stochastic poetry | D9 ELMCIP

Since the rise of the mainframe computer, literary authors and critics alike have expressed anxiety about the computer’s ability to write narrative prose and poetry as well humans, or better. This lecture situates the contemporary digital literary practices of reading, writing, rewriting, and performing computer-generated texts within a broader social and historical context, dating to long before the advent of the computer. Christopher Strachey's 1952 Love Letter generator and Theo Lutz's The Castle generator are discussed in depth.

Pull Quotes

In human terms, a generation refers both to a group of individuals of approximately the same age having similar ideas and attitudes, and to the period of time between one such a group and the next, which is roughly thirty years. Two human generations have passed since the first generation of computers. Many more generations of machines have passed since then, each supporting yet more generations of operating systems and softwares capable of being programmed to generate a wide variety of computer-generated texts.