Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature

Generative literature refers to literature that is completely or partially generated by an autonomous system, a non-human entity such as a computer program, that is algorithmically instructed to produce generated texts — which subsequently may be read as literature — independently from a human author. Very closely related to the field of generative art, generative literature is its subset, as both forms rely on an autonomous system for artistic production.

History

The definitions and history of generative art often serve as the reference for describing the origins of generative literature. According to generative artist and critic Philip Galanter, generative art is as old as art itself, though generative art gained popularity in the late twentieth century, as a result of, in part, the computational possibilities offered via computers, which gave generative art a platform for popular recognition. Art historian Grant D. Taylor notes that computer art’s introduction in 1963 sparked outrage, mostly from non-computer artists who feared that the sanctity of the written poem, as “communication from a particular human being” and “one last refuge for human beings," would be at risk in the computer age.

Jean-Pierre Balpe

Jean-Pierre Balpe in 2000.

One of the first, most prominent uses of generative literature as a term can be traced back to French generative writer and theorist Jean-Pierre Balpe, who, inspired by surrealism, explored automatic text generation’s artistic potential in the mid-1970s. Balpe defines generative literature as “the production of texts that continually change since they are based on a specific dictionary, on a set of rules and the use of algorithms.” Balpe believes that all literature, to an extent, is generative and that generative texts dismantle normative reading habits of temporally situating texts in relation to texts encountered earlier because “[t]he narrative is not totally built in advance but put together from a lot of virtualities which are — or are not — actualizing themselves in the course of reading.” Readers of generative literature neither see the same texts presented to them a second time nor read the same the text as another reader.

Balpe worked on several computer-generated novels online spent the early 2000s, including Trajectoires (2001) and Fictions (2004) and exhibited the poetry generator Babel Poésie (2004), which generates poems from a database of French, Italian, and Spanish words, in the form of a video poem. Poems from Babel Poésie cannot be generated more than once, and while the content of its poems has been criticized as “trash language, word garbage, chaos speak,” the poems’ forms have been praised as “a new poetry which works with boundless text flow and is conceived as an associative and endless process.”

Examples of generative literature

Raymond Kurzweil's "Cybernetic Poet"

Raymond Kurzweil speaking at Stanford University in 2006.

First introduced in the mid-1980s, Raymond Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet is an online program that generates poetry by reading an extensive collection of poems written by human authors. According to Kurzweil, "RKCP [the Cybernetic Poet] uses a recursive poetry-generation algorithm to achieve the language style, rhythm patterns, and poem structure of the original authors whose poems were analyzed. There are also algorithms to maintain thematic consistency through the poem. The poems are in a similar style to the author(s) originally analyzed but are completely original new poetry.  The system even has rules to discourage itself from plagiarizing."

Also functioning as a “poet’s assistant authoring tool,” the Cybernetic Poet aids human authors, Kurzweil claims, by “assist[ing] and stimulat[ing] a (human) poet in finding the right verbal images and phrases,” which “are often intriguing and surprising.”

William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter's "Racter"

«Slide and tumble and fall among
The dead. Here and there
Will be found a utensil.»

(Racter, "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed")

In spite of its popularity, the Cybernetic Poet was not the only poetry generator from the mid-1980s. William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter’s Racter, whose namesake derives from raconteur, is a software written in the programming language BASIC that generates prose on an IMS (Information Management System) computer without prompts from a human operator. A collection of Racter’s early fiction was published in a book entitled, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed (1984), and aside from spelling mistakes corrected by Chamberlain himself, the text is completely computer-generated. Racter generates text from a database containing 2,400 words, matching nouns with contextually appropriate adjectives, and it ensures continuity by tracking used phrases. In the preface, Chamberlain writes that Racter’s goal is to “replicate human thinking” — or, in other words, represent a utopian actualization of the vision that certain people had for computers during the mid-1980s, precisely that computers were “designed to accomplish in seconds (or microseconds) what humans would require years or centuries of concerted calculation effort to achieve,” and, in some cases, were absolutely needed, as certain tasks could not be accomplished without the use or assistance of a computer.

