Our Arrival is a procedurally generated novel by Allison Parrish that recounts the daily events of an expedition through fantastical places that do not exist. The novel’s primary source text is a database of over 5700 sentences drawn from a curated subset of the Project Gutenberg corpus. Each sentence was selected based on semantic and syntactic criteria, namely: the sentence must not have any nouns that refer to human beings; the sentence must have as its subject some kind of natural object or phenomena; the sentence must not have a pronoun as its subject; and the sentence must be in the past tense. The resulting list of sentences appear to be assertions about the natural world. A number of different procedures produce the sentences that comprise the text, including automated grammatical constituent swapping (subject noun phrases are switched out between two random sentences), random topic elaboration (sentences using a pronoun to refer back to and elaborate on the subject of a previous sentence) and random grammar-generated expressions of awareness and affect on the part of the novel's two main characters (I and you). The novel was featured in chapbook form at AND Festival's 2016 Art of Bots exhibit, and excerpts, interleaved with an expository essay, were published in Ninth Letter. Our Arrival was also included in "SAFE", an online exhibition curated by Christpher Clary.
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