The errorengine.org is an art and technology collective whose participants are interested in the nature of narrative. In order to experiment with narratives generated partly by machine we developed a software environment called the Error Engine.

The Error Engine enables installations of self-evolving narrative. It is a system designed to create performances in language that are authored collaboratively by humans and machines. A work in progress involving a writer, a digital artist, and a computer scientist, the engine was envisioned as a virtual loom, a writing machine given the task of learning to evolve its own prose from the fragments and programmatic instructions of the author(s). The work takes the visual form of a single, fluid digital page that is continuously transforming, weaving and re-weaving itself together in response to the interactions of the reader.

The narrative, represented visually and sonically, evolves throughout the period of an installation, and the process of this always-changing, always-disappearing work leaves a trace in the form of physical pages and artifacts within the space. The walls of the gallery are considered as inscribable surfaces housing a dialogue between the printed and the virtual word.

A web version of this work is in development.