1000 Monkeys
Memoir-esque storytelling machine that uses twenty-five years of letters as reference for the content.
Give it a topic — anything you’d want to read a story about — and the engine goes looking through nearly nine thousand letters for something to say back. A few of them surface along the edges of the screen as it works. Then it writes you a story, drawn from what it found.
The name is a smaller cousin of the old idea: infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters, eventually producing Shakespeare. There’s nothing infinite here. There’s one model and one machine — the monkey and the typewriter, if you like — working from a finite pile of writing accumulated over more than twenty years. It’s the budget version of the thought experiment, and that’s the point. Whether it ever hits on something worth reading is an open question, which may be the most honest thing about it.
The letters it draws from belong to Notes to Self, a project I began in 2002: a letter written to myself every day, sealed, stamped, and mailed, and never opened. That work is about what accumulates when you keep addressing yourself across time and refuse to look back. 1000 Monkeys is the strange offspring of it — a machine handed all that accumulated writing and asked to make something new from it, on demand, about whatever you choose. How much of the result is the writing and how much is just the monkey at the keys, I’ll let you decide.
Alternative Title: The Second Third
Give it a topic (anything you’d want to read a story about) and the engine goes looking through nearly nine thousand letters for something to say back. A few of them surface along the edges of the screen as it works. Then it writes you a story, drawn from what it found.
The letters belong to Notes to Self, a project I began in 2002: a letter written to myself every day, sealed, stamped, and mailed, and never opened. More than twenty years of writing, none of it read back.
The name is borrowed. Neal Cassady died in 1968 with his autobiography a third finished; City Lights published that fragment in 1971 as The First Third, and the rest never came. This is the part that never came, written about sixty years late by a machine working from someone else’s letters. How much of what it makes is the writing and how much is just the machine, I’ll let you decide.