generative text

This paper reflects on Electronic Literature projects I created between 2017 and 2020 through interrogating how each project collaborates with an increasingly complex non-human component. Riffing off of Donna Haraway's concept of "significant otherness" and making kin, I speculate on the differences in the significance of the otherness that is engaged with in projects using methods based on combinatorics/chance, statistical models, and vector semantics (contemporary neural-network based language models like GPT-2). While recognizing that each approach involves a reduction in human agency, this reflective paper focuses on the increasing complexity to which this agency is relinquished and how to deal with presenting this relationship between human and non-human actors. Culminating in a series of projects using OpenAI's GPT-2, the need for a self-reflexive "transformative reading interface" is introduced as a concrete instantiation of Katherine Hayles' concept of a "technotext." A transformative reading interface links a corpus of text to text generated by a language model based on that corpus. Such an interface serves to provide a source of noisy creativity for writing and a way to explore the materiality of contemporary language models for reading, while interrogating and respecting the posthuman nature of these artifacts.

Although the most recent curricular documents issued by the Portuguese Ministry of Education (ME, 2017; ME, 2018) recommend students to read multimodal texts, there is still a print-based culture among Portuguese schools and among language and literature teachers. As part of the project “Inanimate Alice: Translating Electronic Literature for an Educational Context”, held at the Centre for Portuguese Literature – University of Coimbra, we have already conducted some experiments with digital narrative in Portugal (Machado et alii, 2018), which we hope to be extended by the inclusion of Alice Inanimada (the Portuguese version of Inanimate Alice) in the National Reading Plan in 2018, as Ana Maria Machado, the project coordinator, presented at the ELO Conference 2018. However, we do not have available data concerning teaching digital poetry to children and teenagers in our country, which led me to include Cantiga in the corpus for the empirical research I am conducting for my doctoral thesis in Materialities of Literature. Cantiga, a combinatory poem (https://www.telepoesis.net/cantiga/) by Rui Torres (2012), retrieves the homonym poem by Salette Tavares (1967), in which the experimental poet recreated the structure, the rhythm, the vocabulary and the ambiance of Galician-Portuguese medieval songs, particularly the ones from the “cantigas de amigo” genre (characterized by a feminine voice). It is the first, a “prototype” (Torres, 2012), of a set of poems to be created in which contemporary poets dialogue with medieval songs. The textual engine created by Rui Torres operates lexical permutations that lead to semantic variations in a text that presents itself to the reader in a digital screen parchment, more specifically in a fac-simile folio from the Cancioneiro da Ajuda. Readers are thus confronted with the intersection of media, forms and languages from both medieval and contemporary times, as well as with the different voices that emerge from the electronic poem. As Portela states (2012: 49-50), “Rui Torres’ generative text is a text upon another text which was already a text upon another text, showcasing citation and iteration as exponential functions in the production of literary meaning.” Moreover, the poem repeats itself in a mirror-like position and symmetrical relation, written, on the left side, using a gothic font, and, on the right, on a font evoking graffiti art. Therefore, past and present reflect one another in a mirror game, progressively changing through the combinatory movement. Although Rui Torres’ poetic engine contains lexical items collected exclusively from the Galician Portuguese medieval songbooks corpus, it also allows the reader to introduce new words and to produce new meaning(s). Readers (now writers) can crystallize their own poems, publishing them on the Poemário blog (https://telepoesis.net/poemario/). In this paper I intend to show how 10th graders from Portuguese schools read Cantiga and how they reacted to reading digital poetry, a first-time experience for all of them, by analysing the answers they gave on a questionnaire created for evaluating the reception of the digital poem. By re-membering and (re-)re-creating “cantigas de amigo”, Rui Torres defies readers not only to unveil all those voices that cross and emerge from this “shapeshifting text” (Côrtes Maduro: 2018), but also to join their own to the stream of voices, creating new poems. So I will talk about the importance of the blog Poemário has for students and for teachers, as an opportunity to engage in a new creative experience.

