recombinant poetics

This paper explores collaborative processes in electronic literature. Specifically, it examines writer authority as it applies to text, code, and other media. By drawing from cinematic auteur theory, Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1994), Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Cayley’s Grammalepsy (2018), and Flores’s (2019) generational approach to digital literature, this paper highlights unique issues that arise in the creative collaborative production of digital literary works, and the influence these processes have on how these works are ‘read’. The creative processes employed in Montfort, Rettberg, and Carpenter’s respective Taroko Gorge, Tokyo Garage, and Gorge (2009), Jhave’s ReRites (2017–2018), and Luers, Smith, and Dean’s novelling (2016)), as well as reflections on the author’s own collaborative creative experiences (Paige and Powe (2017) with Lowry and Lane, Little Emperor Syndrome (2018) with Arnold, and V[R]erses (2019–) with Breeze) are explored in detail. From these analyses, this paper concludes that in digital literary practices code should be regarded as a meta-authority that denotes authority to specific components of the work. A better understanding of these complexities as they apply to attribution is emphasised in the future development of digital literary creative practice and education.

The first two chapters of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (hereafter SF) (1929) use stream-of-consciousness prose to represent the perspectives of the intellectually-disabled Benjy and suicidal Quentin, respectively. The text moves freely between time periods, using italics to indicate shifts, establishing what Faulkner calls ‘unbroken-surfaced confusion’. As a result, the novel depicts the novel’s titular ‘Sound and Fury’.

To this day, SF poses editorial dilemmas. Polk (1985, XIV) lists four difficulties: (i) none of the extant documents fully preserve Faulkner’s ‘final intentions’; (ii) the documents preserve inconclusive and contradictory testimony; (iii) it is impossible to determine who caused variations between the book and carbon typescript; and (iv) given the nature of the text, it is difficult to determine which variations are corrected ‘errors’ and which are not. Faulkner’s correspondence with his literary agent also reveals his desire to use colourised text, which has led to the development of colour editions: the 2012 Folio Society edition and the 2003 hypertext edition.

In textual criticism, an ‘ideal text’, Gracia (1995, 83-4) argues, can be understood in three different ways: (i) as an ‘inaccurate version of a historical text produced and considered by an interpreter as an accurate copy of the historical text’; (ii) as a ‘text produced by an interpreter who considers that it expresses perfectly the view that the historical text expressed imperfectly’; and (iii) text produced by an interpreter as the ‘text that perfectly expresses the view the historical author should have expressed’ (85). Adopting Gracia’s third approach, the colourised editions of SF could be regarded as the view Faulkner should have expressed, had he access to digital technologies.

The digital novel, Little Emperor Syndrome (2018), follows the decline of the Selkirks, an upper middle-class Australian family, from the years of the Global Financial Crisis to the beginning of the Abbott government. Different family members determine each chapter. Its form is inspired by Faulkner’s SF, and attempts to create Faulkner’s ‘unbroken-surfaced confusion’. Like the 2012 Folio edition, this electronic text allows the text to be colourised and navigated using a key. It also adds functionality that allows lexias to be rearranged in various modes: ‘stream-of-consciousness’, ‘cosmos’ (chronological), and ‘chaos’ (random). Time-frames can also be isolated or removed. I argue that this electronic format better articulates Faulkner’s vision. At the very least, such a form could be regarded as an – if not ‘the’ – ideal text of SF.

This paper compares and contrasts approaches to combinatorics in OULIPO and Recombinant Poetics. OULIPO, also known as Ouvroir de Litérature Potentielle, is a literary and artistic association founded in the 1960s whose combinatoric methods and experimental concepts continue to be generative and relevant to this day. Recombinant Poetics is a term that I coined in 1995 in order to define a particular approach to emergent meaning that is used in generative virtual environments and other computer-based combinatoric media forms. Combinatoric works enable the exploration of sets of media elements in different orders and combinations. The meaning of such work is derived through dynamic interaction. Another group exploring combinatorics uses digital audio techniques. The abbreviation "VS" ("versus") is often used in techno-audio remix culture to designate the remix of one group's music by another, often having only an oblique relation to the original.

