text generator

The gladiator Spiculus enters the arena one last time in this text-based simulator. Armed with a sword and shield, he fights gladiator after gladiator until he is killed. The character Spiculus is inspired by one of the most famous gladiators of the 1st century AD Rome. Spiculus won many great battles and was well-known by audiences. He was particularly admired by the emperor Nero who rewarded him with palaces and riches for his heroics.(Source: Author's description)

"Future Lore" is a poetry generator that remixes Nick Montfort's poetry generator "Taroko Gorge". It presents a futuristic free-for-all world where chaos rules. 

„Street Flower” is application designed by Jan K. Argasiński and Piotr Marecki. The technical side of the project is based on the creation of a mobile application that runs in conjunction with iBeacon devices (Estimote Beacons). This technology includes a text generator in a spatial context and action based on the position relative to specified, "electronically tagged" objects. With this combination, dynamically created texts will operate in the context of a specially prepared micro version of the Internet of Things. In our project, we focus on the work of the Polish poet Tadeusz Peiper (1881–1969), sometimes referred to as the Pope of the Avant-garde, an artist and theoretician of the socalled Kraków Avant-garde. His greatest achievement was a poetic form he called a “blossoming arrangement”, in which the constraint stems from the fact that the poem gradually unfolds from smaller units of the poem. We adapt Peiper’s classic „Kwiat ulicy” („Street Flower”), a blossoming poem from 1924, for Estimote Beacons. Thanks to the spatial possibilities of the iBeacon device, Peiper's work gains the spatial shape of a blossom, which was limited by the page. The reader navigates the space with his mobile device in hand and by using the specially designed app, he/she discovers the 4 layers of the work. Operation of the proposed mobile application is based on three contextual aspects: the action of the paired smartphone and beacon working in tandem, the tracking capability of the beacon’s distance from the smartphone and recording the current direction of smartphone’s movement in relation to the beacon. The actors in the created application include: users (operator with respect to whom and in response to whose actions that text will be generated), application (as the recipient of user actions; works in real time and reacts to those actions), smartphone (on which the application is running; the operating system [Android in this case] allows for use of built-in device sensors and transmitters/receivers that enable proper operation of an application and communication with the beacon), and the beacon (passive sender of the radio signal; its task is to broadcast continuous information about itself; in the project we assume that the beacons are fixed in one position). The system consists of three main components and communication between them. The first component are passive signal senders, the Estimote Beacons. They broadcast information about themselves via Bluetooth Low Energy. Another component is the user application installed on the mobile device, smartphone. The application begins to listen for beacon signals in the vicinity. The last component is the Internet with freely realized connection between it and the application.  

Work was a part of the conference paper prepared with Aleksandra Małecka. Abstract:

Since 2013 we have been using experimental strategies to transfer into to context of Polish culture chosen works of American avant-garde from the fields of electronic literature, uncreative writing, conceptual literature, procedural writing, flarf and related genres. These works include art by Kenneth Goldsmith, Nick Montfort, Steven Zultanski, Steve Kotecha, Lawrence Giffin, Amaranth Borsuk, Scott Rettberg and other authors. In our pursuits, we have used various platforms and tools, both digital ones like Google Translate, Amazon Mechanical Turk, various programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl), as well as analogue, that is traditional books. The chosen American texts, dating from the 90s to present day, very often reflect the artists’s response to the development of digital media and their impact on writing practices, as well as their reaction to the popularity of creative writing courses in the USA. Both contexts are poorly understood in Poland, which is considered a half-peripheral country in terms of development of digital media and has a different literary writing tradition, in which creative writing courses have little presence and impact. Given this completely different context, meaning a lack of a lexicon to speak of these works and no parallel community of critics and artists, it is not surprising that the transfer of American avant-garde works into the Polish language and culture encounters a challenging context of reception. In this paper we will consider the reception of American avant-garde works in Poland. 

Robbo. Walkthrough is a hybrid piece in a form of text generator, as well as an analogue book. The text itself is generated on the 8-bit Atari computer, and has premiered as a wild demo on the demoscene party Silly Venture 2k17 in Gdańsk. The piece has been programmed in Pascal by Wojciech Bociański (known in the Atari scene as Bocianu) with soundtrack by Lisu (created in Raster Music Tracker.) The concept and text has been created by Piotr Marecki.

