Remember those childhood build your own adventure stories that we took part in during reading time? Well how does that rebuild itself with today’s technologies? The Infinite Adventure Machine is a truly imaginative technological advancement that lets your own ideas work with computation to develop a truly unique fairy-tale plot on the spot.
Designed by David Benque, the program essentially combines fairytale narration with digital computing to deliver a mind-boggling illustrative composition for a story. Modeled using the 31 functions of folktales that were recognized by Russian Vladimir Propp, The Infinite Adventure Machine creates visual cues and a synopsis for you to fill the gaps of story telling that artificial intelligence can’t piece together.
In Benque’s words: TIAM is a proposal for a computer program which generates fairy-tale plots. While fully automatic story generation remains an unsolved problem for computer science, this project explores the links between imagination and computation. Tales and myths; the core narratives of human culture, have been transmitted for generations through various technologies and media. What new forms might they take through digital formats and Artificial Intelligence?
It’s because the program can’t deliver a full-finished story, rather only a structure and basic illustrations that users get to be imaginative and fill the holes of a synopsis to build their own story and make up for the technology’s shortcomings.
The project is a featured product in the Glitch Foundation (collective exhibition) in Paris during Design Week and will be held at de la Mode et du Design.