Manfred Wolff-Plottegg, Richard Schaffranek

Year
2019

Medium / Material / Technic
Web-based project

Place
town hall foyer

Opening Hours
Mon–Fri, 8 am – 6 pm

»Content Generator III« is the third version of a work initially produced for the ZKM exhibition GLOBALE: Infosphere in 2015. A web-based project, it randomly selects words from the website www.ka-news.de to automatically compose news headlines. Simultaneously, the algorithm searches for the information sources that would correspond to these generated phrases.

As the storing and processing capacities of information technologies grow, internet users can access ever-rising amounts of data that help them to orient themselves and act – both online and offline. In search engines, specific data subsets get combined with personal information and preferences. These combinations form individual paths through the internet and, therefore, unique users’ perspectives.

Content Generator III reproduces this phenomenon and emphasizes the role of algorithms that co-direct our interactions on the web. As opposed to the linearity (in logic and reading) that has prevailed for centuries, this project follows an anti-teleological scheme of information and knowledge production, which, though inhomogeneous, is still navigated by a computational set of rules.