Polish

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.

C()n Du It is a volume of poetic audio-videoclips, presenting the most important phenomena of visual culture and asking questions about a man’s place in the online sphere and about identity in the era of avatars. Intense, expressive and ironic pictures, show in an epigrammatic form our daily internet ‘rituals’, like clicking, posting, chatting. References to animation, film, advertisement or video games create dynamic, expansive clips. No ‘dry bones’, using a metaphor from ‘logical poem’, but a truly ‘fleshy’ poetry, precise and firm. The style of the whole volume may be described as a ‘post-Atari’, with green color reminding of system commands and simple font expressing nostalgia for the uncomplicated, 8-bit world. The spectator is forced to simultaneously cope with the picture and sound and experiences a true stereophonic reality. In so uncertain 20th century a man is a constantly reborn avatar, a pixel or just a printed circuit on the motherboard of society.

Matko Zawrotna is a Flash rotary poem in which poetic sentences are spread out in separate spheres around the centre of a rotating wheel. While the wheel rotates the verses constantly realign each other, forming variable configurations.

Translation of Michael Joyce´s afternoon, a story. The publisher´s catalog-entry comes along with a video-presentation of the work (embedded in this database-entry) as well as a number of notable references.