BLDGBLOGImage Wiring the ENIAC via WiredOne of many things I love about writingthat is, engaging in writing as an activityis how it facilitates a discovery of connections between otherwise unrelated things. Writing reveals and even relies upon analogies, metaphors, and unexpected similarities there is resonance between a story in the news and a medieval European folktale, say, or between a photo taken in a war wrecked city and an 1. How Can I Lose Weight Without Exercising Reviews Of Serotonin Plus Weight Loss Program How Can I Lose Weight Without Exercising Hdl And Ldl Cholesterol Diet For. These sorts of relations might remain dormant or unnoticed until writing brings them to the foreground previously unconnected topics and themes begin to interact, developing meanings not present in those original subjects on their own. Wildfires burning in the Arctic might bring to mind infernal images from Paradise Lost or even intimations of an unwritten J. Microsoft Picture It Photo Premium 9. G. Ballard novel, pushing a simple tale of natural disaster to new symbolic heights, something mythic and larger than the story at hand. Learning that U. S. Naval researchers on the Gulf Coast have used the marine slime of a 3. H. P. Lovecraft Neptunian biotech wed with Cthulhoid military terror. In other words, writing means that one thing can be crosswired or brought into contrast with another for the specific purpose of fueling further imaginative connections, new themes to be pulled apart and lengthened, teased out to form plots, characters, and scenes. In addition, a writer of fiction might stage an otherwise straightforward storyline in an unexpected setting, in order to reveal something new about both. Its a hard boiled detective thrillerset on an international space station. Its a heist filmset at the bottom of the sea. Its a procedural missing person mysteryset on a remote military base in Afghanistan. Thinking like a writer would mean asking why things have happened in this way and not anotherin this place and not anotherand to see what happens when you begin to switch things around. Its about strategic recombination. I mention all this after reading a new essay by artist and critic James Bridle about algorithmic content generation as seen in childrens videos on You. Tube. The piece is worth reading for yourself, but I wanted to highlight a few things here. Image Wiring the ENIAC via WiredIn brief, the essay suggests that an increasingly odd, even nonsensical subcategory of childrens video is emerging on You. Fabri Fibra Turbe Giovanili Games here. Tube. The content of these videos, Bridle writes, comes from what he calls keywordhashtag association. That is, popular keyword searches have become a stimulus for producing new videos whose content is reverse engineered from those searches. To use an entirely fictional example of what this means, lets imagine that, following a popular Saturday Night Live sketch, millions of people begin Googling Pokmon Go Ewan Mc. Gregor. In the emerging You. Tube media ecology that Bridle documents, someone with an entrepreneurial spirit would immediately make a Pokmon Go video featuring Ewan Mc. Gregor both to satisfy this peculiar cultural urge and to profit from the anticipated traffic. Content generation through keyword mixing is a whole dark art unto itself, Bridle suggests. As a particular keyword or hashtag begins to trend, content producers pile onto it, creating thousands and thousands more of these videos in every possible iteration. Imagine Ewan Mc. Gregor playing Pokmon Go, forever. Whats unusual here, however, and what Bridle specifically highlights in his essay, is that this creative process is becoming automated machine learning algorithms are taking note of trending keyword searches or popular hashtag combinations, then recommending the production of content to match those otherwise arbitrary sets. For Bridle, the results verge on the incomprehensibleless Big Data, say, than Big Dada. Download San Bernardino Heap Program' title='Download San Bernardino Heap Program' />INTRO It was American poet Walt Whitman who said, A great city is that which has the greatest men and women. We couldnt agree more. Its the peoplethei. This is by no means new. Recall the origin of House of. Cards on Netflix. Netflix learned from its massive trove of consumer data that its customers liked, among other things, David Fincher films, political thrillers, and the actor Kevin Spacey. As David Carr explained for the New York Times back in 2. With those three circles of interest, Netflix was able to find a Venn diagram intersection that suggested that buying the series would be a very good bet on original programming. In other words, House of Cards was produced because it matched a data set, an example of keywordhashtag association becoming video. The question here would be what if, instead of a human producer, a machine learning algorithm had been tasked with analyzing Netflix consumer data and generating an idea for a new TV show What if that recommendation algorithm didnt quite understand which combinations would be good or worth watching Its not hard to imagine an unwatchably surreal, even uncanny television show resulting from this, something that seems to make more sense as a data collection exercise than as a coherent plotyet Bridle suggests that this is exactly whats happening in the world of childrens videos online. Image From Metropolis. In some of these videos, Bridle explains, keyword based programming might mean something as basic as altering a few words in a script, then having actors playfully act out those new scenarios. Actors might incorporate new toys, new types of candy, or even a particular childs name Matt on a donkey at the zoo becomes Matt on a horse at the zoo becomes Carla on a horse at home. Each variant keyword combination then results in its own short video, and each of these videos can be monetized. Future such recombinations are infinite. In an age of easily produced digital animations, Bridle adds, these sorts of keyword micro variants can be produced both extremely quickly and very nearly automatically. Some You. Tube producers have even eliminated human actors altogether, he writes, to create infinite reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. What is occurring here is clearly automated. Stock animations, audio tracks, and lists of keywords being assembled in their thousands to produce an endless stream of videos. Bridle notes with worry that it is nearly impossible here to parse out the gap between human and machine. Going further, he suggests that the automated production of new videos based on popular search terms has resulted in scenes so troubling that children should not be exposed to thembut, interestingly, Bridles reaction here seems to be based on those videos content. That is, the videos feature animated characters appearing without heads, or kids being buried alive in sandboxes, or even the painful sounds of babies crying. What I think is unsettling here is slightly different, on the other hand. The content, in my opinion, is simply strange a kind of low rent surrealism for kids, David Lynch lite for toddlers. For thousands of years, western folktales have featured cannibals, incest, haunted houses, even John Carpenter like biological transformations, from woman to tree, or from man to pig and back again. Children burn to death on chariots in the sky or sons fall from atmospheric heights into the sea. These myths seem more nightmarishon the level of contentthan some of Bridles chosen You. Tube videos. Instead, I would argue, whats disturbing here is what the content suggests about how things should be connected.