golem

A “book post” is placed in the UiB Humanities Library during March 2021, consisting of a table/desk with two stools by it, near a wall.

Four books are on the table/desk (left to right, in alphabetical order by title): Articulations (Allison Parrish), Golem (Nick Montfort), A Noise Such as a Man Might Make: A Novel (Milton Läufer), and Travesty Generator (Lillian-Yvonne Bertram). Each has a hole drilled through it in the upper left and is secured to the table with a cable, creating a chained library. The books represent the work of four participants in an SLSAeu panel about computer-generated literature.

A Kodak carousel slide projector is in the middle of the table/desk, projecting small, bright images and texts onto the wall. Slides presenting covers and contents of the five books are shown continually during the exhibition. The selections will be made in consultation with all author/programmers and with their approval.

The stools allow two readers to sit and peruse the books. The table is wide enough to allow readers to do so while socially distanced.

The presence of a functioning “obsolete” slide projector, and the establishment of an “obsolete” chained library within the Humanities library, suggests to visitors that the book is also obsolete — while it is, at the same time, a perfectly functional technology. The dissonance of presenting computer-generated text via film slides and analog projection resonates with the decision that this group of five author/programmers has made: to present our computational writing in codex form.

The chained library is both practical and symbolic. Given that this is a library exhibit, the cables prevent people from relocating the books as one typically does in a library. They also emphasize that while we value ubiquity and portability in the digital age, at the same time we want things tethered, grounded, and available at the expected location. This suggestion will be strengthened by the similarity between the way these books are tethered and the way computer equipment is secured to a desk.

The projection of course alerts visitors to the availability of the books. Even if visitors do not choose to sit and peruse these books, the projected texts allow them to see and read computer-generated writing from recent years. Those who only view the projections nevertheless get a sense of the wide variety of approaches and the many textures of language that are seen in this sort of experimental digital writing.

A mythic parody that challenges current genetic engineering techniques. After being considered a source of female evil for thousands of years, Lilith and Eve reinvent themselves by creating an ethical gene according to ancient Hebraic Kabbalah ritual. With this new gene they mold a golem, an artificial anthropoid. The kabbalah gene displaces the artist's gene that Eduardo Kac invented in his artwork, "Genesis."

(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)

Inspired by Derrida's Of Grammatology, Mark Amerika experiments in GRAMMATRON with narrative form in a networked environment. Amerika retells the Jewish Golem myth by adapting it into the culture of programmable media and remixing several genres of text into the story's hybridized style, including metafiction, hypertext, cyberpunk, and conceptual works affiliated with the Art+Language group.

Narrated from various authorial perspectives, the story introduces readers to Abe Golam, a pioneering Net artist who creates Grammatron, a writing machine. Endowed not with the Word (as in the original myth) but with forbidden data—a specially coded Nanoscript—the creature becomes a digital being that "contains all of the combinatory potential of all the writings." The Grammatron is the personification of the Golem, which is also a personification of Amerika the artist. While the Golem and its environment have been depicted in any number of literary adaptations and works, in GRAMMATRON, Mark Amerika creates a seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space in the electrosphere.

Throughout the story, Abe Golam searches for his "second-half," a programmer named Cynthia Kitchen whose playful codes of interactivity lead both Golam and readers through a multi-linear textscape (the Grammatron writing machine) where they search for "the missing link" that will enable them to port to another dimension of "digital being" the story refers to as Genesis Rising.

The project consists of over 1100 (partly randomized) text elements and thousands of links. It comes with animated and still life images, an eerie background soundtrack, and audio-files that sometimes provide a spoken meta-commentary on the work itself. The work consists of different text-layers the user is free to choose from, including a theoretical hypertextual essay titled "Hypertextual Consciousness," the animated text "Interfacing," and the main hypertext "Abe Golam."

GRAMMATRON (1997) was initially received as one of the first major works of Net art and was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art. It was the first work in Amerika's Net art trilogy and was followed by PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002).

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Patricia Tomaszek)