Predictive Poetry

Over the summer of 2017 Craig Ward Fanny Josefsson and Ilana Wolstein discovered a mutual admiration for the abstract - and frequently profound - sentences generated by repeated use of the predictive text bar on Apples iOS. Predictive text draws from a library of each users most frequently used words to contextually suggest three words most likely to follow another. In doing so it creates a fragmented recollection of messages we have already sent; a broken portrait of us and how we communicate. To create the poems an initial word was chosen and from there the predictive text library was navigated with a choice of only three words at a time. To maintain the flow of writing punctuation and line breaks were generally added afterwards. In essence this becomes a form of restricted writing akin to the minimalist poets of the 20th Century. The results are at times clumsy or childlike occasionally falling into a feedback loop while others present us with truly poetic existential observations.