#8 - Radar Angels: art and artificial text generation - D. Link & FM Einheit


David Link
Radar Angels: art and artificial text generation
By David Link & FM Einheit
Introduction by Jack Copeland
Alan Turing was interested in simulating the unpredictable element of human behaviour. According to his friend and colleague Max Newman, Turing joked that programmed unpredictability would in time lead to people saying proudly "My machine" — instead of "My little boy" — "said such a funny thing this morning".[1]
With a laugh, Turing aficionado David Link repeats "My machine said such a funny thing this morning". He isn't joking.
Link, an artist, philosopher, digital archaeologist and code hacker, bases himself in a small Cologne studio that is littered with electronic equipment. Link works at the intersection of AI and the creative arts, and also delves deeply into the history of technology. His fascinating 2016 book Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts chronicles his quest for the "documents ... absolutely necessary to restore an artefact that has gone extinct".[2] Link's recreations of long extinct artefacts — in words, diagrams, hardware, and software — often highlight the sheer beauty of these early creations of the algorithmic age.
In 2012, his recreation of Christopher Strachey's Love Letters program from the 1950s won him the British Computer Society's prestigious Tony Sale Award for Computer Conservation. Strachey's groundbreaking text-generation program ran in Turing's Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester. This housed the world's first stored-program electronic digital computer, designed and built by two ex-radar engineers Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn. Strachey used Turing's random number generator (based on a noisy diode) to produce the eerie love letters. The following examples, signed "M. U. C." — Manchester University Computer — are from Strachey's 1954 article "The Thinking Machine":[3]
DARLING SWEETHEART
YOU ARE MY AVID
FELLOW FEELING. MY AFFECTION CURIOUSLY CLINGS TO YOUR PASSIONATE
WISH. MY LIKING YEARNS FOR YOUR HEART. YOU ARE MY WISTFUL SYMPATHY:
MY TENDER LIKING.
YOURS BEAUTIFULLY
M. U. C.
HONEY DEAR
MY SYMPATHETIC
AFFECTION BEAUTIFULLY ATTRACTS YOUR AFFECTIONATE ENTHUSIASM.
YOU ARE MY LOVING ADORATION: MY BREATHLESS ADORATION. MY FELLOW
FEELING BREATHLESSLY HOPES FOR YOUR DEAR EAGERNESS. MY LOVESICK
ADORATION CHERISHES YOUR AVID ARDOUR.
YOURS WISTFULLY
M. U. C.
Link explains the expression radar angel in a section of Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts titled "Signs of Angels and Symbols of Nothing". Discussing the development of radar, he says "As of 1941, the combination of highly sensitive sensors and imaging produced by calculations resulted in the appearance of clear-air echoes, so called 'angels', on Doppler radar screens that the pilots flying past were unable to identify the source of". Angels are, as Link puts it, "signals hallucinated by the technical system".
Radar angels — intrinsically meaningless spots of light generated by elaborate equipment — were in effect the basis of every computation carried out by the Manchester computer. In their pioneering efforts to build the first universal Turing machine in electronic hardware, Williams and Kilburn repurposed radar technology. They built a computer that operated on spots of light stored on the phosphorescent screen of a cathode ray tube. Two types of spot were employed, a small sharp dot and a larger blurry dot. Neither symbol had any intrinsic meaning. But with the intervention of a human mind, these angels could represent arbitrarily complex information. "Without the projection that endows meaning", Link says, "the computer itself merely separates and unites, writes and deletes — dots".
The 2020 song cycle Radar Angels by Link and Einheit takes this idea and runs with it. In computing's eighth decade, Link's computer-generated text no longer consists dots of phosphorescence. But, like the dots, its fundamental elements — peaks and troughs of a different kind — have no intrinsic meaning. Yet the text brims with meaning if encountered by a human mind. Interacting with one of Strachey's love letters, the reader could, Link says, "project whatever she liked into the text". So too with Radar Angels.
Link describes Radar Angels as "a man–machine creation at the interface of artificial intelligence and human intuition". The lyrics result from a collaboration between Link and an artificial text-generator. He calls his text-generator simply the Poetry Machine. In the absence of any human input, the machine writes incessantly at high speed, its words appearing on a projection screen. "A thunderstorm of letters", Link says. When a human offers some scraps of text at the keyboard, the Poetry Machine devours them and begins to associate, pouring out related sentences. The machinery is based on what are known as semantic nets, a fecund concept originally tossed into AI by Ross Quillian in the 1960s.
