Print publication

According to Funkhouser’s reading of Barbosa’s poem “Porto” (1977), “Porto, a city built on steep granite cliffs on the coast of Portugal, is the inspiration for the language presented and rearranged by the author for poetic effect. The output appears as a block of text of capitalized letters, and as such it has a strong visual quality. Barbosa’s program, while certainly cyclical (…) enables 40,320 permutations. (…) The addition of prepositions adds three times as many configurations and prevents the poem from reflecting a slot apparatus.” (2007: 40). “(…) the overall effect that is achieved by Barbosa’s program is that endless different phrases are built that transmit different dimensions of the same sentiment.” (41) Funkhouser considers that there is a “sense of the passage of time (…) [and] other cultural aspects of the city and its people may be read into the lines, some of which nearly defy interpretation.” (41)

Simanowski considers that Barbosa “deconstruct[s] its form by running it through his text generator. (…) The outcome is predictably absurd and humorous, and portrays wild deviations from the mundane occurrences found in the original. Applying the chance procedures of a text generator to this poem inevitably subverts the status quo of his subject. It spices up the boring life of the city man by turning the depressing poem into seasoned surrealist lines. The form of the computer-generated text responds to the chosen content of the database. The result seems to declare that there is no other chance than accepting the chance. (…) Although the content of the outcome is owned by the machine, the meaning belongs to the human behind it (…)” (2011: 102-103).

In this second volume of Cybernetic Literature, which is devoted to fiction, Barbosa publishes a narrative synthesizer, addressing the concept of “matrix-text” as a transformable grid by the computer program. Being aware that in the fictional field there is a concern for semantic and narrative coherence, the author publishes the most interesting outputs of the variants of the series “Era Uma Vez...” [Once Upon a Time...], “Fábulas” [Fables], “Histórias dum Baralho de Cartas” [Stories of a Deck of Cards] and, finally, “História dum Homem Citadino” [Cityman Story], whose literary reception has been more explored, e.g. Christopher Funkhouser (2007) and Roberto Simanowski (2011), who curiously read it as a poem.

[Source: Álvaro Seiça, "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection" (2015)]

Pedro Barbosa’s pioneering work introduced computer-generated literature (CGL) in Portugal in 1975. Having worked with Abraham A. Moles at the University of Strasbourg, Barbosa published three theoretical-practical volumes of his programming experiences with the FORTRAN and BASIC languages. These volumes deal with combinatorics and randomness, developing algorithms able to ally computing and literary production, bearing in mind a perspective of computational text theory.
According to the author, A Literatura Cibernética 1: Autopoemas Gerados por Computador [Cybernetic Literature 1: Computer-Generated Autopoems] is an “esboço de uma teoria, toda uma prática, dois métodos e dois programas, que irão facultar a qualquer leitor, interessado e imaginoso, a confecção de poemas automáticos à razão de 5200 versos por hora: no espaço intraorgânico de qualquer computador!” [outline of a theory, an entire practice, two methods and two programs, which will provide any interested and imaginative reader with the possibility of making automatic poems at the rate of 5200 verses per hour: in the intraorganic space of any computer!] (1977: 8) These “auto-texts,” or “computer-generated autopoems,” hitherto open up a new field of literary theory in the Portuguese context – the direct junction of literature and computation, of writer and programmer. Barbosa’s autopoems were programmed in FORTRAN, ALGOL and NEAT during 1975-76 (Permuta program, Iserve subprogram, and Texal program, Aletor subprogram), using an Elliot/NCR 4130 (a machine introduced in the 1960s in the UK), in collaboration with Azevedo Machado, engineer at the Laboratório de Cálculo Automático [Laboratory of Automatic Calculus] (LACA), at the Faculty of Sciences from the University of Porto.

[Source: Álvaro Seiça, "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection" (2015)]

2002 is a collaboratively-authored narrative palindrome, exactly 2002 words in length. 2002 was first published in a limited edition of 202 inscribed copies on New Years Day, 2002. On February 20th, 2002 (20-02-2002) 2002 was published on the Web. On November 11, 2002 (11-11-2002) 2002 was published as an illustrated book.A palindrome is a text in which the sequence of letters and numbers is the same forwards and backwards. Spaces, punctuation, and line breaks are used freely. In 2002, the authors took the liberty of assuming an accented e (é) is the same letter as e, and that an i with an umlaut (ï) is the same as an i. Other than that it is perfect.The palindrome was written by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie with the assistance of an Eraware computer program named Deep Speed. Design of the HTML version and the book were done by Ingrid Ankerson. Illustrations were provided by Shelley Jackson. The creators of the book have had the historically rare privilege of experiencing two palindromic years: 1991 and 2002. No generation of people has lived through two palindromic years since 1001, and none will again until 2112.

(Source: Author's description on the project site)

An engineer by training, Erthos Albino de Souza applied conceptual or physical mathematical models to the construction or deconstruction of texts. The graphic poem Le Tombeau de Mallarmé is a good demonstration of this process. He created a program for distributing temperatures and applied them to a heated fluid that runs through the interior of a tube. This program allowed a different design to be obtained based on the different temperatures of the fluids in the various sections of the tube. But since the engineer-poet coded his graphic system in such a way that each temperature scale corresponds to one of the letters of Mallarmé’s name, the result is that the letters are spatially arranged and form configurations that are vaguely reminiscent of Mallarmé’s “tomb.” By heating the fluid at different temperatures, he achieved different graphic schemes and thus different configurations of Mallarmé’s name, where the graphic sequence composes the poem.

(Source: Itaú Cultural. English translation: Luciana Gattass)

The performance of Flog (a combination of flux and blog), by Luc Dall’Armellina, emphasizes our alienation due to the speed of televisual or RSS news flux.

(Source: Serge Bouchardon, "Digital Literature in France")