English

This presentation will explore random e-poetry and interspecies based on two electronic works: one that intersect humanity and insect-like robotics titled “Robot-poem@s”, and an eproject/poem based on a performance with sheep: “Negro en ovejas/Black on Sheep.” Robotpoem@s consist of insect-like robots (five quadrupeds and a bigger hexapod) whose legs and bodies are engraved with the seven parts of a poem written from the robot’s point of view in bilingual format (Spanish and English). Binary constructs such as creator/creature are questioned by these creatures purposely chosen from open-source models resembling insects and spiders, thus emphasizing anxiety and removal from humans while underlying the already problematic relation between humans and technology. The final segment of the poem, number VII, rephrases the biblical pronouncement on the creation of humans, as perceived by the robot: “According to your likeness / my Image.” With this statement, the notion of creation is reformulated and bent by the power of electronics, ultimately questioning its binary foundations. An interface to explore these robopoem@s can be found at tina.escaja.com (requires Flash): http://www.uvm.edu/~tescaja/robopoems/quadrupeds.html. This interface shows the original quadrupeds with options for listening to the poems in three different languages (English, Spanish and Chinese), interacting with 3-D models of the quadrupeds, and experiencing Augmented Reality components triggered by the panels that served as matrix of the robot-poets. On the other hand, “Negro en ovejas” is a digital “ovine poem” which intersects words and sheep in an interactive poetic project that allows random poetry as created by the sheep as they graze in the pasture, a performance enhanced and extended to the possible variants created by a digital interface: https://www.badosa.com/obres/ovino/index.html This project includes, therefore, various levels of poetic action and interaction. First there is the process of constructing the text, the base-poem formed by words which have meaning in and of themselves, but also acquire new meanings by contacting with other words (the noun “Sol” - “Sun”- and the verb “Es” -“Is”- become the plural “Soles” -“Suns”- through proximity or contact). Once the written pieces are constructed, they are assigned to sheep who will freely form poems in a performance of movements and bleating which will become its own entity. Finally, when the event is transferred to the digital artefact, any web surfer can access and reproduce the process in a cybernetic interaction and in an exchange which affords them creative authorship: the web user, just like the sheep, creates the poetic experience, joining forces with  the sheep as well. The presentation of the interface at ELO2019 would potentially capture some of the verses in a suggestion and proposal of new interactive dimensions. Both e-lit projects allow for a questioning of binaries and media-assumptions based on electronics, interspecies and random poetry.

This idea came from an university project (2017) and thanks to the exchange students' program. 

This is an experiment of digital poetry written in 14 verses: it was asked to 10 people from 10 different countries to translate each of them from English to their mother tongue.

Every clips were recorded in different places in Bergen (NO).

The result is a multilingual digital poem about Bergen.

Artistic reenactment of the speech “Against Poets” from Buenois Aires from 1947 with using digital media 

Witold Gombrowicz (one of the most important Polish writers and an icon of XX century European literature) spent almost 25 years in Buenos Aires. In 1947 he gave a talk "Against Poets" at Fray Mocho’s bookshop, then in 1951 he publish the text in "Kultura" in Paris, which provoked a lot of poets and scholars to respond, e.g. Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel Prize winner). In this well known statement Gombrowicz attacked the very institution of Poetry (Form), as a kind of religion. The institution of Poetry attacked him back. Such controversies give a kind of new energy and awareness to the field and get artists out of their routine positions. The point of departure for this project is to reenact his statement in the new digital context. 

Nowadays there are a lot of attacks, controversies in the public sphere, and also in literary, artworld circles (on the Internet). We are going to research and mix some „attacking-” and „against-” poetics. Using words, phrases, sentences which we find in a selected cultural contexts (European, Argentinian, American) we will produce a generated speech reenactment in a new context in which artists, writers, and also anonymous Internet haters attacked eachother. To produce such an output we will create an archive which will provide input for the generation of speeches. This project has one goal: to unify the community through controversy. We hope to give rise to a variety of emotions among the e-poets (support, rejection, disgust, lack of interest). 

