#combinatory

[asyoulikeitnow]

You are a mashup of what you let into your life.

Austin Kleon, Steal like an artist

[american-baidu-yandex-contact]

Character Combinations

[freehealthteacher]

The neural basis of combinatory syntax and semantics Abstract Human language allows us to create an infinitude of ideas from a finite set of basic building blocks.

[taparolepourlamienne]

For as long as I can remember — and certainly long before I had the term for it — I’ve believed that creativity is combinatorial: Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks — knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas — that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something “new.” 

From this vast and cross-disciplinary mental pool of resources beckons the infrastructure of what we call our “own”“original” ideas. 

The notion, of course, is not new — some of history’s greatest minds across art, science, poetry, and cinema have articulated it, directly or indirectly, in one form or another: Arthur Koestler’s famous theory of “bisociation” explained creativity through the combination of elements that don’t ordinarily belong together; graphic designer Paula Scher likens creativity to a slot machine that aligns the seemingly random jumble of stuff in our heads into a suddenly miraculous combination; 

T. S. Eliot believed that the poet’s mind incubates fragmentary thoughts into beautiful ideas; the great Stephen Jay Gould maintained that connecting the seemingly unconnected is the secret of genius; Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press embodied this combinatorial creativity; even what we call “intuition” is based on the unconscious application of this very mental faculty.

[geratura]

Disclaimer : MPAA: Mass Produced Artistic Axioms : generative writing for nascent censors

[geratura]

CHRISTOPHER STRACHEY "LOVELETTERS" GENERATOR (1952)

emulations by: 

Matt Sephton (PHP - code here) 

Nick Montfort (Javascript)

[geratura]

Italo Calvino, "Cybernetics and ghosts" (1967)

«It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe. Men were already exchanging articulate sounds, referring to the practical needs of their daily lives. Dialogue was already in existence, and so were the rules that it was forced to follow. This was the life of the tribe, a very complex set of rules on which every action and every situation had to be based. The number of words was limited, and, faced with the multiform world and its countless things, men defended themselves by inventing a finite number of sounds combined in various ways. (...)

The storyteller began to put forth words, not because he thought others might reply with other, predictable words, but to test the extent to which words could fit with one another, could give birth to one another, in order to extract an explanation of the world from the thread of every possible spoken narrative, and from the arabesque that nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates performed as they unfolded from one another. The figures available to the storyteller were very few: the jaguar, the coyote, the toucan, the piranha; or else father and son, brother-in-law and uncle, wife and mother and sister and mother-in-law. The actions these figures could perform were likewise rather limited: they could be born, die, copulate, sleep, fish, hunt, climb trees, dig burrows, eat and defecate, smoke vegetable fibers, make prohibitions, transgress them, steal or give away fruit or other things-things that were also classified in a limited catalogue. The storyteller explored the possibilities implied in his own language by combining and changing the permutations of the figures and the actions, and of the objects on which these actions could be brought to bear. What emerged were stories (...)»

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em português

[processus-plus]

"I Saw the Devil", a Longform Google Poem by Majestic Hue

https://twitter.com/Majestic_hue