English

This research will attempt to define a new cultural and socio-economic movement we will tentatively call ‘Platformism.’ We will define Platformism as a contemporary overarching meta-narrative driven by the networked communities and economies made possible by software apps which can be considered at once discrete platforms, and forming part of broader ecosystems affecting almost every sphere of human experience. By delineating and mapping Platformism as an evolving system of complex and disputed territories, our purpose is to explore how creative practices including writing and literature can function in, through and against the platform.Beginning with the 2020 Covid emergency travel and movement restrictions, there has been a dramatic acceleration of the already significant mass-migration toward digital platforms. Networked platforms have multiplied in form and function, and (according to the hyperbole of some companies offering these services) cater to almost every aspect of human being. Many of these platforms have been proposed as alternatives to traditional spaces for social and professional activities. Individuals, groups and communities have experienced a kind of ‘forced experiment’ during this period as they adopted services made possible by online and networked technologies, through computer and mobile telephony, often for the first time.Contemporary writers and other creative practitioners are no exception to this digital mass-migration. Not surprisingly, many artists have embraced Platformism; its promise of new feelings through innovative software; its claims of ‘exposure’ through access to massive user-bases; its non-stop attention/affirmation cycles through ubiquitous always-on technologies. We will argue against accepting the platform as a neutral, arbitrary and isolated substrate passively awaiting inscription by the user/artist. From this perspective, an understanding of Platformism can be useful for observing and developing art and literature in, through, and against the platform.We will present a speculative Platformist ‘manifesto’, algorithmically generated through the statistical analysis of a large number of ‘terms of service’ documents taken from existing software and hardware platforms. This Platformist Manifesto resignifies the legal agreements of social media sites (such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) with hardware platforms (such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Playstation, and Nintendo) into a general declaration which can reveal underlying intentions, motives and beliefs.This generative manifesto will also reveal the metanarratives of Platformism, allowing the reader to form a mental mindscape. These topographies may suggest the limits of the Platform, or at least offer pathways to navigate its boundaries. Our purpose in mapping this territory is to cultivate opportunities for commoning our struggles and priorities, to forge artistic and social positions within these topographies. To return writing to the edge.

The paper describes the procedure of porting of one of the first known poetry generators in Russian from a description of a program algorithm published as an article in the USSR Academy of Sciences: Automatics and Telemechanics in 1978. Boris Katz, a computer linguist at MIT in the moment, and at that moment mathematical mechanical faculty of Moscow university graduate was working on the generator in 1972 - 1975. The generator is based on Stone, 1916, the collected poems by Osip Mandelstam. This work was inspired by his elder colleague, a professor of Moscow University, E.M.Landis. Katz started his research on machine poetry and was asking colleagues if they knew anyone working on the theme in the Soviet Union, and they failed to point him to similar work.After several years of developing the program on BECM - 4 (Big Electronic Calculating Machine) he noticed Michael Gasparov’s book Contemporary Russian verse. Metrics and rhythmics. 1974, that analysed contemporary and traditional poetic verse and general laws of organization of Russian verse. This made a considerable contribution to the work.In order to understand the context in which On Program Composing Verse was produced we have to note that unlike in other language contexts the first generated poems in Russian appeared later than musical compositions, even though the beginnings of statistical analysis of literary texts dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. Another component that proved necessary for the computational poetics in the Soviet context was the study of structural properties of literary texts such as metrical analysis of Russian verse undertaken by Vladislav Kholshevnikov, Boris Tomashevsky and Michael Gasparov. So it was important to gain both qualitative and quantitative knowledge in regards of the properties of the poetic text in Russian.Porting or recreating this generator involved creation of a database in which every word of the Mandelstam’s Stone has been classified and included into a database. The program was created by a computer scientist Boris Katz in 1978 for BECM. A poet and computer programmer Anna Tolkacheva used java script for porting the original program. The paper will report on the principles and choices made during the process, as well as the mistakes made at the first iteration of the project and methods implemented for correcting them.