Print publication

Pedro Barbosa (1996: 135) refers to a collection monograph where Lyubich published an article where he includes some of his literary computer plays. Lyubich's idea of "mechanical literature" includes a word mixer and an automatic creator, and divides the produced sentences into three categories: standard with trivial interpretation, non-standard with some interpretation and absurd without interpretation.

This is one of the great books of the twentieth century and is worth learning French for. It's a jigsaw puzzle and a massive painting. It's an Oulipean conundrum and a microcosm of the world. It's a clever game and a philosophical investigation. It's all the things that literature should be and, in particular, it shows that, in the end, life does not fit together in a nice, neat pattern.

Perec himself said he saw a Paris block of flats with the front stripped off so that you could peer into all of the flats and watch the inhabitants go about their daily business. And, to a great extent, that is what this novel is about. He takes a (fictitious) block of flats at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier and looks at each flat, in seemingly random order (though he uses, like Nabokov, the move of a knight in chess to move through the flats), and their inhabitants, 179 in all. The story is told by Serge Valène, who has lived in the building for fifty-five years and who is a painter who, towards the end of his life, plans on creating a painting summing up all of his life (which, of course, he does not complete).

(Source: http://www.themodernnovel.com/french/perec/vie.htm)

Riddle & Bind is a book of poems to solve in three sections.

"Riddle" consists of poems written as riddles the reader is invited to solve by guessing their subject.

"Bind" is a selection of constrained poetry written using traditional, ludic, and Oulipian poetic forms.

The second section, "&," combines both approaches in poems inviting the reader to guess both form and content.

(Source: Spineless Books)

Troper/Schematorium is a poem in 26 parts which was later published in the "&" section of Riddle & Bind.

(Source: Author's Description)

Megawatt is based on passages from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, first published in 1953 but written much earlier, when Beckett was aiding the French Resistance during World War II. The novel Megawatt leaves aside all of the more intelligible language of Beckett’s novel and is based, instead, on that which is most systematic and inscrutable. It does not just recreate these passages, although with minor changes the Megawatt code can be used to do so. In the new novel, rather, they are intensified by generating, using the same methods that Beckett used, significantly more text than is found in the already excessive Watt. The novel concludes with a listing of the code that was used to generate it.

(Source: Harvard Book Store)

The title of this book, pronounced “shebang,” consists of the first two characters of most files containing scripts or interpreted programs. The “shebang” tells the system to use whatever follows to run the file — that the file is a Perl, or Python, or Ruby, or other program. “Shebang” also means “the entire universe of things that is under consideration,” as in “the whole shebang.” The book is a contribution to conceptual writing, published by a small press, most known to readers by word of mouth or via independent bookstores. It is an essentially subversive offering; having no words, letters, or even numbers in the title is, thus, appropriate.

(Source: Nick Montfort at http://http://nomnym.com/successes.html)

#! (pronounced “shebang”) consists of poetic texts that are presented alongside the short computer programs that generated them. The poems, in new and existing forms, are inquiries into the features that make poetry recognizable as such, into code and computation, into ellipsis, and into the alphabet. Computer-generated poems have been composed by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, Alison Knowles and James Tenney, Hugh Kenner and Joseph P. O’Rourke, Charles O. Hartman, and others. The works in #! engage with this tradition of more than 50 years and with constrained and conceptual writing. The book’s source code is also offered as free software. All of the text-generating code is presented so that it, too, can be read; it is all also made freely available for use in anyone’s future poetic projects.

(Source: http://counterpathpress.org/nick-montfort)

Abra is an exploration and celebration of the potentials of the book in the 21st century. A collaboration between Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher, and a potentially infinite number of readers, the project merges physical and digital media, integrating a hand-made artist's book with an iPad app to play with the notion of the “illuminated” manuscript and let readers "hold the light" of language. In the artist’s book, the poems grow and mutate as the reader turns the pages, blurring the boundary between text and illumination, marginalia and body. Animating across the surface, the poems coalesce and disperse in an ecstatic helix of words, taking turns "illuminating" one another's margins and interstices.They play with the mutation of language, both by forming new portmanteaus and conjoined phrases, and also through references to fecundity as it manifests in the natural world, the body, human history, popular culture, decorative arts, and architecture, placing the shifting evolution and continuous overlap of all these spheres in dialogue with the ever-changing technology of the book. The iPad version of Abra, which provides a physical backdrop for the artist's book into which it is inserted, extends and revels in this ephemerality, putting special emphasis on interactivity to highlight the role of the reader. The poems spring to life onscreen: not only do they conjoin and separate, with a swipe of his or her finger, readers may join the collaboration and mutate the text further, creating new juxtapositions and surprising turns of phrase. Their texts provide scores for potential performances of the work, making Abra function much like the magic word of its origin–abracadabra–as an unpredictable living text. We are interested in both exhibiting the hybrid artist's book / iPad app and performing from the work. We would also be happy to give a presentation, if that is of interest. While the project is a collaboration between 3 people, only Amaranth and Ian are applying to present it. We both plan to attend the conference and are especially interested in the opportunity to expand the performative possibilities of the text, which to date has been performed by Kate and Amaranth in conjoined costume. Abra is being produced under an Expanded Artists’ Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. The project will launch this spring. For exhibition, our piece requires an iPad running iOS7 and a podium. We can provide the artist's book. For performance, we can provide iPads and adapters. Amaranth Borsuk's books include Between Page and Screen and Handiwork. She teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell. Kate Durbin's books include The Ravenous Audience and E! Entertainment, among others. She teaches at Whitter College. Ian Hatcher is a text/sound artist and programmer living in New York.

(Source: Author's abstract)

This piece won the 2017 Turn on Literature Prize.