combinatory

Generative textual philosophy based on four fundamental propositions by René Descartes

The Poetry Machine was developed in 2012 as a way for libraries to exhibit electronic literature.52 The installation consists of three sensor-equipped books through which (up to) three simultaneous users can compose poems on a screen, and then get them printed on small receipts and stored on a website. When seizing a book, the user is assigned a sentence from this book out of approximately a hundred different sentences. Each sentence exists in three variations, which the user can choose to drag into the writing space. After a limit (e.g., 350 characters) is reached, by combining the books and sentences, the poem is finished, printed, and stored online.

The Poetry Machine was designed as a collaborative project between librarians, authors, and researchers, and the design has focused on critically addressing the digiti- zation of literary culture—that is, on the tendency of the literary apparatus. The Poetry Machine allows users to experience digitization through the composition of poems and interaction with the installation. In this way the installation seeks to make the apparatus of digitization sensible. Apart from making a usable and meaningful literary installation, it proposes that digitization does not just make the book disappear into virtual libraries but instead on a more fundamental level changes writing itself. Furthermore, it suggests a tactic to comprehend and act against the disappearance (“burning”) of the book that has happened at many libraries. As not-just-art, it explores how tactics from electronic literature challenge traditional literary understanding through three interconnected levels.

(Source: The Metainterface by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold)

Mastering the Art of French Cooking explores variable communications platforms and randomly accelerated speeds of reading. The work projects a four-column machine-based mode of reading two works that are difficult to master: Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking, and a text by Niklas Luhmann on the subject of systems theory. The default speed of reading is set at 1200 words per minute but is variable and may be changed by adjusting the URL.

(Source: Author's Statement from ELC 3)

Two grand narratives of the mid-twentieth century—Niklas Luhmann's system theory and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking—are placed into an autopoietic dialogue with one another. Known for his experimental work in “ambient literature,” Tan Lin’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Systems Theory playfully juxtaposes two textual tomes known for their complexity against one another at supra-human reading speeds. The indigestible speed of this piece reflects the difficult and often inscrutable subject matter of the original works. Whereas Julia Child’s cookbook contained baroque recipes that exceeded the expectations of Americans accustomed to Betty Crocker basics. Luhmann's systems theory is itself written in deliberately abstruse language. Both works attempt to argue for the importance of interconnectedness, whether it’s the careful attention to complicated multi-step, multi-ingredient processes or a vast interconnected communication network. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Systems Theory, Tan Lin networks these two narratives together, hinting at larger forms of interconnectedness—a homology between the quantified abstractions of food recipes and the abstraction of cybernetics in a computational environment operating at the limits of human sensibility.

(Source: Editorial Statement from ELC 3)

Since January 2013, ALIS performing arts company, Serge Bouchardon and Luc Dall'Armellina, researchers and authors, and some students from the University of Technology of Compiègne have been actively involved in a research on the Poésie à 2 mi-mots (we could say in english : Two Half-Words Poetry or Between the lines Poetry, or Along the Lines Poetry or Cutting Edge Poetry...). This specific Poetry is an artistic practice based on special games with the shapes of letters, invented by Pierre Fourny (from ALIS). Pierre Fourny cuts words horizontally, peels them, reverses them. He shows words emerging from other words. Given than the human brain cannot devote itself to such a graphic and linguistic computational exercise, Pierre Fourny imagined a program to do so, at the very beginning of 2000. Since, the Poésie à 2 mi-mots has inspired shows, exhibitions, films, books, produced by ALIS and its partners, most of the time in a kind of handmaking way (using papers, objects, videos), making the audience forget that software was being used. In 2013, the idea was to develop the Poésie à 2 mi-mots using digital media. This project was named Separation. On the road, the e-Poetry Festival in London (2013) and the ELO events in Paris (2013) and in Milwaukee (2014) have been wonderful places of experimentation and of inspiring meetings. Even if we could appreciate some interesting effects thanks to new digital developments, the pleasure to get a little piece of paper with a Cutting Edge Poem written on it was still the higher experience we get from this Poetry and the strongest demand expressed by the people we met. So here we are: the end of digital poetry is paper! Joined by Guillaume Jacquemin from Buzzing Light (a young interactive design studio), the Separation team plays with the idea of going “back to paper”. In the context of Bergen, we offer to install Typomatic in public space, inspired by the photo booth / FotoAutomater. Thus, you enter the photo booth. You listen to and look at the instructions inside (here a performance of Cutting Edge Poetry by the Separation team). You adjust the stool, you write your own Cutting Edge Poem which you get outside of the booth (exactly like ID pictures). And you can keep it or leave it and why not, start again. The scenography of the Typomatic is the same as the well-known process to get a new picture for a driving license renewal, or an ID card, student card, season ticket, visas, etc, in a photo booth. This kind of installation corresponds well to ALIS works and its Cutting Edge Poetry… with the quest for the most minimalist spectacular situation, a single framework, and the reference to psychoanalysis linked to the photo booth and ID photos. This installation and performance deal with the "old" relations between art and machine, when those relations are made of curiosity and humor/misappropriation. As soon as the photo booth appeared, the Surrealists played with it!

