Creative Performance
Johannes Heldén and Håkan Jonson
Biographies
Johannes Heldén is an author, visual artist, musician. Born 1978, lives and works in Stockholm, he is the author of eight books, four digital interactive artworks, three full-length music albums.
Håkan Jonson is a programmer, publisher and artist. Born 1978, lives and works in Stockholm. His previous work includes sound crea- tion, conceptual visual designs, hand-crafted books and paintings.
Abstract
Evolution is an online artificial intelligence (AI) that emulates the writing and compositions of poet and artist Jo- hannes Heldén. The AI analyzes a set of all published text- and soundwork by the artist and generates a continuously evolving poem that simulates Heldéns style: in vocabulary, the spacing in-between words, syntax.
The talk will be a hybrid between a poetic performance – in which the artist will read with the text and sound of the AI – and an introduction to the theory, methodology, mathematics and code behind the application. With Evolution, and in the talk, we aim to ask questions about the role of the author, about the situation of electronic writing and generative text/poetry today and in the years to come. It is an exploration of the new, of the unexpected.