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.
It is a philosophy book by the French philosopher Gilles Deluze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. The authors draw upon and discuss the work of a number of authors, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Wilhelm Reich. A Thousand Plateaus is written in a non-linear fashion, and the reader is invited to move among plateaux in any order. It is the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and the successor to Anti-Oedipus (1972). Before the full English translation by social theorist Brian Massumi appeared in 1987, the twelfth "plateau" was published separately as Nomadology: The War Machine (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). Though influential, and considered a major statement of post-structuralism and postmodernism, the book has been criticized on many grounds.
The book was first published in 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, in French and later translated to english in 1987 and published by University of Minnesota Press.
Working with Nicolas Sordello, Lucile Haute posted square images to Facebook with the date, and then deleted it. The image would still exist for some time, accessible trough a direct link to the Facebook server. After this time, only text remained (comments and image text). This started Haute and Sordello's digital ghost hunt. The project started April 17th 2010 and ended September 14th 2011. Users may still access it through the project's website.
This performance was done in French.
Lucile Haute and Nicolas Sordello took turns posting images to Facebook
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)
his presentation addresses the fate of 1990s pioneering programs of electronic literature during the 2000s. What happened to 1990s electronic literature aesthetic theories and programs once its distribution shifted from floppy disks and CD-ROMs to the Internet? How did early authors of electronic literature revisit their work in light of the ubiquity of the Internet as a form of writing?
Jean-Pierre Balpe’s pioneering work in text generation (1985–2000) makes him a “canonic” author of electronic literature. His work was distributed through the main French venues for electronic literature (exhibits by the Alamo, publications in alire and DOC(K)S), and he directed one of the first academic departments of hypermedia in France. Yet, the majority of his early work in text generation has disappeared from the literary scene as its data storage deteriorated and is now in the hands of a few media archivists. More importantly, his works took a spectacular turn when he started the creation of La Disparition du Général Proust (2005–2014), a seemingly endless production of narrations written under various alter egos, and dispersed on many different blogs. One of the many perplexing aspects of this ongoing work is the presence of generated texts recycled from Balpe’s early text generators. Balpe’s text generators were distributed in the 1990s as computer programs, entrusting readers with an exploratory and configurative function, and promising the advent of a new form of literature reinvigorated by a computerized analog to speech. In contrast, the generated texts found in La Disparition du Général Proust are inert pieces of writing, dispersed wastes of obsolete generators, ruins of a former aesthetic dream. The idealistic prospect of literary text generation seems to have made room to a different form of generation made possible by blogs: the recycling of literary waste. A new understanding of the electronic in literature emerges from Balpe’s late work, one that recycles early electronic literature into an aesthetic of ruins, unoriginality, and obsessive hoarding, illustrating the paradoxical power of literature to repurpose failure into poetry.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
If I believe professor Alain Vuillemin I was twelve years old when France began to pay attention to computer based poetry. In 1959, in France, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais created the "Séminaire de Littérature Expérimental " (Experimental Seminar of Literature), which became shortly after his creation in 1960, the well known "OULIPO". Oulipo was interested in the secret possibilities of these "new machines for information treatment". (In between, Theo Lutz had in Stuttgart produced the very first electronic poetry, "stochastichte text" in Augenblick). But nothing concrete rolled out the huge machine.
We must wait until1964 to see the first electronic poems written in French in Montreal by the French Canadian engineer Jean Baudot "La machine à écrire mise en marche et programmée par Jean A. Baudot". More than ten years later, the first exhibition of automatic produced poems took place in 1975 during the "Europalia " event in Brussels. In July 1981 the professors Paul Braffort and Jacques Roubaud created the literary group ALAMO: "Atelier de Littérature assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs" (Literature Workshop aided by Mathematics and Computers). The definition contained in the name says enough about the artistic ambitions. The use of electronics cannot reach further than helping to find unknown and unthinkable combinations of words. According to Philippe Bootz (e-mail 28 02 02), the first automatic generator of poetry was "Poèmes d'Amour" by Jean-Pierre Balpe, in 1980 and Bootz' first programmed combinatory poems, on mini-computer (not micro), are from 1979 (Bootz dixit). In 1985, during the exhibition "Immatériaux" in the Georges Pompidou's Centre, the audience was invited to create and print computer generated poems. The funny is that the numerous printed productions have been archived, but not the generators themselves. All those poetical experimentations are in a way not yet fully electronic. Written text on paper remains the most important aspect of creation. The input is computerized, but not the output.
The ALAMO group went on by creating text generating programs for DOS, such as the language APL that made possible to easily manipulate text objects as vectors or fonts. We met some members of the ALAMO group during the first Conference for e-literatures in Paris in 1994. I have been surprised by their agressivity against the emerging computer based poetry. For them, nothing new could be done out of the paper publication. There was obviously a break between the authors who saw the computer as a tool and the ones who are considering the machine as an autonomous medium.
(Source: Abstract in Dichtung Digital)
“Blind Side of a Secret” consists of three audiovisual variations, created individually by Mühlenbruch, Sodeoka, and Nakamura, on words written by Thom Swiss. The work could be considered remix culture in action, overlaying and cutting up an underlying tale—which is never given entirely as a whole, though many sections are held in common—about the unspoken parts of relationships, of coming and going. In all three pieces, alternating third-person voice-over narration by a man and a woman forms the bulk of the audio portion, and it includes parts in English, French, and Dutch. The three collaborators approach the material in sharply contrasting ways: the horizontally scrolling, black-and-red fluidity of Nakamura's animation tells the tale in the most linear fashion, with no interruptions or breaks in the audio and no interaction; Sodeoka takes a DJ's approach, carving up the audio into rhythmic segments and pulsating images that recall song more than narrative; and Mühlenbruch turns it into an interactive flash animation, where an image based on the narrative forms a template that a user can click on to follow the individual narrative threads of the voice-over or run them over each other concurrently. Taken together, and given the absence of the source text in the final presentation, the work suggests that the plethora of angles from which to approach the idea of remix in digital art need not conflict, while at the same time suggesting that nostalgia for an “original work” is perhaps secondary in some respects to the artistic potential of collaboration and redistribution.
(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Rob Schoenbeck)
This is an amazing anthology of writings by members of the group known as Oulipo, including, among others, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, and Raymond Queneau. Put simply, this group, which was founded in Paris in 1960, approaches creative writing in a way that still has yet to make its impact in the United States and its creative writing programs.
Rather than inspiration, rather than experience, rather than self-expression, the Oulipians viewed imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by what they called "constraints." Quite commonly, they would attempt to write stories, for instance, in which strict rules had to be imposed and followed (for example, Georges Perec's notorious novel A Void, which was written without the use of the letter "e").
While a major contribution to literary theory, Oulipo is perhaps most distinguished as an indispensable guide to writers.
(Source: Dalkey Archive Press catalog.)