Print publication

“Erica T. Carter: The Collected Works," a haphazard vault installation of poetry generated under the pen name Erica T. Carter by Jim Carpenter's Electronic Text Composition (ETC) project.

The installation features around 18,000 pages of poetry generated by three automated poetry stations. A selection of around 2,500 pages has been randomly arranged about the vault floor and is downloadable, link attached to this entry.

Source: Slought Foundation

Whisper Wire is an unheimlich poem, a code medium sending and receiving un-homed messages, verse fragments, strange sounds, disembodied voices, ghost whispers, distant wails and other intercepted, intuited or merely imagined attempts to communicate across vast distances through copper wires, telegraph cables, transistor radios and other haunted media. The source code of Whisper Wire is based on Nick Montfort’s elegant javascript poetry generator, Taroko Gorge, and the content is drawn from the early history of electromagnetic telecommunication technologies.

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR is a short fiction by J. R. Carpenter about her adventures with Montreal-based artist Ingrid Bachmann's hermit crab Pookie during the month June of 2009. Pookie's website is: http://digitalhermit.ca/ Pookie is also known as Pookie 14.Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR is generated by a Python script adapted (with permission) from a 1k story generator written by Nick Montfort. In July 2009, in a blog post, Nick Montfort wrote: "J. R. Carpenter, author of Words the Dog Knows, Entre Ville, The Cape, and other fine works of e-lit, print, and xerography, has delightfully re-purposed one of my 1k story generators to have it tell stories involving her and a hermit crab named Pookie. The program has grown to about 2k, but it uses the same simple (and surprisingly effective) method as my first generator does: It simply removes all but 5-9 sentences from a sequence, eliding some of what's been written. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder who the hermit is."In July 2009, NYC-based artist/programmer Ravi Rajakumar ported the Python script into Javascript to create a web browser friendly version of the Chronicles of Pookie & JR. http://luckysoap.com/pookieandjr/In December 2010, Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR and three other generators adapted from scripts by Nick Montfort appeared in a print book called GENERATION[S] published by Vienna-based TRAUMAWIEN.In November 2011, Laura Borràs Castanyer translated Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR into Spanish and Catalan.

A collection of four one kilobyte games for the Atari Video Computer System, one for each season, about the experience of observing things. Neither action nor strategy, each game requires a different kind of sedate observation and methodical input. Accompanying the game are essays about the commonalities between videogames and poetry and 1,024 machined haiku—poetry generated by computer—8 bits worth for each season. (Source: Open Texture catalog description)

"Imaginary Landscape 4.1 (betamix)" is an attempt to think what Greek post-print fiction might look like. Its main narrative is made up of two narrative strands;  a metanarrative commenting on the process of the composition of the text itself along with some fragments of computer code and other discourse complete the text. "Imaginary Landscape 4.1 (betamix)" is an attempt to meditate on the relationship of Greek language to programming code. 

VE3 is a re-imagining of a book originally published in the 1960s. The book is the first ever “book in a box”, called Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta. When we say book in a box we mean: quite literally a book that comes in a box with loose pages. Each page has a self-contained narrative, leaving it to the reader to decide the order they read the book, and how much or how little of the book they want to read before they begin again. In so many ways, Composition No.1 was published ahead of its time: the book raises all the questions we ask ourselves today about user-centric, non-linear screen driven ways of reading.With this in mind, we approached Tom Uglow of Creative Labs Google and Youtube to write an introduction for the book. This re-imagined edition also includes several of Salvador Plascencia’s (author of The People of Paper) drawings, looking at all the different components that make up a “typical” book. The book is designed by Universal Everything, UK-based design studio known for their interactive screen-based work.

(Source: Publisher's description)

"The reader is requested to shuffle these pages like a deck of cards; to cut, if he likes, with his left hand, as at a fortuneteller’s. The order the pages then assume will orient X’s fate.For the time and order of events control a man’s life more than the nature of such events. Certainly there is a framework which history imposes: the presence of a man in the resistance, his transfer to the Army of Occupation in Germany, relate to a specific period. Similarly, the events that marked his childhood cannot be presented in the same way as those which he experienced as an adult.Nor is it a matter of indifference to know if he met his mistress Dagmar before or after his marriage; if he took advantage of Helga at the time of her adolescence or her maturity; if the theft he has committed occurred under cover of the resistance or in less troubles times; if the automobile accident in which he has been hurt is unrelated to the theft — or the rape — or if it occurred during his getaway.Whether the story ends well or badly depends on the concatenation of circumstances. A life if composed of many elements. But the number of possible compositions is infinite."

(Source: Description of the work printed inside box cover of 1963 Simon & Schuster English translation)

GENERATION[S] expands upon a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from two 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort, and incorporates GORGE, a never-ending tract spewing verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire, a hack of Montfort’s elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge. There was only one rule in creating GENERATION[S]: No new texts. All the texts in this book were previously published in some way. The texts the generators produce are intertwined with the generators’ source code, and these two types of texts are in turn interrupted by excerpts from the meta narrative that went into their creation. Most of the sentences in the fiction generators started off as Tweets, which were then pulled into Facebook. Some led to comments that led to responses that led to new texts. All these stages of intermediation are represented in the print book iteration of GENERATION[S]. 

(Source: Author's website)