Markbot Chains

By Florian Van de Weyer, student Arts²/Section Digital Arts

Markbot Chain is a social experiment in which the public has a direct influence on the result. The intention is to integrate responses in a text-generation process without applying any filter.

All the questions in the digital files provided by the Mundaneum were automatically extracted. These questions are randomly put to the public via a terminal. By answering them, people contribute to another database. Each entry generates a series of sentences using a Markov chain configuration, an algorithm that is widely used in spam generation. The sentences generated in this way are displayed in the window, and a new question is asked.