Pandaemonium. The Freedom of Generative Literature

The ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe cordially invites you to ‘Pandaemonium: The Freedom of Generative Literature’, a reading and conversation with the artist and author David Link, who has been researching the history and possibilities of computer-generated literature scientifically and artistically for over 20 years.

The book »Pandaemonium« (2024) by David Link is a literary experiment based on an algorithm that the artist has been continuously developing since the late 1990s. The title of the book, inspired by the algorithm itself - called »Poetry Machine« - reflects the central idea: the interplay of associations, unpredictability and chaos generated by the algorithm. Readers are invited to discover fleeting moments of meaning in the texts.

The algorithm developed by David Link searches the internet for information in order to create word associations and generate texts from them. These texts deliberately break with grammatical and content conventions and thus create poetic effects. Although the machine generates the texts, the human author remains an indispensable part of the creative process: David Link selects from the machine-generated fragments and moulds them into a coherent work.

»Pandaemonium« differs significantly from artificial intelligence projects that aim for precision and predictability. The algorithm encourages chance discoveries by deliberately playing with incompleteness and the improbable.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described »Pandaemonium« as an experimental long poem and referred to a statement by mathematician Alan Turing, who remarked in 1949 that thinking machines could soon also write sonnets that would be read by other machines: ‘Perhaps our smart fridges and laser printers have long since been ordering the book like crazy, and you can hear them giggling at night at gigahertz intervals over sentences like: “I'll turn you through the flop of RAM, through the array of transistors”.’

David Link's work is part of a long tradition of machine-generated art and literature dating back to the Renaissance. However, »Pandaemonium« is not a nostalgic look back, but a visionary, algorithmic experiment that takes up the current debate on AI and creativity. It invites us to experience the language of machines and to reflect on the transformation of humans through their machine tools.