Polish

“Heating Season” by Piotr Marecki is an analogue conceptual book, written by the city of Krakow. The texts are produced by the new citizens (I year university students), as well as people whose families have been living here for generations and the avant garde artists. The book „Heating Season” is also based on the large bases collected among the citizens of Krakow. The respective parts of the book have been created by using different writing techniques, also those employing the collective narrator. Among them are: surveys conducted among randomly chosen landline phone users, records from the so-called “smogwatching” sessions, surprise quiz in the university class, smog investigation made in the social media and the weather transcripts.

Robbo. Walkthrough is a hybrid piece in a form of text generator, as well as an analogue book. The text itself is generated on the 8-bit Atari computer, and has premiered as a wild demo on the demoscene party Silly Venture 2k17 in Gdańsk. The piece has been programmed in Pascal by Wojciech Bociański (known in the Atari scene as Bocianu) with soundtrack by Lisu (created in Raster Music Tracker.) The concept and text has been created by Piotr Marecki.

The first part of the title is an allusion to the game Robbo (1989,) a cult Polish production for the 8-bit Atari, while the second part references walkthrough, i.e. the text providing clues of how to finish a game, a popular genre in the digital media fiel,. However, Robbo is a literary (or rather: nonsensical) rendition of a walkthrough. The work is 56 minutes long, and constitutes an attempt to create digital ambient literature.

The analogue book itself has also been created in a rather unusual way. The text generated on the 8-bit Atari computer has been transcribed on the editor, and then assembled using Calamus, a program created in 1987 for use in the Atari ST/TT work environment. All of the elements of the work – text, music, code, composition, as well as graphics – have been created by the Atari enthusiasts, premiered on the Atari-themed party and are being distributed among the retro computers enthusiasts.

While Robbo generator can be regarded simply as an entertainment or a joke, its authors believe that it also describes how the short-lived technologies are often replaced by so-called killer apps. An answer for this kind of technological acceleration is the practice of returning to the discarded and dead media or technologies (in this case the Atari computer) which can provide a critical commentary to this acceleration, at the same time preserving the cultural content in the excess-based contemporaneity, its circulation and repractice.

(Source: Author's Description)

2×6 consists of short “stanzories”—stanzas that are also stories, each one relating an encounter between two people. Appearing in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Polish, the stanzories are generated by a similar underlying process, even as they do not correspond to one another the way a translation typically does to a source text. These sixfold verses are generated by six short computer programs, the code of which is also presented in full. These simple programs can endlessly churn out combinatorial lines that challenge to reader to determine to whom “she” and “he,” and “him” and “her,” refer, as well as which is the more powerful one, which the underdog. Generating 2×6 is a simple process, and readers are invited to study the programs and even modify them to make new sorts of text generators. Reading the output can be much more difficult, as the text that is produced crosses syntax with power relations and gender stereotypes, multiplying those complexities across six languages.

During our presentation, we will take on the role of the literary adept and talk with a chatbot, who we will treat as our master. We’ll ask him questions about how to write, present our works for his evaluation, and try to receive feedback. The Master will use phrases, sentences and paragraphs of texts, which until now have been used in literary discussions. The chatbot that we propose is based on texts from the history of Polish literature, foremost taking into account the exchange of views between literary critics and historians. It is said that one of the peculiarities of Polish mentality is strife, which especially in the digital age takes on monstrous proportions in the form of an uncontrolled wave of hate on the internet and verbal abuse that falls below the belt.

The starting point for our project is to recognize that the majority of existing chatbots are very nice. The available chatbots try to help, give advice and have an answer ready on how to proceed. They look good and behave impeccably. Our idea is radically different: we want to create a bot that is programmed to be unpleasant, to be a troll and hater. The first step will be to research this behavior in Polish literature and based on the literary haters and their hate, we will create a database of possible answers. We are going to use both classical texts, literary quarrels between the romantics and representatives of the Enlightenment, and the avant-gardists attacking tradition, and we will mix these with discussions on literary web portals, social media, statuses and comments. The chatbot will adjust its answer to the user’s questions by employing a simple word order analyzer and keywords. An archive of literary texts will be processed using a sampling method and Markov chains.

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

Przemówienia (Speeches is a program written in Amiga Basic which procedurally generates Communist propaganda. The rote repetitions and word salad satirize political speechmaking by pushing language to its automated extreme. First published in 1993, Przemówienia appeared in a special issue of Magazyn Amiga dedicated to "grafomania" – the compulsive impulse to endlessly write. Marek Pampuch, who was also the magazine’s editor-in-chief, presents a satirical method for winning the Nobel Prize with the help of an Amiga computer. Pampuch writes: "We know that the level of intelligence of our leading politicians only allows them to read out something already written by someone else".

With Przemówienia, Pampuch succeeds in effectively imitating the empty political rhetoric (or what translates from Polish as “grass talk”) by not only producing text which is pre-written and plentiful, but also devoid of any meaning or message beyond its performative utterance.

A poetry generator for the imaginary city. Tokyo Garage is a remix of Nick Montfort's "Taroko Gorge" -- a nature poem generator built in javascript. Rettberg modified the code and substituted all of the language of Montfort's work to create this poetry generator, which plays with received stereotypes of the Tokyo metropolis and of urbanity in general.

Oczy Tygrysa

(Eyes of the Tiger) is an example of an online flash adaptation of the poems of an avant-guard poet (formist) from the interwar period, Tytus Czyżewski.The authors of the adaptation, poet Łukasz Podgóni and electronic literature researcher Urszula Pawlicka chose to adapt Czyżewski’s pieces that speak explicitly to issues of mediation and mechanization. Czyżewski’s poetry serves as a precursor to the forms of aesthetic experimentation now common in electronic literature, anticipating hypertextual, interactive, generative, and kinetic forms of writing. The inspiration for this adaptation was the paraphrased words of Mark Amerika “What would Czyżewski the Formist do with new media?” Oczy Tygrysa shows how interwar poetry complements the language of new media both in terms of composition as well as semantics.

(Source: ELO 3, editorial statement)

A working translation to polish of Taroko Gorge by Nick Monfort.

Despite that this work resembles kinetic poetry made in Flash, the author proposes a new name to describe his work - electronic emanational poems. In these poems he creates invisible, simultaneously coexisting dimensions of text that can be actualised in the kinetic (electronic) versions of such poems.

The emanational form was first used in Oka-leczenie and (O)patrzenie, two books authored by Z. Fajfer and K. Bazarnik, identified as LIBERATURA, a literary genre integrating text with the material form of the book, which inspired a new literary movement of the same name.

The poem was written in Polish in a static, printed form in 2004 and published in Fajfer’s bilingual collection of poems dwadziescia jeden liter / ten letters (Krakow: Ha!art Publishing House, 2010). The Polish electronic version was created in 2004 in collaboration with Marcin Lewandowski.