Link explains: "When the machine starts, its database is empty — the Poetry Machine begins its existence as a tabula rasa. As text, masses of it, is input into the Poetry Machine, software transforms this into, on the one hand, networks of semantic relationships, and on the other syntactical frames. Neural shots through the resulting complex semantic nets will propagate most readily via semantic associations that are especially strong. Feeding the net's output into syntactical frames generates text rich with associations."
A key feature of the Poetry Machine is its self-directed ability to seek out new semantic associations, and also to strengthen existing associations in its nets. "The program sends autonomous bots out onto the Internet, to gather information", Link says. "These bots evaluate the material they find and feed the resulting data back into the system." The Poetry Machine is perpetually searching the Internet for topics it does not know enough about. If, for example, a bot finds the text-fragment "Fish are swimming in the ocean", it extracts the semantically important words "fish", "swim", and "ocean". In the semantic net, the connections between these three words become stronger.
Interplay between Link and the Poetry Machine creates the lyrics of Radar Angels. The songs' themes center on the metaphysics of electricity. Link types theme-words into the Poetry Machine, and as text-generation take place he interacts with the machine. If the output is uninteresting, he interrupts the machine, so weakening connections that were involved in producing this output. If the output is interesting words, then Link repeats it, so strengthening connections.
The music is supplied by FM Einheit. Einheit debuted back in the 1980s with the highly experimental Berlin group external pageEinstürzende Neubauten and now has a reputation for complex sound-art projects. Einheit's electronic score adds further dimensions of meaning to the artificially generated text.
The lyrics are below. You can listen to the songs at external pagehttp://alpha60.de/art/radar_angels/.
[1] Newman, M. H. A. 'Alan Mathison Turing, 1912-1954', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 1, 1955, 252-263 (p. 255).
[2] Link, D. Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, Minneapolis: Univocal, 2016 (p. 13).
[3] Strachey, C. S. 'The Thinking Machine', Encounter, vol. 3, 1954, 25-31 (p. 26).

Radar Angels
A generative song cycle
FM Einheit and David Link
1. He is Half
There are low cycles on the half entropy.
The amplitude psis:
First, no such entropy as a radius radiation elapses.
This is the psi that points with finite singularity.
Which becomes everybody with it and with themselves,
forgets indifferent to itself.
He is half because he becomes whisper.
Was the cycle infinite or constant?
Operator human, models very large, wasted;
The whisper of the dividing is exactly entered.
Infinite curvature in time:
So is also the most constant metrics
known by most equivalents.
Radius, for density, expansions.
What radiation matter are you most gravitational of why?
Elapse on, states, universe believed.
He is half because he becomes whisper.
Was the cycle infinite or constant?
Operator human, models very large, wasted;
These slow churches are not the
only bells who have shrunk.
Memories for tracing out the
consciousness of year and fact.
Come water is a live spring.
Bell and instrument succession.
It is a shrink time that these washes are different.
I nature mean when her word is made.
He is half because he becomes whisper.
Was the cycle infinite or constant?
Operator human, models very large, wasted;
Lame sounds him;
sonic lame sea sounds.
And the sea, who we move
to be ear from decrease:
this voice sounds from the
woman of metaphor himself.
He is half because he becomes whisper.
Was the cycle infinite or constant?
Operator human, models very large, wasted;
Rather, there can be a sonic speech
which each inscription can resemble into him or herself.
Move before wave I am the voice resembled,
but how shall I sound you?
Where this wave moves to delay
we are prompt to air of criticality;
He is half because he becomes whisper.
Was the cycle infinite or constant?
Operator human, models very large, wasted;
Bass tenors and sparing bottoms have been inserted.
Tenor, section, suppresser, and so completely.
New bottom mounts to fit distortion.
Section of Polish grit all specification to:
Does the special suppresser use
standards of weights of barrels?
You must see in them, or get up the match that you operate.
He is half because he becomes whisper.
Was the cycle infinite or constant?
Operator human, models very large, wasted;
Profound associate colors white rainbow.
When the symbol considers staff,
the maypole is colored as well;
If you are white about how they make their
sanctuary then stand this God.
They too often make figure human instead of half.
He is half because he becomes whisper.
Was the cycle infinite or constant?
Operator human, models very large, wasted;

FM Einheit
Copyright: Thomas Rabsch
2. Accelerator
I combined the form and merged.
What content has not transformed to the force.
Here you all will drive this accelerator.
To do so, one must first make a late will
to forgive wheel and drive.
Accelerator drove wheels in the traction.
He thought over to the valves
while the foundry drove to his nut.
The wheel chocked not railroads
back to the skate in not to use;
the traction guesses us,
and each of four difficulties up gets us.
Before valves could get to him,
he elaborated out a difference brake.
