The Death of the Author Experiment

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing
a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-
God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a 'variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (Bathes 146).

For my experiment I chose to combine the old style of artistic expression, blackout poetry, with a modern form of sentence formation, predictive text. Predictive text is a tool that many current day smartphones use to help users form sentences faster. These programs build custom dictionaries based off the typing habits of the user which allows them to promote the use of words they would most likely want to include on their own without having to type them out.

I had students pair up and use one phone with predictive text between the two of them. They then got to decide how they would go about forming a run-on sentence by choosing different words or phrases suggested by the smartphone. After they made a sentence they were to write it down in large font on a piece of paper. Then the papers were passed to the partnership to the left, and those people chose to blackout certain words or emphasize others with highlighters.

The end result were poems made in correlation by humans and artificial intelligence with an allocation of power to the heavy hand of human choice.

Here are the three poems we collectively created.