Print publication

Poetry in Polish created by Amazon Mechanical Turks (AMT). 

“Heating Season” by Piotr Marecki is an analogue conceptual book, written by the city of Krakow. The texts are produced by the new citizens (I year university students), as well as people whose families have been living here for generations and the avant garde artists. The book „Heating Season” is also based on the large bases collected among the citizens of Krakow. The respective parts of the book have been created by using different writing techniques, also those employing the collective narrator. Among them are: surveys conducted among randomly chosen landline phone users, records from the so-called “smogwatching” sessions, surprise quiz in the university class, smog investigation made in the social media and the weather transcripts.

Robbo. Walkthrough is a hybrid piece in a form of text generator, as well as an analogue book. The text itself is generated on the 8-bit Atari computer, and has premiered as a wild demo on the demoscene party Silly Venture 2k17 in Gdańsk. The piece has been programmed in Pascal by Wojciech Bociański (known in the Atari scene as Bocianu) with soundtrack by Lisu (created in Raster Music Tracker.) The concept and text has been created by Piotr Marecki.

The first part of the title is an allusion to the game Robbo (1989,) a cult Polish production for the 8-bit Atari, while the second part references walkthrough, i.e. the text providing clues of how to finish a game, a popular genre in the digital media fiel,. However, Robbo is a literary (or rather: nonsensical) rendition of a walkthrough. The work is 56 minutes long, and constitutes an attempt to create digital ambient literature.

The analogue book itself has also been created in a rather unusual way. The text generated on the 8-bit Atari computer has been transcribed on the editor, and then assembled using Calamus, a program created in 1987 for use in the Atari ST/TT work environment. All of the elements of the work – text, music, code, composition, as well as graphics – have been created by the Atari enthusiasts, premiered on the Atari-themed party and are being distributed among the retro computers enthusiasts.

While Robbo generator can be regarded simply as an entertainment or a joke, its authors believe that it also describes how the short-lived technologies are often replaced by so-called killer apps. An answer for this kind of technological acceleration is the practice of returning to the discarded and dead media or technologies (in this case the Atari computer) which can provide a critical commentary to this acceleration, at the same time preserving the cultural content in the excess-based contemporaneity, its circulation and repractice.

(Source: Author's Description)

2×6 consists of short “stanzories”—stanzas that are also stories, each one relating an encounter between two people. Appearing in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Polish, the stanzories are generated by a similar underlying process, even as they do not correspond to one another the way a translation typically does to a source text. These sixfold verses are generated by six short computer programs, the code of which is also presented in full. These simple programs can endlessly churn out combinatorial lines that challenge to reader to determine to whom “she” and “he,” and “him” and “her,” refer, as well as which is the more powerful one, which the underdog. Generating 2×6 is a simple process, and readers are invited to study the programs and even modify them to make new sorts of text generators. Reading the output can be much more difficult, as the text that is produced crosses syntax with power relations and gender stereotypes, multiplying those complexities across six languages.

Richard Holeton’s gleefully, not to say Gaudi-ly, illustrated glidepath through the remnants of language that trail beyond the (littoral, literal) “postmodern” like the tail of a forlorn freeform comix comet, manage—as the Oulipo poet Michelle Grangaud might have said in her own Formes de l’anagramme à faire plusieurs fois des Temps rondo, in an eschatological imagetext mashup of demon storm troops, pert rodents, and skidrow resident poets, porn purveyors, and sperm donors via Flickr borrowings, Wiki burrowings, and whole tons of homebrew images bluesily rendered ala twerk.

(Source: Vassar Review introduction)

Autopia is a simple text generator that presents language as if it were endless traffic. The headline-style sentences that are produced are made entirely of the names of cars — no other lexemes are used. While the Web version uses a JavaScript port of espeak to do text-to-speech synthesis, it is not necessary to present the work in a gallery setting with sound.

Autopia is available as free software. It is also published in print form, as a book, by Troll Thread, a New York press. It has been exhibited in galleries.

The Truelist is a book-length poem generated by a one-page, stand-alone computer program. Based around compound words, some more conventional, some quite unusual, the poem invites the reader to imagine moving through a strange landscape that seems to arise from the English language itself. The unusual compounds are open to being understood differently by each reader, given that person’s cultural and individual background.

The core text that Nick Montfort wrote is the generating computer program. It defines the sets of words that combine, the way some lines are extended with additional language, the stanza form, and the order of these words and the lines in which they appear. The program is included on the last page. Anyone who wishes is free to study it, modify it to see what happens, and make use of it in their own work.

The Truelist is part of the series Using Electricity. A complete studio recording of the book by Montfort is available for free (either for online listening or download) thanks to PennSound.

"J.R. Carpenter draws language through the icy passage of code's style" Nick Montfort

An Ocean of Static transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into an astonishing sea of fresh new text. From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships.

In this long-awaited poetry debut by award-winning digital writer and artist J.R. Carpenter, cartographic and maritime vernaculars inflected with the syntax and grammar of ships logs and code languages splinter and pulse across the page. Haunting, politically charged and formally innovative, An Ocean of Static presents an ever-shifting array of variables. Amid global currents of melting sea ice and changing ocean currents Carpenter charts the elusive passages of women and of animals, of indigenous people and of migrants, of strange noises and of phantom islands.

This book is made of other books. The texts in this book are composed of facts, fictions, fragments, and codes collected from accounts of voyages undertaken over the past 2,340 years or so, into the North Atlantic, in search of the Northwest Passage, and beyond, into territories purely imaginary. The texts in this book are intended to be read on the page and to serve as scripts for the live performance of a body of web-based works. These texts retain traces of the syntax and grammar of code languages.