!!Con 2020 - CBS Televised Computer-Generated Stories in 1960—and Ten Million Watched! by James Ryan
1CBS Televised Computer-Generated Stories in 1960—and Ten Million Watched! by James Ryan
On October 26th, 1960, CBS-TV aired three computer-generated playlets for a viewing audience of millions. The playlets were produced by SAGA II, a computer program developed by MIT researchers in collaboration with television producers at CBS, for a miniseries called Tomorrow. In this talk, I’ll leverage multiple years of archival research to tell the wild story of the most ambitious early undertaking in computational media, and the remarkable collaboration that made it possible.
James Ryan (@xfoml) is a researcher and practitioner at the intersection of art and computation. His current scholarly focus is in digging up obscure pioneering work in this area, with an emphasis on forgotten early examples of story generation and computer poetry. In 2018 he earned the first PhD in Computational Media from UC Santa Cruz, with his thesis Curating Simulated Storyworlds, and he is now a research scientist based in Minneapolis.