A new literary genre: the algorithmic autobiography
Ghost Writer is the first publication of a new literary genre: the algorithmic autobiography.
We are never alone when we construct our autobiography: other people are always with us, with their presence, influences, relations, interactions, shaping not only our behaviours, but also what we remember, what we feel as relevant, important, worthwhile, and also changing the ways in which we express it, for whom, and the contracts we establish by expressing ourselves: what to show, what to hide, how to interpret it, how to give a form to it.
As human beings of our times, new subjects enter the scene. We constantly leave digital traces in our lives, whether we realize it or not, whether we want it or not. A number of subjects constantly keep track of these bits of ourselves, constructing multiple versions of narrations of our lives, each with different focuses, parameters, points of view, perspectives. These are, to all effects, biographies.
Even more, they are auto-biographies.
Auto, because they are automatically collected. And Auto, because we produce and express these bits of memory ourselves, in our daily lives, through our ordinary performances, like entries in an ubiquitous diary.
If we can collect all of these bits, all these episodes, all of these digital traces in our ubiquitous diary, we can imagine to produce a novel form of autobiography. Currently, multiple algorithms do exactly this, collecting all of these bits about ourselves, classifying them, organising them by time, topic, emotion, behaviour, patterns, types, focuses and more.
These algorithms are the Ghost Writers of our Autobiographies.
Thus comes GhostWriter, a new literary genre: the algorithmic autobiography.
More information about Ghost Writer will be coming soon, right after the opening of the exhibit.
In the meantime, here are the short articles which we published on the Streaming Egos Blog:
- Talking about autobiographies
- Translations
- The Fake solitude of the author
- Authors/Curators
- The Autobiography of Erica Scourti
- Algorithmic mythologies: the BigData Oracle
- A Model for autobiographical memory
GhostWriter is a project by Art is Open Source, and will be launched for the Streaming Egos project with the Goethe Institut, with the support and curation of Marco Mancuso and Filippo Lorenzin (who are the curators of the Italian section of the Streaming Egos project). The overall project includes 5 countries (Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain). The launch event will be in Düsseldorf on January 16th and 17th 2016, at the NRW-Forum. In the Italian group we have the pleasure of being together with Silvio Lorusso, Alterazioni Video, IOCose.