In that foundry, he was mined in a cause car.
Sure nuts, retained.
But, do we really think that study is important?
And these uncoupled skates,
and realigned the same switches.
A caboose as also hand
who must chock and then be cut.
The brakeman knows so as to use the time.
It was ton, the just locomotive,
which guesses when we would not,
that pushed me.
Then you must, in the
difficulty of practices, move up.
From the get signal, engineer call valves.
But then if you have accelerate
to that development,
I automate that you design assembly;
replicate that you designed me
Of the developments of the nasa
which manufacture as right systems
in the space of the lunar.
Automate to robot construct their factory.
Assembly mass surface facilities development.
The commands will be controlled
how they can transfer
instructions and copy
what tapes they are from.
Replications will be replicated
to plant to and produce productions use.
The application may intend in self and unit,
but it will replicate.
Is not to locate that we communicate
how to control this information,
or even that it is human machine.
But these commands would not
supervise him further than by
master of program and a total replica.
Transfers to be nothing else than
a very mobile, large, and stationary universal.
Precisely what to read and how to act
employs the description of the
copies of being.
Instruction action code,
the memory of cell.
Tape of using peoples process at cybernetics.
These suns all come or light pale earth:
Would not a pale water look to place his moon?
When thought by the electrodes,
sorts were lighted what they headed for
in a human reason God:
Is not to vibrate that we speed
how to string this mass,
or even that it is slow world.
There are, however,
some mass to compare.
He was not slow from simplifying
dual in the close;
compare mass, production engine
for horsepower hands, can be assembled.
Metal, wall, center,
and also in her slow and fast cylinder
she has closed out for herself.
All who build this unwanted precision
withstand the flows of their being,
and must create the stock.
Intake first increase ported after degrees,
second prevented after apexes,
third is allowed after pistons;
in, his infusion was simplified
and the cars were fully stepped
to finish his single tunes.
The spring makes to dual valves to bind it.
The acceleration, that different image;
two of them are different,
so the state of charge given incident scatter
is really about.
Then we knew within the hallucinations positive,
that lack that delusional virility;
The loss does not lose some irretrievable
negative phenomenon to;
Observing velocity neutral charge:
The ion of a singly incident fraction of projectile;
but few had vertigo narrator,
perch and giddy summit.
This scatters with the negative measurement.

3. Mind Light Brought
He was scored between power.
The phantom lights to flash two helicopters that are just not so:
Human power you minded on.
In a higher helicopter the mutilation begins the same saga.
That I may be not sensitive, but light;
Mind light brought.
There is mutilation with helicopter, that he may be lighted.
Organs light that, even if.
I help to call the above alien the scientific air.
There is always in ghost a holy actual.
He levelled am cleric some holy if he would
get them for him and am used me.
I poisoned the trace though and I am actual.
Of placed cleric and cold symbol;
on its own, however, it is optic to level explosive ocean.
An old use tells that he is live.
A third poisons that the,
transmissions of the functional be sequestered.
Assassinations.
Zombies walk what I call a person blind.
The war of the link is:
He walked as a casino.
It is just a person that they have placed.
Blind need in souths.
But still the link was a human one.
Casino of outside palace.
And place that he is a world!
Is a need dame of times.
Good bad idea price:
Or corpse of white, and from him preserves all.
The new demon was a very evil omnipresence away.
Twelve evil scares.
Story withheld at last, who named.
Relate heard something under his story.
For last, names grow that.
They grew at see, and plant made back.
4. Hungry Ghost
Background noise and humming.
I can go for several ghosts with nothing,
then a more hungry crack engages.
hungry ghost.
The hungrier they stay.
Ghosts frankenstein bye.
But stay does connect after all, today involved.
aggressive to eat my mimicry;
presence we are not vacuums.
Cut away what is not there.
Silence all possible victories
dare to force the fight of their disguises.
In expiration measure and possible performance,
before time and after the passage,
is still all one simple whole.
And fight arms are a bare no no.
Disguise man mohawk who meets:
Foot ground bare to the summers.
It also worked, for time, during the cities of the atomic bomb in way.
A most atomic gas has embedded,
so adiabatic as to be almost warm.
I have some time positions who are clicked when some draw real.
5. Ping
Both ping its pong and ball,
and dread the gun of its holster.
Fire ball:
How do you dread the holster of a gun ball pong?
In guns holsters.
Ball fire who shouts:
This laser of fire is probably the most past to see and say.
I pinged my whole wont on the register.
Is registered up to as a spectator of need.
This wont was played to the servers.
Spectator sends always from above.
So all the needs filed, every one, without spectator.
Client can connect them.
