The Final Problem
The Final Problem will be a city-specific multi-disciplinary project encompassing elements
of writing, text mining, data-visualization, and community psychogeography, woven together through algorithmic composition. The piece will loosely appropriate the conventions and mechanics of a crime novel as constraints for the filtering and framing of content and the development of narrative rules. There will be three in-gallery manifestations: augmented installation, real-time performance, and free lunch.
The work title is taken from a story by former Edinburgh resident Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in which he devises a plot to kill his famous character as a means (unsuccessful) to move on to more meaningful projects. The subtitle comes from the saying “there ain't no such thing as a free lunch” popularized in a novel by Robert Heinlein where Sherlock Holmes' older brother, the indolent human computer Mycroft, appears as a sentient machine. No free lunch is a phrase rooted in economics but with implications within machine learning (no free lunch theorem) and in relation to the question of whether software and data should be free.
Critical writing that references this work:
