computational poetry

The Algorithm of Donated Dreams is a sociotechnical artifact and a piece of computational poetry. It is the product of a speculative design experience for the blockchain community DAOstack and the Reshaping Work Barcelona conference in 2019. It is also published in Taper 04 and is live here: https://taper.badquar.to/4/ Guests who participated in its making went through a game of futures to speculate "What if we lived in a society where we donated dreams like we donate blood? And what if those dreams were inserted in an algorithm that made us see we can build that society?". Through our game, guests found challenges in that future society and prototyped solutions first with objects around them and then with language. There were two experiences to arrive to the algorithm: IRL: https://thetimetravel.agency/The-Laboratory-of-Donated-Dreams Online: https://thetimetravel.agency/The-Algorithm-of-Donated-Dreams The code for the algorithm was taken from a tiny computational poem at Taper. Direct link to the algorithm: https://taper.badquar.to/4/algorithm_of_donated_dreams.html

There exists a rift in contemporary culture of computational poetry generation. On the one hand, a vibrant poet-programmer scene has emerged around certain arts-focused conferences (e.g. ELO), online events (e.g. #nanogenmo/#napogenmo), spaces (e.g. NYC's Babycastles), and publication venues (e.g. Nick Montfort's Badquar.to). On the other, computer scientists working on Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and related fields publish scientific research on generating literary texts. The epistemological divide between these two groups can be seen most readily in the latter's focus on using empirical tests to assess work. These tests may be intrinsic (e.g. a quantitative measure of the linguistic features of computer-generated poetry), but they are often extrinsic (e.g. based on human judgments of whether a poem possesses qualities such as humor or coherence). Underwriting much (though not all) of this activity is the notion of the Turing Test and its assumed goal of computer-generated text that can pass as human-authored. Clearly, a great variety of work produced by the former group, poetprogrammers, does not lend itself to this kind of empirical testing; more often these works refuse to dissemble, instead radically foregrounding their non- or post-human qualities. The point of this paper will be to reconsider the peripheral status within the e-lit community of the kind of text generation that takes as its goal the emulation of human-produced literary discourse. As this paper’s title suggests, our main point of theoretical departure is Walter Benjamin’s classic account of the way that mechanical reproduction threatens art’s “aura” by obliterating the distance between art and its consumer. Likewise, Vilém Flusser (_Does Writing Have a Future?_) imagined that computer-generated poetry requires the writer-programmer to “dissect” their experience, fracturing it into the smallest logical units possible in order to be calculable and thus turned into a model of human cognition. What is “mechanically reproduced,” then, is not so much the poem but the poet. What do we learn about ourselves, our experiences, and our perception when we subject them to algorithmic “dissection”? What notions of the human do we reproduce or produce anew when we model the mind or minds? How do contemporary computational paradigms (e.g. deep learning) constrain this representation? Where is the consonance between human and computational thought, and where is the dissonance? What remains mysterious, distant, unmodellable? The goal of this paper is not to answer these meta-questions but rather to suggest that to turn entirely away from “emulation” as a goal is to evade them. In an era when algorithmic agents increasingly imitate humans, corporate interests are very happy to pursue these questions on their own terms, determining what aspects of humanity are worth emulating and to what ends. Artist- and researcher-led “imitation games” are one way of wresting back this prerogative; our talk will reflect on these questions in light of the Turing Tests in the Creative Arts at Dartmouth College. ELO2019 University

This book introduces programming to readers with a background in the arts and humanities; there are no prerequisites, and no knowledge of computation is assumed. In it, Nick Montfort reveals programming to be not merely a technical exercise within given constraints but a tool for sketching, brainstorming, and inquiring about important topics. He emphasizes programming’s exploratory potential—its facility to create new kinds of artworks and to probe data for new ideas. The book is designed to be read alongside the computer, allowing readers to program while making their way through the chapters. It offers practical exercises in writing and modifying code, beginning on a small scale and increasing in substance. In some cases, a specification is given for a program, but the core activities are a series of “free projects,” intentionally underspecified exercises that leave room for readers to determine their own direction and write different sorts of programs. Throughout the book, Montfort also considers how computation and programming are culturally situated—how programming relates to the methods and questions of the arts and humanities. The book uses Python and Processing, both of which are free software, as the primary programming languages. (Source: MIT Press)