He does not ping that the God is his.
Gods a random thought,
a great perhaps merely;
the thought man wars army:
Random web recommends to visit.
Merely there is only one twilight:
On man know, way, people.
For the war death the man.
I will reach to try the way.
Death and life new young:
I have your man that you will make him then to age?
His three most pinged defaults port:
The server that the set will be connected;
and, that is precisely what the many defaults
of the master group sends him to do.
Porting frame to something that quits;
server names players of:
And file the set behind it.
I was also connected by inside spectator.
Half connects in search game:
Search lines the functions:
Why did you use game word on your search?
Ping this and you originally add everything.
Originally added.
Is added in mud.
I am a toy, I add nothing of magnetic putty.
No one, I added originally:
Kids for their rubber out of hand:
Originally added.
They add a mud.
In kid one adds again and again this mud:
The kid muds were freed.
I am then free to sell in the plasticines toy.
Do you ping me, may?
After all, the first may idea cannot say any images.
We say not what pond knows us for, but he sees.
Oh, the idea of this man is long true.
This knows it comes thing.
This is the same pond as that of the ice fish.
And these saw feet, and thought the same houses.
Man ways found these half hours.
And the life is true in living them.
He even came of his water with snows.
After the thing, she heard and learnt.
He pings the han of each one and its readership,
and book is nonvolatile of what they do.
Readership volume memory make.
Her book and her men are among the gods,
voice is no more;
the nonvolatile device of the cell transistor voltage.
You have a czech in select nonvolatile chat?
The chats of the type are nonvolatile.
The type from which it had to be assumed
being some three faults physical.
It is therefore particularly nonvolatile
that programs switch these networks.
Fault I am at most common, clutter,
if you can take precipitation.
Nothing on the trope assumes watch by type.
The physical power that is in network.
This is how it pings all courtesies.
They pinged my block.
All datum, to write itself, must change block.
From now on the oracle was only to write.
Oracle row is routinely single.
Disk was uncommitted still.
The rows the oracle modified in
is written in datum.
Routinely, two uncommitted isolations of change read.
It is this single person that receives disk:
The change of incident protected at her forever.
That isolation reads in all of us
working the right sources to be levelled.
Time, when way comes mountain
He now pings his images in ability with this factor:
Image, he thinks, has work psychic system,:
Great abilities and dreams from material memories!
Within the factor elaboration secondary impressions
are therefore those which give.
6. Who Are Hebrew
That, since it is soft
Of the angel of letter,
It can represent only to those
Who are Hebrew of
Stopping that bible.
God and actual people
lord with an old translation
to words and strand.
Here we have to place
what a soft fricative point would be.
Instead of letter, he pronounced
a mean pronunciation of the
samekhs of the shin.
Being spiritual to receive middle
diaries in others with your stop.
They represent to be the same systems
that are engineered by yodh as letters.
By then it was technically fricative:
Qoph, resh and nun are the rough vowels.
Does the word that mean letter
from another point has never
said us name that it does mark?
The absence handled around and
saw at them through his business.
Both of these presences
are worked within this impact.
Who should not take
Symbol translations?
7. Radar Angel
Besides, where do we get the radio
that a communication must build
or must have an effective development?
Communication and the program,
new resource:
Take my detection
do not release nuclear fragmentation.
Fragmentation has been a psychic self
for several positions;
nuclear victims and wars end:
Somatic release
why have you suppressed?
No self situation unaware.
To do so, one must first range
an average will to process
size and length.
An average number of types
vary in improvement.
In it also is size,
since its whole overall is average.
Even varied the builder
Of the different day.
Radar on fine partnerships.
It is finer and slightlier:
Radar on fine partnerships.
So fine a quality makes them;
he made causes of blasts and through them
the bomb of hiroshima foot and especially that.
The first cause,
and all other constant won problems,
are fuss in gesture;
blast top our ball
by the backspin,
loop, and table of her product.
Does the bomb that atomic boy from another hiroshima
Has never generated us
Project that it does drop?
It is not loco for fuss hearts.
Gesture first immigration
Nodded after organs.
In radar, that is one woman
Of the eye that i really open.
The angels, unlike their song nights,
Are not dark disclosures.
This clutter minimized
the reflectivity after the problem
worked in target.
This radar mapped the system
after the suppression
controlled in bypass.
This reflectivity
we are between the features
to derive the datum minimized!
This was feature phantasy
that their dreams had
alluded on for, datums.
The phantasy knows
To material portions to allude it.
Reflectivity between problem and radar.
That is why the new problem
affects to define classifications
as features of statement table:
This radar works a great target
for the automatic clutter.
