Print publication

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a computer-generated dialogue, a literary narrative of generations of transatlantic migration, a performance in the form of a conversation, an encoded discourse propagating across, beyond, and through long-distance communications networks. One JavaScript file sits in one directory on one server attached to a vast network of hubs, routers, switches, and submarine cables through which this one file may be accessed many times from many places by many devices. The mission of this JavaScript is to generate another sort of script. The call “function produce_stories()” produces a response in the browser, a dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference; or: Strophe, Antistrophe, and Chorus; or Here, There, and Somewhere in Between.

Poem with computer interventions.

Mac Low created Virginia Woolf Poems using a “diastic” method he developed in 1963, whereby a phrase (or even a word) from a text is chosen, then words in a source text that share the same verbal or letter patterns are extracted and used to create new poetic work. Later, Hartman transformed Mac Low’s arbitrary method, which itself was algorithmic and did not involve random elements, into a computer program named DIASTEXT. The program was capable of rapidly performing the artist’s deterministic tasks once an input text and “seed” phrase are chosen; Mac Low was pleased with the program, and used it to compose many poems and books. Using a combination of the TRAVESTY and DIASTEXT programs, Hugh Kenner and Hartman assembled a book of poems called Sentences (1995) in which source text is a nineteenth-century grammar book that was run through TRAVESTY “a number of times” then underwent DIASTEXT’s “spelling through” process. Each piece begins with a two hundred and fifty-word text generated by TRAVESTY, followed by DIASTEXT’s manipulation of that text into poetry.

(Source: Chris Funkhouser, "Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry")

A gorge is a steep-sided canyon, a passage, a gullet. To gorge is to stuff with food, to devour greedily. Gorge is a poetry generator, a never-ending tract spewing verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire.The source code for Gorge is a hack of Montfort’s elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge.

First published in 1999 in an edition of 300 perfectbound copies and 26 spiralbound copies lettered A-Z and signed, Pillage Laud is a lost cult item that now returns to print. As the 1999 edition announced, Pillage Laud selects from pages of computer-generated sentences to produce lesbian sex poems (cauterizations, vocabularies, cantigas, topiary and prose) by pulling through certain found vocabularies, relying on context: boy plug vagina library fate tool doctrine bath discipline belt beds pioneer book ambition finger fist flow. It used MacProse, a freeware designed by American poet and jazz musician Charles O. Hartman as a generator of random sentences based on syntax and lexicon instructions internal to the program; the program worked on Apple systems prior to OSX and is now in the dustbins of computer history. In 1999, the news was shocking: Moure’s poems are written by a computer. In 2011, now that everyone is a computer, the book can be read anew.

(Source: Publisher's website)

Book of print poetry that includes print versions of the e-poems slippingglimpse and The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot along with many other poems.

A vault installation featuring Jim Carpenter's Electronic Text Composition (ETC). The installation includes automated as well as self-service poetry stations and wall panels of code.

Information on the exhibition "Public Override Void," an overview of the project with examples of the code, and an audio recording of 49 poems generated by the poetry engine and edited by Jim Carpenter, has been made availabe online: http://slought.org/content/11207/ A recording of the public conversation between Bob Perelman, Nick Montfort, and Jean-Michel Rabaté is available: http://slought.org/content/11199/

A series of poems written in honor of Fluxus artist, poet, printer, and musician, Dick Higgins (1938-1998) on the occasion of his death. Each poem is a mesostic built around the letters "DICK HIGGINS" using words extracted from Higgins' "foew&ombwhnw."  An extremely limited release, 50 copies, Mesostics for Dick Higgins was printed under the Xerox Sutra Editions imprint and distributed at Higgins' funeral.  

The Accidental Artist was an ongoing exhibition in Second Life at Odyssey, June 2008 - January 2009, by Alan Sondheim, with help from Sugar Seville, Azure Carter, Gary Nanes, Sandy Baldwin, and Frances van Scoy at the Virtual Environments Laboratory, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia. The show changed daily and the gave me an opportunity to study the phenomenology of a virtual world in relation to avatar-human objectivity. The following texts were written during the generation of the show.