generative literature

I consider the role of the source code of generative literature in the process of meaning making. The significance of code in the cultural meaning of generative works means the source code becomes a key factor to explore in literary studies. I use Critical Code Studies (Marino) which rejects the practice of only analyzing the output of electronic literature and instead proposes to look at code from a humanities perspective as an integral part of coded literature. To specify this emerging field specifically for generative literature, I propose a distinction between three levels on which the code is involved in the meaning-making process of generative literature: the linguistic level, the literary level. and the cultural level. On the linguistic level, I draw from structuralism, using Jakobson's notions of selection and combination as outlined in "Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances". Generative literature shows the meaning of language explicitly via selection and combination of linguistic units, and adds to this process a literary meaning employing the process of chiasm and overwriting. To do justice to the complexity of the materiality of coded literature on a literary level, I link this to Brillenburg et al's reference to Lyotard's notion of chiasm as excess of meaning and Dworkin's notion of neglected perspectives. Moreover, the source code is positioned as a trope for objectivity, as it does not embody the same cultural biases as one expects from intention-typical research. On a cultural level, I argue that source code is positioned as a trope of objectivity, as the randomness of generation supposes an emptiness of cultural bias.

(author abstract)

I consider the role of the source code of generative literature in the process of meaning making. The significance of code in the cultural meaning of generative works means the source code becomes a key factor to explore in literary studies. I use Critical Code Studies (Marino) which rejects the practice of only analyzing the output of electronic literature and instead proposes to look at code from a humanities perspective as an integral part of coded literature. To specify this emerging field specifically for generative literature, I propose a distinction between three levels on which the code is involved in the meaning-making process of generative literature: the linguistic level, the literary level. and the cultural level. On the linguistic level, I draw from structuralism, using Jakobson's notions of selection and combination as outlined in "Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances". Generative literature shows the meaning of language explicitly via selection and combination of linguistic units, and adds to this process a literary meaning employing the process of chiasm and overwriting. To do justice to the complexity of the materiality of coded literature on a literary level, I link this to Brillenburg et al's reference to Lyotard's notion of chiasm as excess of meaning and Dworkin's notion of neglected perspectives. Moreover, the source code is positioned as a trope for objectivity, as it does not embody the same cultural biases as one expects from intention-typical research. On a cultural level, I argue that source code is positioned as a trope of objectivity, as the randomness of generation supposes an emptiness of cultural bias.

(author abstract)

In 2006 Tommaso Lisa stated that since Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark I, notmuch has been done much to elaborate creative synergies between poetry andcomputer in Italy. In fact, the absence of Italy - homeland of Calvino, Marinettiand Toti - from major anthologies, collections, and exhibitions in the field of e-litconfirms such a bitter statement. But it is still the case? What is the current stateof Italian electronic literature? What should be the reasons for its absence on theinternational scene? What actions are being made and what still could be madeto spread electronic literature in Italy?

The paper is primarily articulated according to those questions, on which it intends to introduce a critical thought. To start, an attempt will be made to give an overview of Italian electronic literature, chiefly focusing on generative experiments. After a brief introduction on the precursors of generative dynamics, the analysis will focalize on the first example of Italian electronic literature: the aforementioned poetic combinatorial experiment made by Balestrini in 1961 using an IBM 7070 calculator. The work will be placed in the international and national context, in order to identify its affinities with coeval experiments – from Love Letters by Christopher Strachey (1952) to Autopoeme by Gerhard Stickel (1966) - as well as its role within the cultural milieu of the Sixties in Italy. A close look on the development of the Italian poetry generators which is the most vivid and dynamic field of artistic research in Italy nowadays, will be of help to understand the importance of Balestrini’s legacy. The analysis will then concentrate on some examples of multimedia generative poems up to the experiments conducted in the fields of chatbots and storytelling which exploits the capabilities of AI. Finally, an attempt will be made to extend the spectrum to generative art projects more closely related towards visual and sound aspect, as well as to generative design, projects that hybridize gaming and 3D technology, or explore the new frontiers of Cognitive Storytelling.

The paper aims primarily to provide room for further comparative studies, secondly to investigate untold archeologies between electronic literature and other expressive and material practices (Visual Poetry, Design, Marketing) and thirdly to reflect on the potential - but also the difficulties - that a social and cultural practice such as electronic literature may face in contexts like the Italian one.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

As the genre is still unknown to many in the Netherlands, this article serves as an introduction to computer-generated poetry in the Dutch-language field of literary studies. Via an analysis of the canonical Taroko Gorge (Montfort) and its remixes, the article considers how three characteristics of generative poetry - namely temporality, overwriting, and remixing - play with the idea of authorship.

