German

More than 50 years ago a calculator generated a literary text for the first time ever. This happened in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1959 Theo Lutz wrote a programme for Zuse Z22 to create stochastic texts. Following Max Bense’s (Stuttgardian philosopher) advice, 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 either "ein" or "jeder" ("one" or "each") or the corresponding negative form "kein" or "nicht jeder" ("no" or "not everybody"). Then the noun, selected arbitrarily from the pool of sixteen given nouns, was linked through the verb "ist" ("is") with the likewise arbitrarily chosen adjective. Last, the whole construction was linked up through "und," "oder," "so gilt" ("and," "either," "thus") or given a full stop. Following these calculation instructions and by means of this algorithm, the machine was able to construct sentences like: 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 "searchLutz!" I use a web conversion of Theo Lutz’s programme that I wrote in PHP. The web interface generates stochastic texts on the basis of Lutz’s algorithm but permits additional word input. The nouns and adjectives of the original vocabulary can be replaced by the audience during the performance by using a terminal. Furthermore words from the live search of the search engine could infiltrate the text generation process. In 1959, computer texts were connotated as literary texts in two ways: Firstly through the "Kafka" vocabulary used, and secondly through corrections carried out by Theo Lutz. In a printed copy of a selection of stochastic texts he had edited, Theo Lutz corrected little grammar mistakes and missing punctuation marks by hand, and thus, contrary to programming acted as a "traditional" author. During the performance we refer to these literary features (or one could almost say there is no escaping from one’s humanity) of the first computer-generated texts in two ways: First we do so through the co-authorship of the audience, secondly we have a professional speaker who is reading the so produced computer texts directly off the screen and is thus performing them as they were generated.

"Die Aaleskorte der Ölig" is a combination adventure with 20 scenes by Dirk Günther and Frank Klötgen which won the Pegasus Award of DIE ZEIT, the german prize for internet literature, in 1998. It is based on a short story with only one perspective. Before the adventure starts, the reader has a chance to participate by choosing the perspective for each scene. The five protagonists are the woman Ölig, Hohmann, a group of children and an eel. Afterwards the so called "movie" starts. Every scene has a different picture and text to describe the plot which changes based on the decisions of the user in the beginning.

The 'Imaginary Library – Journeys into the rhetorical spaces of art-hyper-texts' appeared first in 1990 as an offline data-base, but is now also available in a HTML version. The program makes it possible to feed quotations and literary predecessors into personal thinking and writing processes as basic stock.

Source: Rudolf Frieling on medienkunstnetz.de