Elizabeth Freudenthal:

Much of constrained authorings, particularly the matrix portion of it, was inspired by the work of the Oulipo. This group of mathematicians and writers, founded in 1960 in Paris by Raymond Queneau and Francois de Lionnais, experiment with different voluntarily imposed, mostly mathematical structures for literary creation. The name, an acronym of Ouvroir de Litrature Potentielle, "a workshop of potential literature," is meant to point to a larger concern with expanding the abilites of writers; ouvroir is translated mulpitply as a workshop, a sewing circle in which well-off women make clothes for the poor, and a workroom for nuns. Thus do these writers seek to fight the misconception that writing is based on inspiration; constraints expand creativity, and the more rigid the constraining structures, the more interesting the results (Motte 12).

The Oulipo cannon as such consists primarily of George Perec's La Disparition and Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de poemes. Perec's "The Void," is a 1969 novel about the disappearance of the letter e, written entirely without that letter; "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems," published in 1961, consists 10 sonnets, each written so that each line is interchangeable with corresponding lines of the other poems -- a total number of sonnets impossible to read in a single lifetime.

A few primary themes are evident in Oulipo anthologies: obssessive self-definition, though it reads as self-defense, is outweighed by a self-professed characteristic sense of play. Scriptor ludens, lector ludens. That is, we can build a story out of an equation for a bunch of reasons, many relevant to a graduate seminar in Hyperliterature. For a detailed defense of why this stuff matters to questions of readership and authorship, go ahead and email us at jdouglas@umail.ucsb.edu or freuden@umail.ucsb.edu. But the first and last explanation we'd give is that it's just frickin' cool.

Jeremy Douglass:

Much of constraint authorings, particularlythe anagrammatics, were inspired by the work of Turing. Mechanically produced text is digital rather than analogical – defined by purely discreet sets of possibilities (whether finite or infinite) rather than zones or gradations, and created by equations and components rather than impulses or judgements.

Currently, almost all texts have an underlying mechanization. For example, the letters, words, and sentences are formed from a limited set of letters and punctuation marks. Even this limitation however is conventional rather than formal, and subject to the will of the author. Texts breaking into multilinguistic dialog will include characters outside the English set as needed, from Spanish to Russian to Manderin. Also, the very limitations of typesetting have from the beginning been mutable to the will of the composer. Dada was one expression of such wills, while Faulkner and Pynchon and Heller peppered their passages with coffins and cracks. Although texts appear mechanized in their production, they are not ultimately mechanical because they are not truly constrained. Violations are permissible and even encouraged.

The true mechanized text takes its means or method of production as an authorial principle or a medium, or both. Constraint is inviolate, a part of the authoring physics limiting possibility as totally as black and white film or the silent movie. (Setting aside discussion of post-processes for the moment, whether coloration of film, or the nickelodean piano in the theater….)

As one complicates the mechanism, the media begins to resemble an author. Does it compress and expand perfectly? “texture” is analogic, unmechanical. Mechanized text has been framed as a question of the authoriality of the system. In fact, this may be an unimportant (or at least moot) point. As we can see by following the Turing test through Eliza and the evolution of bots/agents, mechanized text generation up until now has been largely a question of effect - like a fractal, the beauty of the product lies in the tension between the nature of the underlying system and its reaction to environmental 'data'.