French

An animated translation of a concrete poem in French. The French poem Dentelle by Pierre Albert-Birot appears at the left side of the window; the English translation is on the right.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

A hypermedia adaptation of the poem "Piano" by René Lapierre.

To experience “Living Will,” a story-game and interactive fiction, the reader must choose to be one of the heirs of Coltan-magnate E.R. Millhouse, who has made his fortune in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While reading, the heir navigates this unique legal instrument, slowly accruing medical and legal fees, while also grabbing bequests from her fellow heirs. The piece explores the long shadow of colonialism, the conflict minerals buried in our mobile phones, and the heart of darkness of a dying imperialist seeking to extend his control beyond the grave.

First produced in 1998, Bas Böttcher’s looppool marks a specific generational moment in the history of online poetry and netart. Simple yet delightful, its palindrome title playfully describes the Sisyphean loop of wandering red billiard balls through a textual maze composed of scattered objects, thoughts, and actions. The reader can either passively watch as these spherical flaneurs wander along the pre-selected path or click to alter their course. Rather than convey the sense of an infinite possibility space, the paths of these poems are highly constrained. Like a Möbius strip, there is no outside to this looppool and regardless of the direction taken, the leisurely poem will wander forever along an unbroken loop.

(Source: editorial statement, Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Three)

50 years ago a calculator generated a literary text for the first time ever. And this was in Stuttgart my hometown.
Theo Lutz wrote 1959 a program for Zuse Z22 to create stochastic texts. On the advice of the Stuttgardian philosopher Max Bense, he took sixteen nouns and adjectives out of Kafka’s “Schloss,” which the calculator then formed into sentences, following certain patterns. Thus every sentence began with “ein” or “jeder” (“one” or “each”) or the corresponding negative form “kein” or “nicht jeder” (“no” or “not every”). Then the noun, selected arbitrarily from the pool of sixteen, was linked through the verb “ist” (“is”) with the likewise arbitrarily chosen adjective. Then the whole assembly was linked up through “und,” “oder,” “so gilt” (“and,” “either,” “thus”) or given a full stop. Following these calculation instructions, by means of this algorithm, the machine was able to construct such sentences as:

EIN TAG IST TIEF UND JEDES HAUS IST FERN
(A day is deep and every house is distant)
JEDES DORF IST DUNKEL; SO GILT KEIN GAST IST GROSS
(Every village is dark, thus no guest is large)

For the performance of “free lutz!” I use a web conversion of Theo Lutz’s program which I wrote in PHP. The Web interface generates stochastic texts on the basis of Lutz’s algorithm but permit additional word input. The nouns and adjectives of the original vocabulary can be replaced by the audience at the performance through a terminal.
In 1959, computer texts were connotated as literary texts twice over, firstly through the “Kafka” vocabulary, and secondly through corrections carried out by Theo Lutz. In an edited print out of a selection of stochastic texts, Theo Lutz corrected minor grammar errors and punctuation omissions by hand, and thus, out of keeping with the programming, he acted as a “traditional” author. In the performance, reference is made to these literary features (or one could almost say “human failings”) of the first computer-generated texts in two ways. The first is through the co-authorship of the listeners, the second is the literary production of the computer texts by a professional speaker reading off the screen and performing them as they were generated.