Speeches

Przemówienia (Speeches is a program written in Amiga Basic which procedurally generates Communist propaganda. The rote repetitions and word salad satirize political speechmaking by pushing language to its automated extreme. First published in 1993, Przemówienia appeared in a special issue of Magazyn Amiga dedicated to "grafomania" – the compulsive impulse to endlessly write. Marek Pampuch, who was also the magazine’s editor-in-chief, presents a satirical method for winning the Nobel Prize with the help of an Amiga computer. Pampuch writes: "We know that the level of intelligence of our leading politicians only allows them to read out something already written by someone else".

With Przemówienia, Pampuch succeeds in effectively imitating the empty political rhetoric (or what translates from Polish as “grass talk”) by not only producing text which is pre-written and plentiful, but also devoid of any meaning or message beyond its performative utterance.