for experiments in their own rights. Perhaps merely metaphoric recipes, ready to be embodied in colour, textile, sound, image. Let’s see. Hopefully in only giving me the skeleton of a sausage I can use my human intuition to build the flesh (flap).
Take a sausage recipe, separate it into 5 categories (Dominant, fat, binder, show and other ingredients). Put into chart.
Repeat with all recipes
Insert each ingredient into code, then run script.
Host html site, sit back and watch the good people of twitter tweet away.
When done, freeze screen and note which ingredient has largest score for each category. The winner of each category is the ingredient for your sausage.
Repeat at different times/ days to generate new recipes.
Take sausage recipes and divide into 3 categories (dominant, show and ingredients). Put into chart, avoiding any repeats.
Repeat with all recipes
Convert each ingredient into a numerical value using simple gematria calculator. (A=1… Z=26) e.g. rice = 35
Find 1-5 other words which have the same value using database. I suggest picking politically interesting words.
Insert all words for each category into code, run script.
When done, freeze screen and note largest score within each category. The winner of each category goes into your recipe.
Repeat at different times/ days to generate new recipes.
Welcome to the circus of rigorous absurdity. In giving myself this limitation I feel more multiplicious than when trying to lift the whole sack of my interests..
Is this a new way of making? Well by no means is this a mode of transformational creativity, merely combinational, merely a form of idea generation. Not random beg not, but accountability predictable (phew). Accounted for by digital trends in the world, (i.e. twitter stormers). But the system only ever outputs what I put in, it cannot yet create more ingredients, or totally new chemistries. Its limitation is my list of recipes. From only these blocks does the structure emerge. But since this combine harvester(ha) is a blind system, merely a tool of creation and hybridity, it will rely on my human genius (cooking or otherwise unspecified skill) to magic the recipes into some valuable form of physical existence.
Grate, grate, grate. Am I perhaps accidentally trying to create a really crude artificially, quite clearly-unintelligent system? By dissecting the sausage, in order to understand it, am I over-rationalizing the sausage, AM I KILLING THE SAUSAGE? Can sausages only be fully understood in their wholeness, not there isolated parts (systems thinking yh)? Am I perhaps inhabiting a computational, rationalist worldview, where we obsessively chop up and categorize things, in order to analyze and control them?
Or am i better than that (hope so)? In nurturing an interest in the world of computers and ai only recently, I am quite simply a lagging ignorant digital art pleb. But embrace what you don’t understand (they say). Must I be digi-whizz extraordinaire with spell-binding creative code (fat chance)? You don’t have to be a master as something in order to engage with it. Lest not forget art school = no skills, therefore cannot avoid being bad ‘dabbler’ in skills we do not have. So I dabble I will. I see (perhaps) value in my naive, feminine angle to the digital (enter here crude cooking analogies). I am a techno-pleb and so maybe are you. Maybe I speak your language therefore, maybe let’s all throw our pennies towards a visual democracy.
Lift the flap, what makes this tick? Hello surveillance capitalist notion that data is more valuable than oil, thus erect your rigs and exploitatively extract from this lesire labour. Mr data harvester mines your mind to make money. Selling your predicted-self back to you. Data (as words) feeds my sausage. Am I complicit in this system? Never. I am an entire dislocator of data I am good data mining lord, I don’t extract data to manipulate your desires, I want your data to give you real not virtual cookies. Is this really a better use though or is it meaningless? You tell me.
Have I merely created a microcosm? A data-fuelled system of competitivity which controls action? I’ve tried not to. Here I am producer and consumer, architect of traceable loop. I have control over categorization. I have not created black box monsters but an open, accountable, non-exploitative system. I am not techno-solutionist, but will rely on human intuition and decision to realise recipes into form. But am I endorsing a Darwinism competitivity, quantity not quality? A top of the ladder winner takes all? This worldview is mimicry (sigh), the forces exist already. It needs instead to be an alternative possibility. Question to myself then = how could I endorse a more ecological, symbiotic, interconnected mindset into the foundations of this system, to offer a more innovative approach? How to be more of a rhizome?