As a pastime, I enjoy browsing Goodreads for philosophical quotes. For each quote, I briefly ponder its meaning and wonder how ridiculous it would be if each quote simply had no meaning. What if originally each of these quotes had no meaning to them? They would simply be words on a screen, arranged in an alternative way provoking people to deeply analyse each word.

Language is merely a medium to express meaning. So what would a language without meaning be? You could perhaps compare a meaningless language to thoughtless action. I could dissect this thought in a dozen more ways but the question I really want to ask is what happens when people start to think a meaningless language holds meaning? What would they think as a result of it and what would they discover?

Do people analyse quotes not necessarily because these words are philosophical, but because that is what they are supposed to be? This is how ZenGen was born. The idea of creating a program that spat out ‘deep’ quotes on par with those I had read on Goodreads intrigued me. What could people glean from these meaningless phrases? And if they could glean anything, would that mean the meaning they have perceived is false or true?

It is satirical by nature but should not be perceived as an attack against true profundities and its words. It is a thought experiment in which the context of philosophy is applied to words that are randomly generated.