Computer-generated poetry is now almost sixty years old, stretching from the work of Christopher Strachey, Jackson Mac Low and Theo Lutz in the 1950s to the wealth of interactive poetry generators freely available online today. According to Antonio Roque, this history comprises four distinct (but overlapping) ‘traditions’: the Poetic; the Oulipo; the Programming; and the Research. But despite the inherent ‘literariness’ of the enterprise, one tradition is conspicuous by its absence: the ‘Critical’. It is the object of this paper to rectify this omission, proposing a mode of critical engagement that might allow interactive poetry generators to be naturalised as objects of textual study according to the protocols of literary criticism. It seeks to achieve this by means of a comparative analysis between what might be construed as the first interactive poetry generator – Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’ – and one of the most recent (and most powerful) – Chris Westbury’s JanusNode. It argues that a full critical understanding of Tzara’s text can only proceed from a phenomenological engagement attentive to the 'reader-plays-poet dynamic' that is a feature of any ‘Dadaist poem’. This approach is then applied to present-day interactive poetry generators via an interface-centred close reading of JanusNode that draws on the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard and the work of concrete poets such as Eugen Gomringer. This analysis serves to assert the literary pedigree of interactive poetry generation and, more importantly, establishes some ways to critically fix a textual object for which flux might be said to be a primary characteristic. Previous to the advent of the web, the failure of literary criticism to engage with poetry generation might be excused, as the critic’s access was limited by problems of distribution and resources and a lack of specialised knowledge. In the contemporary online environment, however, this failure is no longer tenable. This paper strives to encourage deeper critical engagement with interactive poetry generation and the recognition that these programs constitute virtual aesthetic objects in their own right worthy of literary study. Furthermore, it aims to engage Roque's other ‘traditions’ in dialogue, in the hope of further developing and extending the myriad possibilities of poetry generation.

Literary Art in Digital Performance examines electronic works of literary art, a category integrating the visual+textual including interactive poetry, narrative computer games, filmic sculpture, projective art, and other works specific to digital media. In recent decades, electronic art's aesthetic has been driven by new algorithmic, randomized, and emergent processes. Although this new art differs from material art or print literature, the rise of popular fascination with new media has neglected signifcant discussion of how technical mediation impacts contemporary art and literature. Presented as a collection of case studies by leading scholars, the book provides a contemporary optic on this art's forms, problems, and possibilities. Each case study is followed by a post-chapter dialogue where the editor engages authors on the foundational aesthetics of new media art and literature.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Juncture and Form in New Media Criticism, Francisco J. Ricardo

2. What is and Toward What End do We Read Digital Literature?, Roberto Simanowski Post-Chapter Dialogue, Simanowski and Ricardo

3. List(en)ing Post, Rita Raley Post-Chapter Dialogue, Raley and Ricardo

4. Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo’s Slippingglimpse: Distributed Cognition at/in Work, N. Katharine Hayles Post-Chapter Dialogue, Hayles and Ricardo

5. Reading Discursive Spaces of Text Rain, Transmodally, Francisco J. Ricardo

6. Kissing the Steak: The poetry of text generators, Christopher T. Funkhouser Post-Chapter Dialogue, Funkhouser and Ricardo

7. Geopoetics: Aesthetic Experience in the Works of Stefan Schemat and Teri Rueb, Katja Kwastek Post-Chapter Dialogue, Kwastek and Ricardo

8. Self, Setting, and Situation in Second Life, Maria Bäcke Post-Chapter Dialogue, Bäcke and Ricardo

9. Looking Behind the Façade: Playing and Performing an Interactive Drama, Jorgen Schäfer Post-Chapter Dialogue, Schäfer and Ricardo

10. Artificial Poetry: On Aesthetic Perception in Computer-Aided Literature, Peter Gendolla Post-Chapter Dialogue, Gendolla and Ricardo

11. Screen Writing: A Practice-based, EuroRelative Introduction to Digital Literature and Poetics, John Cayley Post-Chapter Dialogue, Cayley and Ricardo