Search: What’s Happening?’ is a procedurally generated series of texts that recount events occurring between 6th and 12th September 2020. Twitter feeds were extracted from a search for what’s happening in India, and became the database for the texts to be generated by algorithms. The algorithms were created such that the sentence structures are tuned to the syntactic criteria of news reporting language; by laying emphasis on who, what, when, where and why. Each line had to reflect these prompts and register them in past tense.
The work thrives on the intertextuality between public posts that circulate on social media, and their citation within narratives produced via recycling mechanisms performed by codes. In this sense, meanings come into being at the moment of “reading” these narratives.
GitHub repository of codes used in the work: https://github.com/aasmatulika/Search-Whats-Happening-/tree/master
Delhi | September 2020
