generative novel

World Clock tells of 1440 incidents that take place around the world at each minute of a day. The novel was inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s “One Human Minute” and Harry Mathews’s “The Chronogram for 1998.” It celebrates the industrial concept of time and certain types of vigorous banality which are shared by all people throughout the world. This novel was generated with 165 lines of Python code, all of which were written by the author in about four hours on November 27, 2013. The only external data source that is used in the generation process is the computer’s time zone database. The source code is available under a free software license at http://nickm.com/code; anyone is welcome to use that code to generate their own novel or for any other purpose. World Clock was generated as part of the first "NaNoGenMo" or National Novel Generation Month, which was declared on Twitter this year as a response to, and alternative to, the better-known NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

Fictions d’Issy is a generative novel, its narrative being gradually composed as it is presented to the readers. It was first shown at the 2005 edition of the 1ER CONTACT FESTIVAL.It retraces the story of two characters – he and she – and their relationship, oscillating between breaking-up and being involved. The story - continuously generated, sentence after sentence - is published in Issy-les-Moulineaux’ eleven urban e-newspapers, alternating with municipal information. The story takes place in the town of Issy; the names of public establishments, streets and squares are memorised by the text-generating device and appear regularly throughout the narrative. The local population is thus able to follow the characters’ adventures as they take place in familiar places.

Readers can shape the narrative, whether they live in Issy or not, by calling a toll-free number, as messages regularly invite them to do. When calling this number, they are asked to press a key on the phone’s keyboard, which then acts as a symbolic map representing both the town’s territory and the emotional territory of the characters’ relationship. The choices made by readers either bring the characters together or pull them apart; readers then receive a text message with the narrative piece they have helped to generate. Piece by piece, contribution by contribution, the readers are able to modify the novel-generating system, which will ultimately decide whether the couple splits up or reunites.  All the generated pieces are also stored online on a dedicated website.

(Source: Le Cube)