generative

Beginning with punch cards, an IBM1130 computer, FORTRAN, and space exploration in the late 1960’s, Arriving Simultaneously on Multiple Far-Flung Systems is a virtual reading machine, created/recreated with JavaScript in a HTML/CSS structure and read “on-the-fly”. With a complex array of randomly-generated texts, the work mirrors the life of Diana, an early aerospace information retrieval programmer, who later worked to bring community networking to rural and urban areas. The gap between the acceptance of women programmers who worked — not only during WWII but also in the decades after WII — and the current dominance of men in the field, is core to this narrative of one woman’s journey through an environment of changing technologies.

(Source ELO 2018.)

Penelope is a combinatory sonnet generator film based on the Odyssey, addressing themes of longing, mass extinction, and migration. Recombinations of lines of the poem, video clips, and musical arrangements produce a different version of the project on each run. Penelope was co-produced by Alejandro Albornoz (Sound), Roderick Coover (Video), and Scott Rettberg (Text and Code). Using a similar combinatory structure to that of Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, the computer-code-driven combinatory film can produce millions of variations of a sonnet that weaves and then unweaves itself. The program writes 13 lines of a sonnet and then reverses the rhyme scheme at the center couplet. Each 26 line poem is produced as an audiovisual composition, with lines spoken by voice actress Heather Morgan. The system determines their composition, produces and plays the video and musical composition, and then displays the text of the generated poem before composing a new sonnet pair. The videos by Roderick Coover and the sound compositions by Alejandro Albornoz also recombine in an algorithmic structure. Albornoz remixed oboe solos by Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra musician Marion Walker in developing the aleatory soundtrack. The video and the text were developed by Coover and Rettberg during 2017 residencies at the Ionian Center for Arts and Culture. Actors in non-speaking roles in the film include Kefalonian residents Helen Amourgi, Kostas Annikas Deftereos, and Sophia Kagadis.

(Description: Author's description)

For me, it was the repetitions of the few words of which this poem consists, that stood out to me and I wanted to do something with that. Because the poem I chose consists of merely 13 words, chosen from a pre-existing text, I chose to give the user the possibility to generate these words in a random order, resulting in a new, each time unique poem.

(Source: Translation of the description in Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

A JavaScript program, written in 2012 by SHINONOME Nodoka, that produces parodies of contemporary Japanese poetry. Translation to English by Andrew Campana. (Source: ELC3)

Przemówienia (Speeches is a program written in Amiga Basic which procedurally generates Communist propaganda. The rote repetitions and word salad satirize political speechmaking by pushing language to its automated extreme. First published in 1993, Przemówienia appeared in a special issue of Magazyn Amiga dedicated to "grafomania" – the compulsive impulse to endlessly write. Marek Pampuch, who was also the magazine’s editor-in-chief, presents a satirical method for winning the Nobel Prize with the help of an Amiga computer. Pampuch writes: "We know that the level of intelligence of our leading politicians only allows them to read out something already written by someone else".

With Przemówienia, Pampuch succeeds in effectively imitating the empty political rhetoric (or what translates from Polish as “grass talk”) by not only producing text which is pre-written and plentiful, but also devoid of any meaning or message beyond its performative utterance.

Every hour, this bot draws language from wikiHow, repackages and recontextualizes it as a sexting message, and tweets it. Part of its process is to add pronouns “I,” “you,” or both to the instructions and actions described, in addition to prefacing each tweet with “sext.” Its output invites readers to interpret bland, utilitarian language metaphorically because it’s conceptually framed as sexting. The scenario of people sending sexually explicit messages back and forth, describing things they are doing to their bodies, contrasts sharply with the step-by-step instructions common to wikiHow, resulting in surprising and humorous results. Follow this bot on Twitter to learn many new euphemisms for sexual acts and the expressive potential of conceptual reframing. (Source: Editorial Statement from the works collection site)

Every three hours, this bot tweets a generated text field composed of blank spaces and unicode characters that can be interpreted as stars or other celestial bodies, particularly when conceptually framed by the account’s title. Its artistic output has become very popular, rapidly attracting over 70,000 followers and with each tweet being favorited and shared over 300 times. While this project would seem to be more of a visual art than literary bot, consider that it is not generating images, but sequences of characters, spaces, and carriage returns. It is using the materials of writing in the tradition of ascii art and its results are so evocative that it has even inspired a spinoff bot @tiny_astro_naut. Follow this bot to become to explore its tiny endless expanses. (Source: Editorial Statement from the works collection site)

A poetry generator for the imaginary city. Tokyo Garage is a remix of Nick Montfort's "Taroko Gorge" -- a nature poem generator built in javascript. Rettberg modified the code and substituted all of the language of Montfort's work to create this poetry generator, which plays with received stereotypes of the Tokyo metropolis and of urbanity in general.