The first part of the title is an allusion to the game Robbo (1989,) a cult Polish production for the 8-bit Atari, while the second part references walkthrough, i.e. the text providing clues of how to finish a game, a popular genre in the digital media fiel,. However, Robbo is a literary (or rather: nonsensical) rendition of a walkthrough. The work is 56 minutes long, and constitutes an attempt to create digital ambient literature.

The analogue book itself has also been created in a rather unusual way. The text generated on the 8-bit Atari computer has been transcribed on the editor, and then assembled using Calamus, a program created in 1987 for use in the Atari ST/TT work environment. All of the elements of the work – text, music, code, composition, as well as graphics – have been created by the Atari enthusiasts, premiered on the Atari-themed party and are being distributed among the retro computers enthusiasts.

While Robbo generator can be regarded simply as an entertainment or a joke, its authors believe that it also describes how the short-lived technologies are often replaced by so-called killer apps. An answer for this kind of technological acceleration is the practice of returning to the discarded and dead media or technologies (in this case the Atari computer) which can provide a critical commentary to this acceleration, at the same time preserving the cultural content in the excess-based contemporaneity, its circulation and repractice.

(Source: Author's Description)

The Kaos electronic literature magazine was published on floppy disk by the French company Kaos as a new year electronic postcard from 1991 to 1993. Realised by Jean-Pierre Balpe, the father of automatic literary text generation, the issue #3 released in January 1993 for Apple Mac proposes generators by different authors (in French and one in English by Jasper). (Source: http://imal.org/en/resurrection/kaos-3-action-poetique-jean-pierre-balpe)

Épigrammes created by Jean-Pierre Balpe in 1997 and published in DOC(K)S/ alire 10 is a text generator that formulates epigrams or short satirical writings. These satirical writings use sarcasm and irony to show truths of human beings, or rather, delicate truths that are normally private. The role of the viewer is to examine the generated fragments and to find the links within the text. The viewer always has his/her own history that contributes to the sense of the text. Therefore, the viewer is never naïve, and, according to Balpe, each time that the viewer reads the work, he/she sees a new text that provides the opportunity for a new meaning. Each short epigram describes or speaks of a different situation for one or several characters, and these small anecdotes show thematic coherences. The women in the epigrams swear and gossip about the superiority of women, creating a satirical, often sarcastic, theme of the higher morality of women that is proven or established with a false assurance by the feminine characters. One epigram says : “Evelyne glose, Evelyn jase tout le temps, Ses compétences sont reconnues de tous, Tout un chacun déclarerait ses mérites, et proclamerait sa supériorité…” In the epigrams with masculine characters, the text offers a different tone that consists of the use of satire and sarcasm in a pejorative sense, which is also often vulgar. A strong coherence of theme is not evident between the two sexes, but, one could say that the characters show the faults and the traits of humanity according to Balpe. The repetition of phrases and forms in the epigrams also adds a thematic and structural coherence. In the two epigrams that follow, the structures repeat and follow a formula found in the other epigrams. The formula consist of a name, then an ellipsis (that suggests the elimination of information), and then three lines (with the same general sense and format), followed by an ellipsis and an expression or a proverb. « Zoé… Zoé jure que la femme est l’avenir de l’homme, Elle l’assure, elle le promet Le souvenir n’est jamais certain … La douleur embellit l’écrevisse. » « Guillaume… Evelyne dit : la femme est l’avenir de l’homme, Il l’affirme, il le répète Rien n’est sûr à qui se souvient… A toute chose sa saison. » The phrase that repeats itself, « la femme est l’avenir de l’homme », references a verse in « Le Fou d’Elsa » by the poet Louis Aragon. This use of phrases as repeating scriptions, as well as structural forms, is a mark of a generator, but Balpe uses repetition to give an impression of coherence that supports the interpretation of the theme. Balpe strongly uses satire in the words of the generator that shows the two sexes in a pejorative sense. The text comments on humanity and life with an underlying dark tone: « La vie n’est pas un long fleuve tranquille ».