Looking Outwards 06: Randomness

For my blog I chose to look at Rami Hammour’s “A Text of Random Meaning.”

According to Hammour: “This text-like visualization is a mapping of a “Register and Taps” random number generator in action. The drawing compares three registers: 9, 11 and 13. It shows the difference in values, and counting of the generated numbers while highlighting the taps.”

As a person who loves orthography and considerations of language, this idea of a meaningless or random meaning text is fascinating. Semantics being such an important part of the way we understand language, how can we confront the randomness of meaning to a computer? How do we subconsciously assign meaning to these things? I think these questions are interesting to ponder, and while looking at this piece I found myself thinking quite a bit about that. It reminds me of similar pieces which attempt to recreate “language” in random forms. For instance the Library of Babel project, or Vulgarlang. Similarly, the use of random number generation (while not present in the Library of Babel or Vulgarlang) creates a sense of interconnected forms from which one might attempt to derive meaning. That is perhaps the most interesting part of randomness to me, to try to derive meaning from the noise, because undoubtedly what you find will never be the same twice.