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The formal patterns of the codex book remain evident in literary forms no longer bound by the material efficiencies of the paper platform. For some works, like Judd Nelson's "The Jew's Daughter" or Jason Nelson's "Evidence of Everything Exploding," the printed page becomes a platform for the mutability of the screen, while others like Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's _Between Page and Screen_ or Steve Tomosula's _VAS: An Opera in Flatland_ explore the tension between the printed and the projected word.Still other electronic works embrace the physical material of a bound, published book as their final form,, and in this paper, I propose a framework for considering the differences among computer-generated books relative to their characteristics and apparent purposes. By articulating three broad genres, I attempt to draw in more diverse networks of influence that bear on the present moment.Works that are metonymic are sculptural in their appeal to bookishness (after Jessica Pressman's) through the fact of their material existence. These works include Luigi Amato and Roberto Arista's _Volume_, which includes as its contents its literal self-description (in terms of weight, width, height, indexicality) and Jean Keller's 2012 _The Black Book_, which maximizes the value of a self-printed book by printing each page in solid black. The role of computation in the creation of these works is at least implied, and their status as metonyms for the concrete visibility of books draws in other works with different origins.

Computer-generated books may follow or invent many different literary genres, although poetry is a more forgiving milieu than prose. The books that I propose to call "generic" are those whose function is contingent upon a specific work or style. The methods programmers use may be stochastic, deterministic, or statistical, but they each begin with a specific work or works and rely for their significance on readers recognize the work being satirized. This includes the many methods following the tradition of Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke's "Travesty Generator."

Finally, works that I consider "operationalist" follow Neil Harris's identification of P.T. Barnum's method of showmanship as demonstrating an "operational aesthetic." For these books, the audience is to some extent left with some doubt as to the origin of the book, and this may include books where readers have some reason to doubt whether it was really generated by a computer program and books that have attempted to "pass" as human-authored. In either case, the operations of authorship are among the principle signifying characteristics of these works.

The typology I have proposed and will develop in this paper is broad, and many computer-generated books may have features consistent with two or more of the types I have specified here. But given the wide range and long history of books co-authored by computational processes, this attempt at a framework for describing their purposes and audiences helps connect these works of electronic literature to adjacent fields such as conceptual writing, literary hoaxes, and artist's books.

The Convergence between Print and Digital Literature in Blackout Poetry study the phenomenon of the “blackout poetry” both in the digital and the physical world. According to Ralph Heibutzki, on Demand Media, “Blackout Poetry focuses on reordering words to create a different meaning. Also known as the newspaper blackout poetry, in it, the author uses a permanent marker to cross out or delete words or images that he sees as unnecessary or irrelevant to the effect he is trying to create. The central idea is to design a new text from the words and images published previously, but finally, the reader is free to interpret as he wants.”

As new ways of sharing stories emerge, how does this impact on our writing processes, the ways in which they are informed by previous practices, and the development of new possibilities? Technologies shape stories (Zipes, 2012, p. 21), yet as digital texts take on ever more varied forms – multimedia, sensor-driven, embedded in objects and located in landscapes – contemporary writing practices remain linked to the production of the printed book (Bolter, 1991, p. 5). This paper considers opportunities and challenges in shifting from using only chirographic and typographic tools in writing practice to utilising methods from the oral tradition and other practices.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

In A Literatura Cibernética 2: Um Sintetizador de Narrativas [Cybernetic Literature 2: A Narrative Synthesizer] (1980), Pedro Barbosa advocates the same analytical perspective of literary machines, which he had begun in the first volume. Influenced by Max Bense and Abraham Moles, the author develops the idea of “artificial text,” which would be later challenged by E. M. de Melo e Castro (1987), in the sense that Castro’s transmedia stance considers that all texts, produced over time with the aid of various technological tools, are always artificial. (Source: Author's Introduction)

Pedro Barbosa’s pioneering work introduced computer-generated literature (CGL) in Portugal in 1975. Having worked with Abraham A. Moles at the University of Strasbourg, Barbosa published three theoretical-practical volumes of his programming experiences with the FORTRAN and BASIC languages. These volumes deal with combinatorics and randomness, developing algorithms able to ally computing and literary production, bearing in mind a perspective of computational text theory. (Source: Author's text)

I would like to propose a paper that centers on the specific poetic form of the mesostic. The mesostic not only allows us to reflect on the specific qualities of and differences between print, analog film, and digital born works, but also inspires thinking about complex surfaces picked up by John Cayley and Wardrip-Fruin, among others. My intervention would thus at once make a case for an “old” form of digital literature (the projected poem) and continue emerging debates on the future of textual practices that rely on contemporary developments in computer technology.

FLUXUS related artists such as John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Dick Higgins saw in the printed mesostic a way of organizing language that dispenses with grammar and syntax, which rely on linear structuring principles. The printed mesostic, by contrast, is basically organized around a phrase printed vertically on the page, whereby each letter intersects the middle of horizontally distributed lines, although additional, seemingly random rules complicate and enhance its poetic possibilities. I shall analyze more (as well as less) convincing works in this genre.

Paul Sharits’ analog film “Word-Movie” (Fluxfilm 29, 1966) adapts the mesostic, though not without changing the rules of the game. New rules are in fact suggested by exploring the possibilities the new medium has to offer. Adding speed and kinetics at the expense of vertical orientation, the work calls for new reading strategies.

mIEKEL aND’s “Mesostics for Dick Higgins” from 1998 again adapts the mesostic, in this case for Internet based projection on a screen, and again the rules of the game are adjusted so as to highlight the specific qualities of the new medium. And again we need to adjust our reading practices. While the vertical axis is reintroduced, the horizontal lines are now looped and are, more importantly, programmed in such a way that each of the individual words needs to be loaded separately time and again. The rhythm of the work thus depends on the ever so slight variations in loading speed. So while all 11 vertical words initially get replaced all at once after approximately a second, the work soon starts to “break up,” forming 2 halves which change at the pace of a heart beat. Eventually, the lines change at a sufficiently variable pace so as to compose a recombinant poem, relating words from mesostics that were not initially composed as such.

This fluctuation between a given text and a generated one inspired John Cayley to elaborate on the complexity of the textual surface. His reflections again compare contemporary development in digital poetry to predecessors in print (Joan Retallack) and analog film (Saul Bass). Cayley is particularly interested in relating and differentiating on-line and on-screen works (such as his own “Overboard”) to works designed for 3D VR caves (“Lens”). These considerations have been taken to a new dimension by Wardrip-Fruin, as he elaborates on the difficulties of combining narrative strategies with digital projections beyond the screen. Following this line of thought, I will thus suggest that projected poetry has both a past a future worth tracing. (Source: Authors abstract)