For the exhibition “Data Alchemy – Observing Patterns from Galileo to Artificial Intelligence”, curated by Liat Grayver and Adrian Notz at the Collegium Helveticum, I contributed the installation “Prognostications”.
From the description:
“Prognostications” is an installation by Hannes Bajohr consisting of a plain box with a button that, when pressed, dispenses a short prediction. Generated by a computer program that is a variation of Alison Knowles’s iconic electronic poem “House of Dust” (1967), the predictions combine materials, locations, and people to tell of a positive, negative, or ambiguous future. The program randomly chooses from lists of words to generate these miniature poems, using and extending Knowles’s original list tenfold with the help of a machine learning algorithm. While deterministic in its logic, “Prognostications” nevertheless leaves the interpretation of these futures open to those who read and, in the end, make them.
“Prognostications” is now part of the Collegium Helveticum’s permanent collection.