generative narrative

Operatus is a live performance of a generative narrative-poetic system distributed between screens, interactive objects and augmented reality overlays. The work engages a range of historical and contemporary contexts of observation and forensic analysis including early modern surgical theaters, the deductive logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Stud File, a methodical archive of personal evidence documenting the sexual exploits of Samuel Steward, a 20th century tattoo artist, pornographer, and friend of Gertrude Stein. (source: http://chercherletexte.org/en/performance/opera-tus/)

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.

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.

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)

The generative hyperfiction its name was Penelope is a collection of memories in which a woman photographer recollects the details of her life.Like a photos in a photo album, each lexia represents a picture from the narrator's memory, so that the work is the equivalent of a pack of small paintings or photographs that the computer continuously shuffles. The reader sees things as she sees them and observes her memories come and go in a natural, yet nonsequential manner that creates a constantly changing order -- like the weaving and reweaving of Penelopeia's web.Begun in 1988, the work was exhibited in a computer-mediated artists book version at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California in 1989. It has been re-created through the years. Four versions have been identified by Dene Grigar, in Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media: Version 1.0: "The exhibition version." Created in 1989 with Malloy's own generative hypertext authoring system, Narrabase II, in BASIC on a 3.5-inch floppy diskVersion 2.0: "The Narrabase Press version." Published in 1990, this version is an extensive revision of the 1989 version and features a new cover and the edited text; it was released on a 5.25-inch floppy disk, self-published via Narrabase Press, and distributed by Art Com Software. She reports that she may have produced copies on 3.5-inch floppy disks for later requestsVersion 3.0: "The Eastgate version." This version is a retooling of Version 2.0 by Mark Bernstein from the original BASIC program into the Storyspace aestheticVersion 3.1: Published on 3.5-inch floppy disk for both Mac and PC formats by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1993 but copyrighted in 1992Version 3.2: Published on CD-ROM in 1998 with no changes from the original. This version does not appear on the Eastgate Systems, Inc. websiteVersion 4.0: "The Scholar's version." Created under the auspices of the Critical Code Studies Working Group 2016 from Jan 18 to Feb 14, 2016 as a DOSBox emulation of Version 3.0 and includes uses the new text and translations of the Odyssey by the authorA special note: An iPad version has been in development since 2012 by Eastgate Systems, Inc. It was designed with the same aesthetic as Version 3.0 but used the affordance of mobile touch technology for its functionality. To date, it has not been completed. its name was Penelope was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review,  Washington Post Book World, The Bay Guardian, Postmodern Culture, the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, American Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, among others.  It was exhibited at the 2012 MLA Convention, The Electronic Literature Organization Conference, the University of Nevada, Reno, The Space, Boston, MA, and the Richmond Art Center, and, among many other collections,  is included in the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archive (video of reading) and the NYC Museum of Modern Art's special collections. (1990 Narrabase Press edition)