Participant: Faisal Kadri
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: recursion, praxis
The fable of Hansel and Gretel describes the plight of two children over two types of threat; harm to their immediate survival and pain from hunger. The varying degrees of insecurity and the two contexts of self-preservation and feeding are evident from the flow of the story dialog, therefore an automatic re-playing of dialog can be realized by picking sentences from two lists; one containing sentences in the context of self-preservation, the other in the context of feeding.
Self-preservation is a motivation that exists in all ages; theory and Internet humor preference surveys suggest that sentences in the context of self-preservation have relatively constant preference with respect to age. In contrast, sentences in the context of hunger and protection of feeding turf were found to decline with age, reflecting the declining need for food which is highest in childhood while growing up then gradually falls with aging; people as they grow old will typically have other motivations. Same theory and surveys showed that sentences in the context of sociosexual relationships increased in preference until adulthood then declined with maturity. Also, sentences in parenting context, such as when caring for offspring, society and the environment were found to increase in preference with age and maturity and displace attention from feeding and sociosexual preference. Therefore in order to construct a recursive Hansel and Gretel dialog for audience of all ages, two lists of sentences are added to feeding: In sociosexual and in parenting context. The self-preservation list is paired with one of the remaining three; the three pairs form the sentence selection sources of three stages of age: Youth, adulthood and maturity.
The single thread story of Hansel and Gretel serves as template for recursive dialog, adding more sentences to create alternative threads and unbound possibilities for plots, thereby duplicating the story structure without repeating the narrative.