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 is a comparative reading of two works of generative literature: Scott Rettberg's Frequency Poetry Generator and J.R. Carpenter's Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR from a structuralist perspective.
Viktor Shklovsky described the effect of literature in his 1988 article "Art as Technique", in which he describes the difference between practical and poetic language. The essence of poetic text, according to Shklovsky, is its process of "defamiliarization": The reader will see his/her familiar world in a different light due to poetic rather that practical descriptions. In generative poetry, however, the defamiliarizing effect does not stop there. Not only does one see the world differently, but the way one sees poetry itself is defamiliarized. This defamiliarizing effect does not mean that there are no rules. The formal elements of the text guide the reader, as Culler describes in his article "Literary Competence".
The aim of my paper is dual. First of all, I use Shklovky's author- and text-focused approach combined with Culler's reader-focused approach to gain insight into how generative texts build upon the readers' 'literary competence', their familiarity with 'conventional' literature, in order to understand the defamiliarizing effect of generative literature. Second, I argue that my specific analysis of generative poetry in turn gives insight in what readers expect from a text, thus helping to define the often implicit literary competence readers possess.
The output of Frequency Poetry Generator shows poems that are explicitly recognizable as poetry, thus guiding the readers' interpretation. Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR on the other hand, situates the full text as a chronicle, implying the passing of time, and the individual texts as "excerpts", implying there might be more to the story that is not included in these excerpts, making the text into a serial narrative.
I analyze both code as well as output of these works in my analysis, utilizing Marino's framework of Critical Code Studies. The analysis of code is an integral part of the understanding of the work as it positions how the work is portrayed building on different conventional genres as well as the knowledge that one is reading a generative work of literature. Even if the reader chooses not to look at the source code, it is the potential of all possible texts that defines how the text is read as a work within the genre of generative literature. The code shows this structure, all sentences together make the potential of all different texts explicit.
A significant characteristic of generative literature is the fact that it will be a different text each reading. As I cannot analyze every single output, I invite readers of my paper, which is originally written in Scalar, to submit a reader experience of the output based on the structuralist method that I outline. This way, I offer a new type of criticism, which uses the affordances of the born digital paper to crowd source reading experiences that can be combined to specify the theory of "literary competence" further.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

In Fall 2014 I taught a “special” version of my “Writing Electronic Literature” course. Throughout this class my students received an overview of established and emerging forms of Electronic Literature including hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive works, and digital poetry. Students read, analyzed, and composed a variety of emerging genres of Electronic Literature. Yet what was unique to this particular iteration of my E-Lit class was that my students contributed to a transmodal generative novel to be published in late 2015 by the academic journal Hybrid Pedagogy. The idea of a generative novel is one that can be traced to the OuliPo group (Ouvroir delittérature potentielle) in France. According to the OuliPo website, the generative writer is “un rat qui construit lui-même le labyrinthe dont il se propose de sortir” (trans. “a rat who builds the maze he wishes to escape”). In this understanding of art and literature, the idea of creation, especially literary creation, is one of wordplay and gameplay. Therefore, the generative novel is, in itself, a game – one of interplay between people, cultures, and institutions. It is an open-ended enterprise that in many ways ensures new and unexpected results. In order to create a work of generative literature, there must be a creative constraint (limitation), which forces the writer to direct writing toward a particular purpose.

The Generative Literature Project is a crowdsourced gamefied digital novel about a murder. Nine writing professors and their students – from the US, The Marshall Islands, and Puerto Rico – completed a series of digitized artifacts about nine “distinguished alumni” of the fictional “Theopolis College”, a highly competitive Liberal Arts College that exists in the leafy suburb of the fictional town of Theopolis. In the artifacts created by my students can be found the clues and red-herrings, motives and alibis of the suspects in the murder of the Theopolis College president.

This paper/presentation will highlight our experimentation with this crowdsourced project as I consider some of the pedagogic affordances of digital writing within a networked and computational environment. As my students developed their fictional work for The Generative Literature Project, I watched how their evolving new sense of reading and writing (in a 21st century digitized context) shaped their own discovery of new ways to learn. What role might Electronic Literature play in transforming pedagogic practices for both reading and writing? In what ways does a networked learning context transform reading and writing methodology?

My discussion will highlight the work of my class’s contribution, offering a birds-eye view of the open ended electronic literary experiment. My presentation will include a further description of the project, including phases of development and forms of collaboration (i.e. the mechanics) and a schema of the digital writing spaces generated thus far (i.e. the infrastructure). Analysis of the project will include reflection on the element of creative play as an inherent entry point in the generative literature undertaking. It will also account for the ways in which community develops around a collaborative fictional enterprise. Other topics addressed include networked character development, social media as a space of fictional creation, pedagogical approaches & challenges, and examples of student generated character “artifacts”.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Stephanie Strickland's and Nick Montfort's See and Spar Between is in many respects a translational challenge that in some languages might seem an impossible task. Polish, our target language, imposes some serious constraints: one- syllable words become disyllabic or multisyllabic; kennings have different morphological, lexical and grammatical arrangement, and most of the generative rhetoric of the original (like anaphors) must take into consideration the grammatical gender of Polish words. As a result, the javascript code, instructions that accompany the javascript file, and arrays of words that this poetry generator draws from, need to be expanded and rewritten. Moreover, in several crucial points of this rule-driven work, natural language forces us to modify the code. In translating Sea and Spar Between, the process of negotiation between the source language and the target language involves more factors than in the case of traditional translation. Strickland and Montfort read Dickinson and Melville and parse their readings into a computer program (in itself a translation, or port, from Python to javascript) which combines them in almost countless ways. This collision of cultures, languages and tools becomes amplified if one wants to transpose it into a different language. This transposition involves the original authors of Sea and Spar Between, the four original translators of Dickinson and Melville into Polish, and us, turning into a multilayered translational challenge, something we propose to call a distributed translation. While testing the language and the potential of poetry translation in the digital age, the experiment – we hope – has produced some fascinating and thought-provoking poetry.