Artist Statement

The Great Wall of China is a new project conceived for simultaneous realisation across media, including a Website, a CD-ROM, a book and an interactive installation. The foundation of The Great Wall of China is a real-time interactive language machine. This uses the metaphor of the actual Great Wall of China as a navigational device. The system is capable of creating an endless stream of ever evolving and changing texts.

Experimental works that were part of the development of this project can be viewed.

The inspiration for this project began with the short story of the same name by Franz Kafka. The database for the work consists only of individual words, all of which come from the original Kafka story. There are no linguistic structures stored in the system beyond the individual words. All sentences and grammar structures are formed "on the fly" through object oriented procedural techniques.

The main technical approach used in this work is based on pattern recognition and Chomskian Formal Grammars.

This strategy has been employed as it was the artist's desire to avoid having any form of "story-telling" model in the system.

  Artist Biography

Born 1957 Adelaide, Australia. Brought up by the sea in the country nearby, where main interest was surfing. Working as an artist since 1976. Started to use computers to make images in 1978. With father (a computer scientist) developed early graphics dedicated computer system in 1979. Started to produce computer animations in 1980. Since 1983 focus has been on computer based interactive installation, animation and related media. Has lived and worked in London, England, since 1986.

See hypertext cv at http://www.easynet.co.uk/ simonbiggs/detail.htm.