I am a Purple Plum living in Calle de las Huertas 45 in the neighbourhood of las Letras in Madrid (ES). In June 2021 I was part of the publication experiment around the algorithm Markov Chain, during a research residency on algoliterary storytelling in Medialab Prado. Realised with the support of Vlaamse Overheid - Kunsten - Digital Culture Residencies. You can generate a publication here: https://algoliterarypublishing.net/paseo-por-arboles-de-madrid.html
2021, Purple Plum, Las Letras, Madrid
With the help of a large list of colleague tree species, the human participants in this experiment managed to tell create a story from the narrative point of view of the algorithm Markov Chain.
Markov Chain
The Markov Chain algorithm simultaneously generates a poem and a walk along trees in the neighbourhood Las Letras in the centre of Madrid where I live. Markov Chain was designed in 1906 by Andrey Markov, a Russian mathematician who died in 1992. This algorithm is at the basis of many softwares that generate spam. It is used for systems that describe a series of events that are interdependent. What happens depends only on the previous step. That is why Markov Chains are also called « memoryless ».
A person is outside, surrounded by trees. Each tree is associated with a meaningful word.The trees form the database for the Markov Chain. We choose a tree/word to begin with. We pick a new word rolling the dice. We approach the specific tree, write the word on a piece of paper. And so on. We can insert stopwords to make the syntax fluent.
Database of trees of Madrid
Despite the impression that there are few trees in the neighbourhood, the algorithm counts 460 of them in the database Un alcorque, Un arbol of which I was part. It is clearly set in the past. The database was an initiative of the municipality of Madrid, set up in 2017 and removed offline in 2024.
Collaborators
The human participants in this project were: Emilia Pardo Bazán, Benito Pérez Gáldos, Jaime Munárriz, Luis Morell, An Mertens, Eva Marina Gracia, Gijs de Heij, Ana Isabel Garrido Mártinez, Alfredo Calosci, Daniel Arribas Hedo. The algorithms participating were Markov Chain, Python programming language, javascript, weasyprint, html, css.
This experiment was created as part of the residency of Anaïs Berck in Medialab Prado in Madrid, granted by the Government of Flanders as part of their ‘Residency Digital Culture’ program. The creation happened in company of collaborators of Medialab Prado, who assisted to various workshops.