Daily Guidance on Instagram 👀

The Pursuit of Happiness is a collection of motivational quotes for your daily guidance to live a #happylife. It is dedicated to create a path starting by optimising processes to find happiness. Using thousends of inspirational quotes, an algorithm creates new ones, without human intervention – the purest form of self-optimization. The Pursuit of Happiness demonstrates and criticises the methods of self-proclaimed life and happiness-coaches and entrepreneurs and pushes the possibilities of self-optimization to the limit. Through the complete creation and curation of the content by algorithms, an even more absurd non-sense is created.

All generated content is neither scientifically substantiated nor based on scientific research. If there is a sense of meaning in a quotation, it is not intentional on part of the algorithm. A daily use of the guide is recommended. Any interpretation of the content is the responsibility of the user. The Pursuit of Happiness doesn’t guarantee a happier life and disclaims any kind of responsibility for the happiness of third parties. The Pursuit of Happiness is not intended to serve as a genuine guide to happiness and is not a substitute for professional psychological counselling or therapy. If you are really looking for help, please consult a qualified professional.

The syntax of the quotations used is taken exclusively from sources that are either untraceable or whose authors have been dead for at least seventy years. Part-of-speech tagging is used to classify a total of 9’748 quotations into constituents and phrases. These are used as individual parts, separated from the semantics of the original quotes. The principle is a modernized, digital version of the cut-up technique used mainly by representatives of the beat generation or found poetry. If a randomly generated combination of variables reproduces a quotation verbatim without naming the author, this is unintentional and does not constitute copyright infringement in the context of how it was created for this work.

The input of The Pursuit of Happiness has been created and edited by the editor to the best of his knowledge and belief. The parameters are limited to ensure that the output does not contain any grammatical or textual errors. Due to the volume of input and output, there is no guarantee of completeness or accuracy. In addition, the input has been analysed for any discriminatory, derogatory or denunciatory content and has been cleaned to the best of one’s knowledge so that the output is generated free of value. All quotes are generated automatically, without human intervention.

The algorithm takes over all other tasks from layout to file export at the push of a button using the basil.js library.

The Pursuit of Happiness is the second edition after The Laws of Success, which was originally developed in 2019 at the Bern Acadamy of the Arts and was published in 2020.

The Pursuit of Happiness does not use machine learning or any other form of artificial learning, apart from the visual material used for web-based formats. The video was generated on the 9th of January 2022 using StyleGAN2-ADA with an input of 3000 beach images with centred horizon.

This project was made possible through the generous support of the Berner Design Stiftung