Comments on: An Edge of Chaos

By: shadoof

shadoof — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:15:30 +0000

This exercise ramifies. I did believe that it was interesting and had aesthetic traction but that it might only be an exercise. It seems already to be more than that.
As Jim points out the spiders find comments but, performing these processes reveals that (Google) searches and their results change all the time. (We shouldn’t surprised but we must be; we now treat searches with authority – of many kinds.) We are not searching ‘our’ corpus, we are searching ‘their’ corpus, and we need to remember and examine this.
History can repeat itself, deny its own procedures, our own procedures. As of ‘now’ – 8:57am EST – my Googlpiders quip *is* indexed but my original post is not indexed any longer (also Google reports that it ignores all but the first 32 words – is this new also?). So, for example, any one who is interested can, for example, use the strings of the ‘googlewhack’ version to generate the whacks again, whereas ‘we’ should by now be finding *two* results for each of the strings in this version, the second being my netpoetic post. (I did do this with precisely these results on Oct 5.) My *previous* (first) comment has still not been indexed either. You could perform Process 1 on my seed sentences and get the first iteration but you will not (yet) be able to generate the text in my comment (until the original post is indexed again). *I could not have written that comment yet.*
I now feel obliged to go on with this and to see if, suddenly, the page returns to their corpus, their index and to find out where the procedures will lead.
Is this a more or less critical art practice (and therefore aesthetic beyond ‘cool’ in Alan Liu’s sense) than mapping art or late-flarf-style-phrase-grabbing art. I believe that it is, and also that the texts it may render us on the way have a closer relation to those that are composed by less ambiguously human processes.

By: Christine Wilks

Christine Wilks — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:40:12 +0000

Marvellous! Writing on the edge of chaos, yes, but it’s also like mating with Google. Beyond symbiosis, a kind of symbiogenesis… sympoeticgenesis perhaps?

By: Jim Andrews

Jim Andrews — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:23:55 +0000

I googled “Are blog comments indexed by Googlpiders?”. Your comment was indexed.

On a related but not note, I spent this evening at the thrilling task of dbCinema maintenance. dbCinema uses Google image search. From time to time Google changes the way the search results pages are coded. Which kills dbCinema. So I occassionally have to re-write the dbCinema parsing algorithm for the search results. Yeesh.

But dbCinema searches for stuff that’s there. I like the way your piece uses it to find out what’s not there.

By: shadoof

shadoof — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:25:32 +0000

Are blog comments indexed by Googlpiders?

Not so far …

By: Jim Andrews

Jim Andrews — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 07:33:02 +0000

Ha. Well there’s an original idea. Well done.

By the way, Google indexes only online documents. What gets indexed, you ask? Anything linked to any document already indexed (via busy spiders). You can also manually point Google at an online doc to have it indexed if the doc isn’t linked to some other indexed doc.

By: shadoof

shadoof — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 21:56:59 +0000

The above was posted to netpoetic.com along with most of the rest of these notes on Sat Oct 3, about 11:30am EST. The same process now generates the following (i.e. 21 more sequences that are not yet (they are ‘now’) in the ‘corpus’) :

“The purpose of this writing is to address an edge”
“is to address an edge of chaos.”
“address an edge of chaos. Specifically,”
“an edge of chaos. Specifically, the”
“edge of chaos. Specifically, the point”
“of chaos. Specifically, the point or”
“Specifically, the point or points in sequences”
“the point or points in sequences of”
“or points in sequences of words”
“points in sequences of words that”
“in sequences of words that delimit phrases”
“sequences of words that delimit phrases”
“of words that delimit phrases found”
“words that delimit phrases found to”
“that delimit phrases found to be”
“delimit phrases found to be”
“phrases found to be unique in”
“found to be unique in our most accessible”
“to be unique in our most accessible”
“be unique in our most accessible”
“unique in our most accessible corpus.”

[Google, Thu Oct 1, 2009, completed 5:42pm EST. 21 lines]

Note that this only works – according to the procedure – because the underlying sentences of this text were not posted as a integral sequence or indexed as such by Google. (As it is posted, the text – from which the sentences can be read and which is lineated by breaking on sequences that are already in the corpus – is not recognized by Google’s spiders as a sequence.) If you tried the same thing with the text beginning ‘If I write, quoting, …’ then to produce a text following the rules – a text that is unique – or rather unique as a sequence of words in terms of Google’s corpus – you would have to add to this text.