Babble (full title: An Inexhaustible Stream of Babble) is an idea I followed through on; it was part of a show at Pierogi Gallery in 2001. It's funny that words could fall short describing it here, because it's designed to produce a relentless stream of them.
It's a computer program that displays one screen full of random "sentences" after another, forever (or until the machine blows up). A chorus of up to four synthesized voices reads a line per screen while the CD Tibetan Buddhist Rites from the Monasteries of Bhutan Vol. 2. plays in the background.
The program has a vocabulary of more than 5000 words, so it can produce more than 11 quadrillion unique sentences. I found the vocabulary on the web and massaged it to make phrasing smoother, conforming to the action-filled grammar: adjective plural-noun verb adjective plural-noun.
I used the same speech synthesis software used in the cartoon videos I've done for the voices. The full version can't play from the web because it expects to run on a machine with those voices (and the screen size is too big to be recorded and parked at YouTube; see the full screen images above).
But here is a silent demo of a page of Babble text. And below is a blurry video of a small portion of the full version, to give an idea of what it sounds like.
When Babble was shown I covered the wall next to the monitor with a (8 by 10 foot) printout of nearly 5000 lines from an overnight run of the program. Some lines were poetic, and a lot made sense. The work did (for me) exactly what I'd hoped, by suggesting the power of Chance applied relentlessly over time -- as it is all around and inside us, all the time -- to produce useful material. Material that led to the emergence of life and language.
The program is an idiot that can't shut up. It takes a human mind to pluck and accumulate bits of sense from the passing stream of babble. But in The Wild, the process of evolution did that for us, so our ancestors survived while less curious, adaptable and driven creatures died off.
I guess this all sounds strange, but isn't it strange and awe inspiring that: here we are, able to build machines that mimic where we come from?