Material: steel, electronics, language generating program written by Janet Zweig using software developed by Jonathan Meyer
This is an interactive computer piece that invents and writes a new line of text and displays it on a mechanical "flip-disk" sign (like ones in train stations) everytime someone enters the building through the main doorway, activated by a contact in the door. The computer that runs the sign contains a text-generating program with grammar rules and a lexicon programmed by the artist.
The programming strategy was to use a large number of syntactical structures as templates, and, for each sentence, choose from them randomly and then choose every word in the template randomly from a large lexicon. This provides sentences that are coherent, often funny, and never the same. Every sentence is a new one, written by the computer.
