Gerrit Krol is a novelist and poet, but also a computer programmer, who worked for Royal Dutch Shell. This book offers the earliest examples of computer-generated poetry from the Netherlands, and includes an essay about Krol's methodology.
Mexica: 20 Years–20 Stories [20 años–20 historias] contains 20 short narratives developed by the computer program MEXICA. Plots describe fictional situations related to the Mexicas (also known as Aztecs), ancient inhabitants of what today is Mexico City. This is the first book of short-stories produced completely by a creative agent capable of evaluating and making judgments about its own work, as well as incorporating into its knowledge-base the pieces it produces. By contrast with other, statistical models, MEXICA is inspired by how humans actually develop fictional stories. The book, in both Spanish and English, also includes source references related to the program. Preface by Fox Harrell.
(Source: Publisher's catalog page)
Using Electricity is a series of computer generated books, meant to reward reading in conventional and unconventional ways. The series title takes a line from the computer generated poem “A House of Dust,” developed by Alison Knowles with James Tenney in 1967. This work, a FORTRAN computer program and a significant early generator of poetic text, combines different lines to produce descriptions of houses. The series is edited by Nick Montfort.
A computer-generated novel about gun violence in the United States.
This novel in three sections follows a nameless man on a journey west. Flat, neutral-sounding declarations meander around a variety of encyclopedic topics — firearms and mass shootings, but also homosexuality, autism, and the goth subculture. The language becomes increasingly simplified and fragmented. The 2018 edition reflects current events and was generated with up-to-date text and links from some of the writers struggling the hardest to produce explanations.
The 2018 edition went on sale July 4, 2018. Hard West Turn will be regenerated and published annually. Produced on the MIT Press Bookstore Espresso Book Machine. Edition of 13 (corresponding to the original 13 states) + 3 artist’s proofs (red, white, and blue), numbered and signed by the author/programmer.
The 2018 edition was copy-edited and designed by the proprietor of Bad Quarto (who is also the programmer/author). It was proofread by him with the kind assistance of Stephanie Strickland. Specifically, spelling and punctuation corrections were made, with U.S. spellings now used throughout. Sentences with proper nouns that remained were manually removed. No other changes were made to the output, which derives almost entirely from the English and Simple English Wikipedias.
Racter poses virtually no threat to human authors, nor does any other algorithmic author currently available. The question is hence not one of replacement, but of augmentation, of new responsibilities for the human author in light of the algorithmic one. When Juhl writes that computer-generated output lacks the intentionality of a text with a human author, he falls into a similar trap as Bök: both scholars fail to recognise the fundamentally human basis of algorithmic authorship. Human intention hasn’t disappeared, but is merely manifest in a new way. Indeed, The Policeman’s Beard’s apparent randomness is a rhetorical choice, and Racter’s nonsensical output pushes the limits of creativity by means of an intentional goal to be incomprehensible.
The poster is a visual presentation of the experiment that was the translation from English into Polish of the Nick Montfort computer generated novel World Clock (2013) and its subsequent publication and distribution in print in Poland (Zegar światowy, 2014). The poster is composed of two distinct parts. The first part is devoted to the in-depth description of the problem of translating a generator, focusing on the challenges connected with the language transfer of programmed narrative work, as well as chosen issues connected with the publication process. The second part covers what occurred after the publication of the book and presents the conclusions of the analysis of the reception of the work.Zegar światowy was the first computer generated novel published as a book in Poland, thus it gained interest of some media and critics, who usually do not discuss experimental works. It may be hypothesized that the interest was partially due to the fact that the generator was partially inspired by a text by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, which makes it an example of what Strehovec describes as derivative writing.
In the first part, using the expressive processing tools proposed by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the authors describe the translation process, beginning with the input data, the code of the process and ending with the generated output. The program, written in English, consists of 165 lines of code and randomly generates 1440 short stories, which are coordinated with the Python pytz time zones application, pairing the generated stories with cities in different timezones. Because of numerous differences between the grammar of English and Polish, the Polish version of the program consists of as many 229 lines. The translator chose to make changes in the code in order to generate from the input stories with a similar structure, but accommodating for the specifics of the Polish language. Writing the code required addressing a number of problems, like including grammatical gender or translating the names of characters and locations. Some other changes were dictated by the use of timezone definition base in Python, for which there is no Polish version. In this part of the poster the authors will also address the question why publication in the medium of a traditional print book was one of the key elements of the project, referring to literature on the materiality of literature.
The second part of the project is an analysis of the marketing and reception of the book in Poland. Montfort's project is inspired by a made-up book review by Stanisław Lem, in which the writer imagines the book One Human Minute, consisting of an enumeration what all the people around the world do in one minute. The Polish translation was marketed as a computer generated novel based on Lem's idea. Thanks to the decision to distribute this conceptual work just like conventional literature, through a traditional publishing house, the work received critical reception unprecedented for works from the field of electronic literature in Poland. Instead of being discussed by digital media scholars, Zegar światowy received 15 reviews in mainstream columns and on blogs and websites devoted to conventional literature. This experiment provided the opportunity to analyze how experimental electronic literature is perceived by actors from the field of conventional literature. The author analyzes the discourse of their reactions, the focal points of which include the “non-human” aspect of the work, its experimental character and values associated with it, as well as different approaches to the reference to the celebrated Polish science fiction writer.
With the exception of this introduction, the writing in this book was all done by a computer. The book has been proofread for spelling but otherwise is completely unedited. The fact that a computer must somehow communicate its activities to us, and that frequently it does so by means of programmed directives in English, does suggest the possibility that we might be able to compose programming that would enable the computer to find its way around a common language "on its own" as it were. The specifics of the communication in this instance would prove of less importance than the fact that the computer was in fact communicating something. In other words, what the computer says would be secondary to the fact that it says it correctly.
(Source: from Bill Chamberlain's introduction at Ubuweb)