Succinct borderline,
Irrational mailbox noted -
Method taskmaster.
1. Materials
2. Definitions
3. History
4. Breadth
5. Readings of Readings
6. Theory
MACHINE LITERATURE | Materials | Definitions | History | Breadth | Readings of Readings | Theory
MACHINE LITERATURE | Materials | Definitions | History | Breadth | Readings of Readings | Theory
Machine literature encompasses writings (ostensibly literary) which are machine-generated. This generation is structural, with writings assembled, synthesized, modified or constrained by machine systems. Such systems might include computer programming algorithms, mathematical equations, scientific theories, or, at the most basic level, artificial alphabetic structures such as acrostics or lipograms.
A "machine" need not be digital or fully automatic. A perfectly good machine system for a haiku might consist of choosing each word by letting a dictionary fall open to a random page and placing a finger in the text, then writing down that word.
MACHINE LITERATURE | Materials | Definitions | History | Breadth | Readings of Readings | Theory
Rotary dial poems
Cut-ups: http://www.speakeasy.org/~worden/cutup/
"You'll soon see that words don't belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action.
The permutated poems set the words spinning off on their own; echoing out as the words of a potent phrase are permutated into an expanding ripple of meanings which they did not seem to be capable of when they were struck into that phrase.
The poets are supposed to liberate the words - not to chain them in phrases. Who told poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Poets have no words "of their own." Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody. "Your very own words," indeed! And who are you?"
-- Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, 1978
"An essentially collaborative effort to create new work by arbitrary systems of constraint, recombination, transposition, and displacement, Oulipo is on one level a game-though of course all art is game-playing. And on another level, it is a means of breaking through what one knows and knows how to do, a way of forcing oneself to think in different categories, to come face to face with the surprising. Take the lipogram, for instance: a text excluding one or more letters of the alphabet.
...[the book is] a clear view out of the Oulipian window, where strange smiling folk carry their imaginations like small silver buckets about the world."
-- James Sallis's review of an Oulipo compendium
HM: "[I]t seems to me that the use of Oulipian or Rousselian methods in writing comes closer to realizing the Surrealist ideal than actual Surrealist practice. Automatic writing and writing down one's dreams and writing in the state between waking and sleeping, in my experience, has always ended up producing rather obvious stuff. It isn't necessarily bad, but it doesn't seem to involve the unconscious very much, whereas when you use a complicated, demanding procedure it frees up the unconscious by keeping the censorious part of the mind occupied with the problems of solving the mechanical problem it's given itself."
Q: What are your feelings about computer-assisted and/or generated text? Does the Oulipo have a collective position regarding this question? Would you ever consider electing a computer to the Oulipo?
HM: We're all for it, though nobody's gone very far with it, really, in a way which is interesting to imaginative writers. But a great deal of work has been done; there are some facts you could get from two articles in the Compendium, "The Computer and the Oulipo" and "ALAMO." At the present stage, I don't think we could consider electing a computer to the Oulipo but we have no prejudice in the matter-we're not racist in any way. We'd be happy to know of the existence of a computer which could feel at home amongst us.
La Disparition, A Void, by Georges Perec. http://www2.ec-lille.fr/~book/perec/
Cent mille milliards de poèmes -- "100,000,000,000,000 Poems," by Raymond Queneau. http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/queneau/poemes/poemes.cgi
MACHINE LITERATURE | Materials | Definitions | History | Breadth | Readings of Readings | Theory
MACHINE LITERATURE | Materials | Definitions | History | Breadth | Readings of Readings | Theory
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/cal.html
Calvino calls for "a literature which breathes philosophy and science but keeps its distance and dissolves, with a slight puff of air, not only theoretical abstractions but also the apparent concreteness of reality" (Calvino, Times Literary Supplement).
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language. (Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium).
These stories published in 1967.
MACHINE LITERATURE | Materials | Definitions | History | Breadth | Readings of Readings | Theory
Author vs. reader and consequent definition of text/literature.
Writing generated by a collection of programs, people and computers, combos thereof - literature exists but doesn’t have an author-compare to hypertext, magazine work, newspaper work.
A genre in the process of becoming.
Short term developments - Chatterbots and LanguageTreasure, Babblemachine, etc.
Thoughtbots - can write meaningfully, artificial intelligences in general-robots that can acquire language,
English 25: Literature and the Culture of Information:
Class 27, Wednesday March 14 2001: Machine Literature
Guest Lecturers: Elizabeth Freudenthal
and Jeremy Douglass.
http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/courses/liu/english25/schedule.html#class27