“The Descendants” by Alexandre Gherban is a dynamic and “active” program with an indeterminate function. It varies in transiency, sometimes being transient and other times intransient; In other words, the aspects of the program (the text, the images, and the sounds) change and move constantly in a random, or indeterminate, function. Even if the text does not have a personal perspective, the viewer plays a role by choosing his/her path in the work. The reader can interact with the processes and find the links within the images. Only then do words reveal themselves. By clicking on the words, (“the descendants”, “the parents”, “who…”, “and who…”) the work changes and the viewer can interact with the images of the new page. For the page where one sees “the parents”, one must choose one of the two images that represent the parents themselves, and this choice determines the path for what follows. This function suggests a reference to artificial life. By starting with “the parents” that produce “the descendants”, the viewer sees a type of reproduction that resembles that of a family tree. By choosing the path of one parent or the other, the user has an exploratory function. With each new page that follows, the viewer can play with the images and the symbols, and then find a link to continue on to the following page. Because of this, one could say that the text offers an explicit chaining, or linkage. These images are made of letters, geometric figures, and small photographs, all representing the “descendants” and what they do. Even if the images are designed with a random function, they move in repetitive ways with each new page. At the same time, one can always see the calculated randomness that presents itself in real time (where the objects move at the moment when the viewer sees them or the mouse touches them), all of which determines the atmosphere of the program. Like the article “3eme brouillon pour un manifeste de l’œuvre d’art sur ordinateur “ by Antoine Schmitt suggests, “Put there is a direct relationship between the processes and the spectator, through the effects and their perception, the actions and the reactions.” This program is similar to the third program of “Trois Machines de poésie” by Gherban presented at the international festival "e_poetry Paris 2007". One sees “the parents” and then “their descendants”. It is interesting that the descendants of this program are introduced with a possessive adjective, "their", rather than an indefinite article like “the descendants”. In general, the relationship between the parents and the descendants is evident because “descendants” must have parents from which they came, but perhaps this relationship does not have the same meaning in these two programs. One can, perhaps, conclude that “Les Descendants” is an extension, or rather a continuation, of the third program of “Trois machines de poésie”.

“Locutions introuvables” is a literary program inspired by Marcel Bénabou’s Ouilipien method published in The Oulipien Library N.25 in 1984. This program was presented in the “Les Immatériaux” exposition of the Centre Pompidou in 1985, but it was Éric Joncquel who ported it to the website ALAMO (l’Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs). The program is also inspired by the notion of “langage cuit” (over-done language) by Robert Desnos. Entitled “Quinze locutions introuvables, mais qui doivent enrichir notre sagesse” (15 lost expressions, but that ought to enrich our wisdom), this program takes one hundred and forty expressions and cuts them up into two parts and recombines them in order to form original expressions. Thus, the “head” and the “tail” of the expressions are mixed up to create lexical chimera. The program works by composing expressions randomly. That is to say, the creation of these “lost expressions” is a function of the combination of different elements that provides the reader with the opportunity of interpreting the text, or rather the scripton, in a personal manner. For example, one of the expressions created by the program is “tirer le diable par le bout du nez.” This expression closely resembles the real expression “tirer le diable par la queue.” Therefore, the resemblance could confuse or trouble the reader, according to the reader’s reaction confronted by an unknown yet familiar expression. In spite of that, this complicity of the program grants the reader a level of liberty in interpreting the expression and giving it an independent sense. The viability of the lost expression does not therefore come from the lexical sense of its elements but rather the sense that the reader creates. Since the lost expressions imitate the structure of true expressions, the reader can use this complicity when reading them. As such, it can be said that the program produces an esthetic of complicity. With more than one hundred and forty expressions cut up and recombined, there are an exponential number of expressions the reader can form by generating them. In this way, the program truly succeeds at enriching the wisdom of the reader by conferring unto him/her original expressions.

(Source: Jonathan Baillehache)

This adaptation of the prize-winning children's book "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus" is a combinatory work where children can choose between three options. The "Egg" mode generates a story without input from the child. The "Chick" mode lets the child choose from sets of objects and goals, for instance, "Complete this sentence: The Pigeon wants to... rule the world / drive a bus / eat your dinner." The story is then told with the child's choices inserted. In the "Big Pigeon" mode, the child can record their own story elements and a story is generated using the child's voice along with the pre-recorded audio.