computer-generated literature

Racter poses virtually no threat to human authors, nor does any other algorithmic author currently available. The question is hence not one of replacement, but of augmentation, of new responsibilities for the human author in light of the algorithmic one. When Juhl writes that computer-generated output lacks the intentionality of a text with a human author, he falls into a similar trap as Bök: both scholars fail to recognise the fundamentally human basis of algorithmic authorship. Human intention hasn’t disappeared, but is merely manifest in a new way. Indeed, The Policeman’s Beard’s apparent randomness is a rhetorical choice, and Racter’s nonsensical output pushes the limits of creativity by means of an intentional goal to be incomprehensible.

In this paper, I regard generative literature as a model-object from the perspective of Mahr and Erdbeer’s application of model theory in order to give insight into the functioning of generative literature as well as further specify the new research focus of literary model theory (Erdbeer 2014). Through the modelling practice of literature generators, own preconceptions of what literature is (supposed to be), are projected. In its algorithmic writing, generative literature mimics intention-typical literature while at the same time destabilizing its very foundations. Through multiple short case study analyses, I outline (1) how generative literature self-reflexive in the sense that it is a model of literature, (2) how literary models change due to practices in generative literature and (3) how temporality is modelled in generative literature.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

This paper interrogates the ‘topic’ of islands displaced from print books into digital literary spaces through a discussion of a web-based work of digital literature ...and by islands I mean paragraphs (Carpenter 2013) http://luckysoap.com/andbyislands/ In this work a reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by a background image of graph paper. Whereas horizontally lined loose leaf or foolscap offers a guide for linear hand writing, horizontally and vertically lined graph paper offers a guide for locating positions, or intersections, along orthogonal axes such as latitude and longitude, and time and distance. In this graphic space the horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse, or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean computer-generated paragraphs. JavaScript continuously recomposes these fluid texts, calling upon variable strings containing words and fragments of phrases collected from a vast literary corpus of books about islands – Deleuze’s Desert Islands, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Bishop’s Crusoe in England, Coetzee’s Foe, Ballard’s Concrete Island, Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries, Darwin’s Voyages of the Beagle, and many other lesser-known sources. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of ‘topical islands’ (Díaz), places only possible in literature. Called as statement-events into digital processes, fragments of print texts are reconstituted as events occurring in a digital present which is also a break from the present. A new regime of signification emerges, in which authorship is distributed and text is ‘eventilized’ (Hayles). Situated at the interface between an incoherent aesthetics, one which tends to unravel neat masses, including well-known works of print literature; and an incoherent politics, one which tends to dissolve existing institutional bonds, including bonds of authorship and of place; Galloway terms this regime of signification the ‘dirty regime of truth’.

In support of their belief that the truest test of a methodology is to apply it to a new set of questions/practices, Barbara Bridger and J.R. Carpenter embark on a conversation about Carpenter’s computer-­generated dialogue: TRAINS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]. As they attempt to find language appropriate to an extended notion of dramaturgy capable of both contributing to and critiquing a digital literary practice, their calls and responses to one another come to perform the form and content of the dialogue in question. The resulting discussion provides an example of putting performance writing methodology into practice.