"In 2015, E-Poetry, which is headquartered in Buffalo, New York, organized its festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Spanish and Portuguese languages seemed to take a leading role during research presentations as well as artistic events. During the festival segment titled NEW PATHS, NEW VOICES/NUEVAS RUTAS, NUEVAS VOCES, a coalition was forged against the domination of the English language in the field. During a performance (an intentionally antagonistic one, dedicated to trolling) presented in Spanish and Polish and abiding by the spirit of major Internet trolling strategies, it was established that the name of the coalition would not be announced in English, and the performance also was expressly forbidden from being translated to English. This was a gesture aimed at opposing the most significant type of domination in the field—namely, language domination and all the hegemonic practices that stem from it. It was a move modeled after that of the Coalition Against Gringpo5 and assumed this sort of trolling approach as a reply to having languages and practices identified as being at the ‘end(s)’. "

Piotr Marecki, Nick Montfort, Renderings: Translating literary works in the digital age  https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/32/suppl_1/i84/3077164

“En una sala a oscuras, de espaldas al público, un hombre de estatura media, pelo canoso y un cuerpo de apariencia frágil recita algo en una lengua que no existe pero en la que se distinguen rasgos de todas partes: sonidos nasales franceses o polacos, morfemas en español, aglutinaciones de consonantes de ecos indoamericanos, entonaciones tangueras, vocales cerradas anglófilas"

http://reseniasbds.blogspot.no/2015/07/cronica-del-e-poetry-festival-lu…

The Truelist is a book-length poem generated by a one-page, stand-alone computer program. Based around compound words, some more conventional, some quite unusual, the poem invites the reader to imagine moving through a strange landscape that seems to arise from the English language itself. The unusual compounds are open to being understood differently by each reader, given that person’s cultural and individual background.

The core text that Nick Montfort wrote is the generating computer program. It defines the sets of words that combine, the way some lines are extended with additional language, the stanza form, and the order of these words and the lines in which they appear. The program is included on the last page. Anyone who wishes is free to study it, modify it to see what happens, and make use of it in their own work.

The Truelist is part of the series Using Electricity. A complete studio recording of the book by Montfort is available for free (either for online listening or download) thanks to PennSound.

Thanner Kuhai is a short work of digital poetry, an elemental metaphor about wrestling with depression and finding hope against all odds. The reader/player is transported into an environment where language becomes intertwined with nature in a flooded subterranean world. Navigate tunnels and passageways teeming with strange life and shadows of words. Submerge beneath the water. Or seek escape to the surface. Available in English and Tamil.

Lack of lemmatization often undermines the quality of concordances, which is especially relevant for diachronic corpora. A significant part of lemmatizers are designed for Modern English. This paper presents MiddleEnglishLem, an application designed for dictionary-based lemmatization of Middle English texts. We use a hybrid algorithm to lemmatize the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, a long-time-span diachronic corpus that includes Middle English texts of different genres, a total of 608 570 words. MiddleEnglishLem is capable of associating multiple inflected forms and orthographic varieties with canonical forms. Lemmatization becomes more accurate owing to comprehensive premade dictionaries. The competitiveness of this lemmatizer is proved by the low average errors – less than 2.5 percent, whereas its prebuilt stemmer has a strength of 0.38, a relatively high value. Accuracy of the lemmatization process can be improved by implementing syntagmatic analysis at the part-of-speech identification step. MiddleEnglishLem can be applied to diachronic corpora in order to research the development of English.

Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Using-a-Hybrid-Algorithm-for-Lemm…

A poem in 3 languages with an equal number of voices and an infinite number of experiences. Part games, part story, within this 'Pulp Culture' experience, the abstract behaviour of verbal form leaves space for various interpretations of the text. Depending on the user, www.onderhandelingen.com is a multivocal monologue or a dialogue. Due to the different sequences and conjunctions of sound and typography, the manuscript of Tsead Bruinja is different every time: Lit de ûnderhannelings begjinne! Laat de onderhandelingen beginnen! Let the negotiations commence! (a word game by the Frisian Tsead Bruinja, the American Ryan Pescatore Frisk and Dutch Catelijne van Middelkoop) (Translation Description on Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

This is a presentation with commentary of two experimental original, collaborative digital poems: one with variora in two voices; and the other somewhere between a translation and a multilingual composition in English, Italian and French. “Digital Poetry” is understood to be language-based, formally structured art to which the digital dimension is indispensable in at least one of the following elements: composition, performance, or reception. We are two published poets who have worked for many years with translation in literature. This collaboration takes us into an exploration of the continuous re-invention of the speaking Subject through traversing languages in digital space. It breaks new ground in opening on to potential poetic conversations across cultures, even where interlocutors are far from fluent in each others’ languages. It is potentially an immediate way in to the kinds of discovery that can make translation so rewarding, but that are not generally easy to access without relatively long experience, especially in a literary context. The poems in our presentation were/are being composed through an email version of the corps exquis, where we agreed some simple ground rules, and then sent each other a couple of lines at a time. The ground rules were not rigid, and we soon loosened our initial attempts to include formal frameworks such as poetic meter. The most enduring agreed rule was not to open an email until ready to read and respond, and then responding immediately. These poems form the source texts. They are being programmed by Penny in close consultation with Paolo by means of digital Readers, part of the Readers Project with which the ELO will be familiar, and within which Penny has presented several times with John Cayley. John describes the digital Readers that are the basis of the Project as “distributed, performative, quasi-autonomous poetic ‘readers’ – active, procedural entities with distinct reading behaviors and strategies”. “Inextrinsix” is the nominal form of the epithet Penny coined to characterize how she programmes the Readers. The reason we have called these digital poems “inextrinsix” is that the idea of the “inextrinsic” embodies a contradiction, or tension (“in-ex”). This is because it concerns an essential property of digital poetry, that of its capacity to go deeper into poetic language, and translation, than was possible before it (intrinsic), but also because it then moves to foreground associative, or metonymic, traces (extrinsic). To give an example of a related linguistic element: paranomasia, or punning, is a feature of much digital poetry. Punning is an inextrinsic figure because it works by taking the reader into a figure of language, the direction of which then goes outward. It is also useful as an example because it has a visual element that transposes to sound, an attribute much more foregrounded in digital poetry than in the generality of printed poetry. Lastly, it is right on the edge of consciousness, which is perhaps the most important when it comes to digital Subjectivity. To elaborate a little: innovative language is necessarily oblique in terms of what is currently known. The joke work, like the dream work, can enable perception of the unconscious or preconscious, or that in which reason or the Symbolic is embedded. This is the terrain of the speaking Subject in process, and this is where moving between natural languages in digital form opens on to new potential. The electronic, inextrinsic Readers work on this threshold. The “completed” texts on screen start with a static version of the poem, which serves as a frame, part of which remains on screen throughout. The human reader then interacts with the digital Reader by pressing specific number keys on whatever device s/he is using. These works take my earlier collaborations with John forward mainly in the following ways: they are original poems, composed collaboratively via email; translation is treated almost as part of syntax in the programming; and the same goes for multiple voices. That is, the analytic strategies according to which the movements and “Readings” traverse the source texts are treated as if there were no distinction between a change of speaker, a change of language and the kind of grammatical or structural move native to poetry. The effect, however, is to expose where they overlap and where they do not, thereby revealing a differential comparable to a partial palimpsest. Digital Reading is what creates and opens this space. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

The poem-program Universo was developed by João Coelho in BASIC for a IBM PC. This is a computer poem which draws its own title - universe, in english - in a spiral that evokes endless movement, symmetry and chance - forming words in portuguese along the way.