Willem Velthoven: Design by Algorithms

I am going to show something quite relevant. It is a simple thing. It is reading a poem through the Internet and I think it is interesting, because it is silly and fun, but also because we have seen here the last two days a lot of proposals, concepts for enormous media projects, which involve large amounts of information and very large numbers of sources. When you think about it as a designer, it is very easy to conceive something like that; but when you think about it as an editor it is quite horrifying. You don't want to edit all this stuff. All these proposals we see here take so many links to so many resources that it is almost impossible to edit: we have to find ways to get rid of the editing.

So I am supposed to talk about design by algorithms, but I want to talk a little bit about editing by algorithms. I found something very simple: I made a little linked poetry Internet page that basically sends every line or component (as a whole) to a standard search engine. So when I click in the margin, I just submit a whole sentence to the Alta Vista search engine. I did not think about doing smart key words -- but look what happens. When I send this poetic sentence, I get poetry back! (...) is my first hit. I can show you more. A lot of hits about poetry, literature and culture!

This morning I used another text. I used the blurp from the folder for this conference and indeed I got blurp back from the Net, I don't really want to show you. The funny thing is that when you put poetry links, you get poetry back, with just a standard search algorithm! So apparently, if I do not try to be smart as an editor and just give my text to the Net, I get something that is quite relevant or more relevant than when I do my very best formulating the right search rating myself... It seems silly, but I think it is important.

Maybe it is an option to just forget about editing the links, forget about formulating smart queries, but just start designing the search algorithms instead. So when you want to do something with a particular kind of content, rather than trying to make all the links (which is a horrible task), just for this project design special search algorithms and of course also do the design. Thus we are really going to save lots of time, by leaving it to the system to edit our work.

URL Mediamatic: www.mediamatic.nl