literary machine

Simanowski considers that Barbosa “deconstruct[s] its form by running it through his text generator. (…) The outcome is predictably absurd and humorous, and portrays wild deviations from the mundane occurrences found in the original. Applying the chance procedures of a text generator to this poem inevitably subverts the status quo of his subject. It spices up the boring life of the city man by turning the depressing poem into seasoned surrealist lines. The form of the computer-generated text responds to the chosen content of the database. The result seems to declare that there is no other chance than accepting the chance. (…) Although the content of the outcome is owned by the machine, the meaning belongs to the human behind it (…)” (2011: 102-103).

In this second volume of Cybernetic Literature, which is devoted to fiction, Barbosa publishes a narrative synthesizer, addressing the concept of “matrix-text” as a transformable grid by the computer program. Being aware that in the fictional field there is a concern for semantic and narrative coherence, the author publishes the most interesting outputs of the variants of the series “Era Uma Vez...” [Once Upon a Time...], “Fábulas” [Fables], “Histórias dum Baralho de Cartas” [Stories of a Deck of Cards] and, finally, “História dum Homem Citadino” [Cityman Story], whose literary reception has been more explored, e.g. Christopher Funkhouser (2007) and Roberto Simanowski (2011), who curiously read it as a poem.

[Source: Álvaro Seiça, "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection" (2015)]