“Recombinant poetics”, a term coined by artist/scholar Bill Seaman, refers to a techo-poetic practice in which the display and juxtaposition of semantic elements are generated by computer algorithms, rather than through an author’s predetermined composition. Although inspired by traditions of combinatorial literature and the use of constraints to generate narrative or poetic forms, recombinant works of art produce variable “fields of meaning” (Seaman/Ascott) for the user. Recombinant authors program discrete semantic elements, media stored in arrays or databases, to display through random, semi-random or variable processes, often in conjunction with user-interaction. Examples of recombinant poetics in works of digital poetry and art are abundant. Digital narratives that foreground recombinant processes are less common, because they tend to dismantle or dissolve themselves as sequential narrative in favor of more non-linear, emergent meanings. However, narrative authors since Laurence Sterne have tried to harness variability and randomness inside their fictions by embedding non-narrative representations of contingent experience within a narrative framework. Through digression, semantic shock, dream logic, parataxis, meta-narrative, stream of consciousness, authors disrupt narrative logic in order to produce affect in the reader/viewer, which in turn contributes to the realization of a fictional world. In this essay, I explore recombinant fictions that uses computational procedures to produce this affect of variability and randomness alongside or as counterpoint to narrative sequencing. I will begin by looking at important examples of combinatorial literature and cinema (Diane Williams, Raul Ruiz) and then I will examine qualities of recombinant fiction in electronic literature (Stuart Mouthrop, Olia Lialina, Eric Loyer, Will Luers). Finally, I will speculate about the literary importance of variability and randomness as a liminal realm in networked culture, increasingly dominated by database logic.

A critical reflection on poetics, experimental and digital writing.

Through the creative projects Bodytext, Tower and Crosstalk the author explores how language and communication function in a hybridized context where human and machine are responsible for both the articulation and interpretation of texts. The dynamics of such a hybrid apparatus allow insights into how the making of meaning and its reception can be considered as a socio-technical system, with implications for how people are situated and instantiated.

Bodytext, Tower and Crosstalk are language based digitally mediated performance installations. They each use progressive developments of generative and interpretative grammar systems. Bodytext (2010) was authored in Adobe Director and coded in Lingo and C++. Tower (2011) was developed with a bespoke large scale immersive virtual reality simulator and was coded in Python. Crosstalk (2014) was developed and coded in Processing.

Bodytext is a performance work involving speech, movement and the body. A dancer's movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented environment employing real-time motion tracking, voice recognition, interpretative language systems, projection and granular audio synthesis. The acquired speech, a description of an imagined dance, is re-written through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the performer causing texts to interact and recombine with one another through subsequent re-compositions. What is written is affected by the dance, whilst the emergent texts determine what is danced. The work questions and seeks insight into the relations between kinesthetic experience, memory, agency and language.

Tower is an interactive work where the computer listens to and anticipates what is to be said by those interacting with it. It is a self-learning system, and as the inter-actor speaks, the computer displays what they say and the potential words they might speak next. The speaker may or may not use a displayed word. New word conjunctions are added to the corpus employed for prediction. In its first version the initial corpus was a mash-up of Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey. Words uttered by the inter-actor appear as a red spiral of text, at the top of which the inter-actor is located within the virtual reality environment. Wearing a head mounted display the inter-actor can look wherever they wish, although they cannot move. The predicted words appear as white flickering clouds of text in and around the spoken words. What emerges is an archeology of speech where what is spoken can be seen amongst what might have been said, challenging the unique speaker’s voice.

Crosstalk is a multi-performer installation where movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented 3D environment employing real-time motion tracking, multi-source voice recognition, interpretative language systems, a bespoke physics engine, large scale projection and surround-sound audio synthesis. The acquired speech of inter-actors is re-mediated through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the inter-actors physical actions causing texts to interact and recombine with one another. The elements in the system all affect how each adapts, from state to state, as the various elements of the work – people, machines, language, image, movement and sound – interact with one another. Crosstalk explores social relations, as articulated in performative language acts, in relation to generative ontologies of self-hood and the capacity of a socio-technical space to “make people”.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)