Racter’s choice of words is completely random, producing senseless text that literary critic Jack Barley McGraw calls “empty text” resembling “Dadaist nonsense” that cannot be close read. Any attempt at close reading Racter’s “disturbingly superficial” prose, according to McGraw, would be a “conceptual justification (seemingly out of thin air) for vaguely related strings of words.”

Nick Montfort's #!

«form intends intense verse crease to tense form tense vent verse tone verse form crease form vent tends to crease to tends form form vent form crease tone verse tense»

(Nick Montfort, "#!")

More contemporary examples of generative literature include Nick Montfort’s book entitled #! (2014) but pronounced ‘sha-bang’ (which means “the set of all circumstances.”) Published thirty years after Racter and Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet, #! contains generated poems and their algorithms. The book is divided into sections that introduce the algorithm, followed by print out of its output on the following pages. Some of the outputs end with ellipses to signify that they could not be printed due to their infinite length. #!'s title is also a valid Python command: the placement of a hashtag before any given text commands the computer not to read any text following the hashtag. 

In a review of #!, literary critic John Cayley writes that the programs are meant to read by the program producing the output, but the inclusion of both program and output in #! makes the code “a (constitutive) facet of the poem. It is (also) the text.”

Contention

The literary status of algorithmic outputs has been an ongoing contention even amongst new media artists and critics: digital technology theorist Yuk Hui called algorithmic outputs “algorithmic catastrophes” rather than anything worth studying at all, defining outputs — or “the product of automated algorithms” — as “the failure of reason,” not even “material failure.” Portuguese experimental poet Rui Torres, whose creative works include presenting poetry in hypermedia contexts, asserted, while fielding questions after a talk on Portuguese electronic literature delivered at the University of California, Berkeley in April 2016, that algorithmic outputs have no literary value.

According to Galanter, the oft-discussed question “What is art?” in art history does not go unnoticed when conceptualizing a generative art theory. Generative art, Galanter notes, however, additionally faces the question frequently encountered within artificial intelligence: “Can it be claimed that a computer can and will express itself? Alternatively, when the computer determines forms not anticipated by the artist, does its creation still qualify as the artist’s expression?”

Bibliography

• Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
• Aquilina, Mario. “Text Generation, or Calling Literature into Question.” electronic book review, August 6, 2017. http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/text-generation-or-calling-literature-into-question/.
• Cayley, John. “Beyond the Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext.” Visible Language 30:2, 1996. 164-183.
• Funkhouser, Chris T. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.
• Funkhouser, Chris T. New Directions in Digital Poetry. Edited by Francisco J. Ricardo. Vol. 1. International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2012.
• Gendolla, Peter, and Jörgen Schäfer, eds. The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in the Programmable Media. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2007.
• Hayles, Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
• Hayles, Katherine. “The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event.” Edited by Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss. In New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
• McCormack, Jon, and Alan Dorin. “Art, Emergence, and the Computational Sublime.” Second Iteration, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Generative Systems in the Electronic Arts, Victoria, Australia, 5-7 December 2001. 
• McCormack, Jon and Mark d’Inverno. “Computers and Creativity: The Road Ahead.” Computers and Creativity, edited by Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2012, pp. 421-424.
• McCormack, Jon, Oliver Brown, Alan Dorin, Jonathan McCabe, Gordon Monro, and Mitchel Whitelaw. “Ten Questions Concerning Generative Computer Art.” Leonardo 47, no. 2 (March 20, 2014): 135-141.
• Nake, Frieder. “Construction and Intuition: Creativity in Early Computer Art.” Computers and Creativity, edited by Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2012, pp. 61-94.
• Simanowski, Roberto. “What Is and Toward What End Do We Read Digital Literature?” Edited by Francisco J. Riccardo. In Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism, 10-16. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009.
• Simanowski, Roberto. Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations. Vol. 35. Electronic Mediations. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

See also

• Electronic literature
• Digital poetry
• Generative art
• Hypermedia
• Oulipo

External Links

• Jean-Pierre Balpe, Fictions
• Jean-Pierre Balpe, Trajectoires
• Raymond Kurzweil, The Cybernetic Poet
• Nick Montfort, #!