Stream of Consciousness

[Paolo Curtoni is a member of the "Colorless Green Ideas" collective, a laboratory aimed at exploring the relation between art, language and meaning. www.colorless-green-ideas.io]

"Stream of Consciousness: narrative technique intended to render the flow of myriad impressions - visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal - that impinge on the consciousness of an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. [...]" (from Encyclopædia Britannica)

Now imagine this process, this stream of thoughts brought to the level of a social mind, of an entire community or society. The expression of a collective consciousness. Sixty-seven million stories of personal experiences, told spontaneously, without inhibitions, in the shelter of the anonymity of a social network (Experience Project, now discontinued): this is the enormous collection of human thoughts that has been used to synthesize an artificial mind, in some way representative of an entire generation of people.

Using language technologies, the whole collection of millions stories has been linguistically analysed and distilled into a semantic model using Deep Learning techniques, in order to create this artificial mind, the actionable knowledge behind the social network.

And finally, the generation: starting with a single seed word, all the subsequent words spring automatically, freely following a thread of linked senses, sensations, associations. Each word is linked to the previous one by a semantic similarity, computed with the AI model. As a result, the words are interconnected by an evolving semantic coherence, like a loose interior monologue of this collective mind. No filter has been introduced: the result is sincere, candid and brutal, as are the unspeakable thoughts that we all keep in our depths.
A representation of the full richness, speed, and subtlety of a mind - maybe our mind - at work.

Each minting has its own unique sequential stream of concepts, with the first word chosen randomly in a lexicon of 10.000 words. The rest is a dreamlike journey through the chain of thoughts, transparencies of words and colors in motion, according to specific parameters unique to each iteration.

During the animation you can:

• pause/resume the animation by pressing the spacebar, or
• save to a file the current frame, by pressing the "s" key