Oulipo

Alexandre au Greffoir is a method of text transformation. It was first published in the OULIPO Library in 1986. The selected alexandrines come from the most known alexandrines in French poetry. Marcel Bénabou and Jacques Roubaud collaborated in order to select these alexandrines while only using their memory. Consequently, they did not resort to anthologies or dictionaries to select the adequate verses. Once they established a list, they grafted hemistiches together. The alexandrines were cut at the caesura, then brought together with other hemistiches, as the user wished. This method is comparable to a mold and gives a function of configuration to the reader. This graft obeys to semantic, syntactic and prosodic restrictions in order to respect the number of foot of the alexandrine. It also takes into consideration elision phenomenon. The Alexandrins au greffoirs from the OULIPO is an applicational program that selects its hemistiches from the inventory created by Bénabou and Roubaud. The program’s approach is then in line with the original project. When Alexandre au Greffoir was first indexed and published in the ALAMO library, the authors could only print a small sample of these new alexandrines and poems. Thanks to a hyperlink under each poem, the applicational program of the OULIPO allows the user to read as many alexandrines as one wishes to, alexandrines that are previously unseen and unread. The readers can also generate other alexandrines if the ones on the screen do not appeal to them. The readers then feel engaged towards these alexandrines. Roubaud and Bénabou’s approach is tinged with nostalgia towards the recitation of French poetry verses. With the evolution of national education program, recitation disappears and causes a loss of literary, artistic and poetic knowledge and heritage in France. Bénabou and Roubaud’s initiative, to rekindle the formerly known alexandrines, lives on and flourishes through ALAMO’s program. To touch on the esthetics, we shall take the example of the following scripton: “On a souvent besoin demain dès l’aube”. The reader can easily recognize in the first hemistich the fable of Jean de la Fontaine “Le Lion et le rat” and in the second hemistich the poem of Victor Hugo, “Demain dès l’aube”. This new alexandrine draws on the reader’s childhood memories as he recognizes and identifies the hemistiches. The reader in this case has a new interpretative function. This recalling strategy plays on the reader’s complicity with the new alexandrine, a pastiche-like method. This scripton leaves the reader wanting more as he is willing to continue reading in order to gain some meaning and interpret the new alexandrines.

(Source: Jonathan Baillehache)

Reading Club is a project started by Emmanuel Guez and Annie Abrahams in 2013. Eleven sessions were organized with more than 40 different “readers” in English and/or French based on text extracts from Raymond Queneau, from Mez and the ARPAnet dialogues to Marshall McLuhan, Michel Bauwens and McKenzie Wark. Guez and Abrahams experimented with different reading and writing constraints (color, duration, text-length, number of “readers”, etc.) and different performance conditions (online vs. live performance, with and without sound, etc.). In a session of the Reading Club, readers are invited to read a given text together. These readers simultaneously write their own words into this text given a previously fixed maximum number of characters. The Reading Club can be seen as an interpretive arena in which each reader plays and subverts the writing of others through this intertextual game.

A simple web version of Queneau's Oulipoan print classic, which shows a sonnet generated from a new combination of lines each time you reload the page. Includes French and English translation.

Wordtoys proposes a reading exercise as a task in deciphering that doubles as a narrative toy. It gathers together a series of works on hypertext, e-poetry, and audiovisuals made from 1996 to the present. Framed within the context of net poetry, with roots at the historical forefronts that emphasized the materiality of signs, these works are constructed using randomness, permutability, process, games and re-writes. This sort of digital analogy of a book, a toy book, allows us to access pieces like Procesador de textos Rimbaudeano (Rimbaudean Text Processor) and Escribe tu propio Quijote (Write your own Quijote). In the latter Gache reminds us that in her Quijote, Cervantes the narrator tells us that he is not the author of the book, but that he found it in a manuscript written in Arabic, and she tells us that in 1944, Jorge Luis Borges wrote Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote (Pierre Menard, Author of Quijote), in which the French symbolist attempts to re-write the original text. Gache proposes that we write our own Quijote through a word processor console in which no matter how hard we try to resort to our imagination, we can only write Cervantes’s original text. In the case of El idioma de los pájaros (The Language of Birds), she presents a series of bird automatons who, with synthetic voices, recite poems on birds from famous authors. These birds turned machine-poets have been programmed to recite words. Gache reminds us: “Aren’t words always someone else’s?”( Source: Netescopio http://netescopio.meiac.es/en/obra.php?id=80)