This research derives from a survey of primary and secondary literature and my practice as a professional artist using electronic information delivery systems. The research has informed the creation of an interactive art work, authored so that emergent meaning can be examined and explored within a specific generative virtual environment by a variety of participants. It addresses a series of questions concerning relationships between the artist, the art work and the viewer/user. The mutable nature of this computer-based space raises many questions concerning meaning production, i.e., how might such a technopoetic mechanism relate to past practices in the arts, and in particular how might its use affect our understanding of theories of meaning? If the outcome of this part of the research suggests a radical transformation in meaning production as dynamically encountered through interactivity with a generative work of art, then how might the construction of this device inform a new field of practice? The scope of the topic and the secondary questions that flow from the initial speculation focus on the inter-conveyance of text (both spoken and written), image (both still and time-based) and music, as encountered by participants through interactive engagement within an authored and inter-authored virtual environment. The method has been to extend the realm of a series of theoretical positions relative to these areas as they appear in the mainstream literatures on art and interactivity, meaning and understanding. A virtual interactive art work has been developed in parallel to the literature survey and exhibited in Europe and Japan. The conclusions have been drawn by the author on the basis of a series of theoretical positions that examine the operative nature of an art work which is intended to generate emergent meaning. Future research is also discussed that seeks to extend our understanding and use of generative virtual environments.

This thesis explores how various computer programs
construct poems and addresses the way several critics
respond to these computer generated texts. Surprisingly,
little attention has heretofore been paid to these programs.
Critics who have given the matter attention usually focus on
only one of the myriad programs available, and more often
than not, such scholarship concludes with a disparagement of
all such projects. My work reexamines computer generated
poetry on a larger scale than previously exists, positing
some conclusions about how these texts affect contemporary
theories of authorship and poetic meaning.
My first chapter explicates the historical debate over the
use and limits of technology in the generation of text,
studying similitudes between certain artistic movements and
computer poetry. This historical background reveals that
the concept of mechanically generated text is nothing new.
My second chapter delineates how the two main families of
computer poetry programs actually create these texts.
Computer programs combine existing input text, aleatory
functions, and semantic catalogues, which provides insight
into how humans both create and interact with these
programs. At the same time, this study illustrates the
difficulty in defining the level of intention and influence
by individuals on the textual product, and therefore these
texts challenge our traditional notions of authorship and
the value of poetry. My third and final chapter argues that
contemporary literary theory and poetics creates the
conditions under which computer generated poetry can pose as
a human product. The success of these programs to deceive
readers about the origins of the text becomes clearer with
the results of a survey I conducted in which the respondents
were fooled by the machine more often than not. This
possibility of machine-created text masquerading as human
art threatens many critics, who quickly dismiss the process
and its results as non-poetic, but I conclude that since the
computer complicates foreknowledge of origin in some
contemporary poetic forms, this intrusion by the machine
prompts us to reconsider how we traditionally value and
interpret poetry.

"Infopoesia ou Poesia Informacional" [Infopoetry or Informational Poetry] was published on October 29, 1987, in the Diário de Lisboa, in the supplement “Ler Escrever.”

This benchmark article helped defining the state-of-the-art of “computational poetry,” by exposing the 1960s creative threads in the works by Nanni Balestrini, Herberto Helder, Margaret Masterman and Marc Adrian, and by additionally introducing new Portuguese and Brazilian authors, such as Pedro Barbosa, Silvestre Pestana, Antero de Alda, Erthos Albino de Souza and João Coelho. Furthermore, it disseminated for a general audience the relevance of computational programming in literary creation, by stressing that, for some authors, “a própria programação [é] o acto de criação poética por excelência, sendo o programa um poema” [the very programming (is) the act of poetic creation par excellence, being the program a poem], which facilitates different outputs.

[Source: Álvaro Seiça, "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection" (2015)]