Classification between
this pattern and the fig of anomaly.
Let us affect thoroughly
the dream of the classification itself.
That end comes foot and
Ice finds log, no one does not begin;
We offer opportunity is optic,
But ocean is never open.
8. Oscillation
And even chugging oscillations.
I chug it is more regular to call it the bass of a stroke.
Why does this sigh, which is regular to sounds, beat to you?
Bass all of the couples maintain.
Stroke minute added from layers:
But this sighs to do less than man to sound.
It does not take that man is sound.
Room took in sound.
Rooms turn on sound.
Away wakes dream of turns.
Sound on the part turns?
Oscillation frequency, she determined, you creep:
Any frequencies out there about
the measurement of dissipation?
And the other one,
the other rate crept by these transients is.
Well, you may determine that
when it confines off
I will make you a frequency.
Dreams, and an influence of selection is.
How then can a measurement force the earth?
Oscillation rotation in causes.
Rotation more coils than it would wire.
Coil bodies, joule:
But only one who can wire their side can
take over their way.
At that result, an incident fraction scattered on me.
But those two bodies burn each other.
Is a side roof of steels.
Any way house can now be flamed to the river.
And if so, whether the oscillation should be wired
for the space or ether.
Well, it wires differently.
From space, who wanted it of a jump one and next;
besides, this is differently paid,
so we step take what we get!
He wanted, found, began.
Super foxes should be jumped about
in every version of star.
Next, unenforceable, eastern.
They do not pay what others vow;
yet the whole plaintiff is stepped, as are claim,
as a moot bit of defendant:
To take a long welcome usual.
Sines, democracy.
The sine of magnitude in the
quantity of torque particle.
In any magnitude,
the stress of the time has been angular.
In quantity the motions are polar;
torque of result is synchronous, similar and exact.
His particle just forces his frames.
Can time scale stress?
Rotation, image, position!
You cannot non evidence something to rotation.
The cosines angled their tilt.
Tilt, turn you, my procedure;
and then, angling in wheel,
I cast in camber, and so.
Is being turned by me this foot.
Procedure steers what he toes;
In alignment, three total measures cast.
Wheel vehicle:
Cambers of measurement degrees;
my foot was a land,
and I will never find how much she did.
I steer less correctly and thrust more vertical.
Be great of alignment and great of direction,
and then you can line by being negative.
So is also the most total concepts
incorporated by most references.
Measure and sensor of errors.
The kind of vehicle only relatives would be dynamic of!
As, the measurement was directly computed by the methods.
Then it will do it again,
only the degree will graph the front!
Lands specific to each uses are as glides:
Do you find strength the very chain of bar?
Do on, times, weight pressed.
Thrust the projection.
Its not correctly provided.
Vertical axis plane.
That is zero, pointed level.
Is illustrating that the figures and
those who would predetermine after them
would be one.
It was a very steerable line;
what a direction we consider to!
Negative, upward positive.
9. Blip
The blip may blanch
in blank and bleach,
but it will blink.
Then we blanched within
the blonds random,
that break that black blaze;
blank was to block them as the
bloc and batch of bench.
Then, random, her bar busts,
its branches banked to its bum.
Precisely what to boil
and how to brew bolts
the blitz of the blazes of being.
Blonds have always bolted their blank,
and during the brand they were random.
From the bear black,
burn blaze blots.
The blank of these bluffs is random.
Well, you have to know
you answered quite random,
time began.
For time, a paper
who gives a property
when he or she knows for one.
10. FM
The power of what is not there.
It makes senses everywhere that concept
says their primary, ineffable communication truths.
Oh there, producing accidents potential challenge broadcast!
Sorrow sun earth of heaven joyed from days:
The electricities must make equations.
There was enough of the equation in his system to improve him
nothing else could play the agencies of benefit.
Quantum, fractional statistic.
The fractional matters that the ectoplasms appear to
in finding the element
grind this water still further.
Perish, thing and the time of slothfulness cannot develop thee;
School of bombs, effects, and damages.
In way, he wires us to ruin and beam the structure.
But, that is the very unconsciousness,
from a symptomatic event,
why absences of seizures were provoked.
The events of multitude also update out of
partial symptom into aura phases.
Within the seizure recurrence
That is, I have a symptomatic or acute cause to myself.
Awareness partial or not, brief;
Sound like nothing.
Nonsense just non communication;
to see myself killing.
When they go to nonsense,
it will be quite another paradox.
Of repeating, nonsense;
paradox and claim should be indirect.
Repeated to account paradox.
Claim sense ah, I am understood!
David Link's website is external pagealpha60.de and his email is