instability

This dissertation investigates the current state of digital poetry generators. The study argues that today’s poetry programs embody a new stage distinct from second- generation digital literature. The new stage projects a “dynamic network aesthetic,” reflective of four trends in Web 2.0 cultural production: the potential for mass aggregation; the adoption of participatory platforms; the instability of textual material; and the unpredictability of individual actors. The chapters interrogate the ways in which the four characteristics emerge in three categories of poetry generators: programs that manipulate user input; programs that manipulate Internet text; and programs that generate autonomous content. Corresponding with the three categories, three theorists of the machine inform the discussion. Donna Haraway, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze each provide apt approaches to twenty-first-century technology. However, each theorist also demonstrates the ways in which recent models of the machine do not yet fully account for the “dynamic network aesthetic” of the Internet era. In addition to the theoretical discussion, each chapter addresses the design and output of eight poetry generators. The readings suggest that poetry generators, like contemporary technologies in general, advance towards increasingly autonomous cognitive abilities. Emphasizing the cultural value and literary merit of poetry generators, the discussion aims to validate poetry generators’ place in literary studies, in addition to demonstrating a strong connection between contemporary cultural trends and current poetic practice. The dissertation concludes by imagining a potential field of study dedicated to poetry generators. The conclusion calls for further investigations of a “dynamic network aesthetic,” and foregrounds the need to consider future literary machines.

Whenever the program of a work is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, it may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the artist is given four options when dealing with the lability of the electronic device: (1) she demands the ‘right’context of reception for his work – a requirement which, over time, will be confronted with the impossibility to preserve obsolete machines, software and operating systems; (2) she ‘re-enchants’ the lability of the electronic device and ascribes a ‘technological sublime’ to it; (3) she simply ignores the lability of the digital device and creates at once, as if the digital framework was immutable; (4) she is fully aware of the instable environment in which his digital creation will be updated; he even considers the ephemeral and uncontrollable nature of his work as its fundamental aesthetic principle. This most radical approach would then consist in letting the work slowly decompose, as well as in accepting his changing forms and updates and in taking up the possibility of incidents and unexpected events. In Tramway, one of my experimental poetic works that I present and analyse in this article, the instability of the device is metaphorized on the surface of the screen; it is thematized in the relationship between the figures of ‘manipulation’ and the manipulable textual context; it is also theorized in a critical paratext which is based, for example, on the actual presentation of the work in this journal issue. A second work, Pond, is located on the border between the aesthetics of the ephemeral, in which the author accepts the slow decay of his/her work, and the aesthetics of re-enchantment, in which the author ascribes the digital device with a hope of survival, with a spectral characteristic linked to the materiality of the programmed matter and which remains despite the changes it undergoes on the electronic device.

Source: author's abstract