SIMULACRA

“Information devours its own contents… information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy…”

- Jean Baudrillard

Modern media bombards viewers with fragmented information in bite-sized formats like infographics and short-form videos, using buzzwords and key phrases to showcase snippets of intricate topics. These are presented alongside memes, thirst-traps, advertisements, and other frivolous content creating a mess that further dilutes meaning and context. Original meaning is lost and the surface of information becomes more significant than its depth. 

This installation generates sentences off of a dataset of news headlines, social media posts, tweets and comments, essentially everything that an individual consumes through online media. Although the effects are miniscule, users can also input their own narrative into the dataset. Using an algorithm based on Markov Chains, the program generates text based on the probability of words that follow other words. What this means is that the words are chosen not based on the context it has but rather on the patterns and the frequency it appears in, resulting in sentences that lack any significance, much like online media that is only seemingly important.