writing machines

The possibility of machines making works of art has fascinated mankind for centuries. Men have dreamed not only of machines equipped with a powerful artificial memory, capable of reproducing patterns and structures from previous texts; they have also devised machines capable of working on their own, producing beautiful works without any human input. That leads us to the startling hypothesis posed by Calvino (2009): “will there be a machine capable of replacing the poet and the writer?”. The fact that written verbal language consists of nothing but visual symbols rearranged into meaningful structures makes this system (and Literature, as well) a field where experimentations with automated creation tend to be prolific. The interactive computer system Library of Babel, created by the American writer John Basile, based on the central metaphor of the short story “The Library of Babel”, by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, is a remarkable techno-artistic product in this area. The system works on the mathematical principle of Combinatorics, so that any click on the refresh button triggers a different combination of 29 graphic symbols (the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the space, the full stop and the comma) among all possible rearrangements, filling in a page with 3200 characters. As if in a lottery in which one wins by buying tickets for all possible rearrangements (which would evidently cost more than the prize), the system Library of Babel encompasses, under massive layers of linguistic chaos, all texts (literary or not) that could be written with these 29 graphic symbols. With that in view, this paper discusses the ontological and aesthetic consequences of a “total writing”, the logical premise of a project like the Library of Babel, which lies somewhere between a machine that subsumes all possible writers, but also all possible archives. As to the theoretical bases for our analysis, we will analyze Basile’s system from the perspectives defended by Umberto Eco (2016), Italo Calvino (2009), Barthes (2004), Deleuze (1979) and Raymond Quenau (1961).

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/609/A+poe…

For several years, the Paragraph Laboratory, University of Paris 8, has explored new avenues in the field of digital art and literature. In that context, a project is currently ongoing in this lab, in collaboration with the University of Technology of Compiegne and the University of Geneva, supported by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord. The goal of this project is to design a computer tool for the writing of nonlinear fictions for interactive media and to investigate its impact on both the writing and reading processes.

This experimental tool is based on a dynamic link engine, managed by structural entities named hypersections. A hypersection is a recursive container: it can include not only framents, to be directly accessed by the reader, but also hypersections. Simple rules for sequencing/interweaving hierarchical hypersections allow for very variable potential reading trajectories, while limiting the complexity of writing that is observed in classical hypertextual approaches. The tool is developed in Java with Eclipse. It currently contains some writing and reading features such as the folding/unfolding of the structure, the zooming or the color coding. The tool is developed in collaboration with authors and readers. This design methodology aims at experimenting several alternative interfaces.

The tool is now composed of three modules: the writing module, the structure visualisation module and the reading module (itself composed of a fragment reading interface and an inter-fragment navigation interface). The structure visualisation module, initially designed for monitoring and feedback purpose for the author quickly appeared as a relevant module, on the reader’s side. Indeed, it stages the reading process in a unique and innovative manner. The reader is able to combine the reading of the text and the reading of the device. He or she can enjoy the discovery of sophisticated mechanics for reading management. The reader can also realise that some unread fragments are still to be discovered. More generally the reader realises that other trajectories are possible and can enjoy the re-reading of the piece.

Does this new approach present a risk of a displacement of the reader’s interest in favor of the device, at the expense of the litterature quality itself? We hypothesise that the reading of the device is fully part of the reading pleasure. The proposed tool opens new perspectives to computer-based litterary creation, since it opens a certain form of procedural writing to non computer expert authors. In particular, the visualisation of the structure for the reader provides the author with the opportunity to invent new discursive strategies.

(Source: Author-submitted abstract.)

Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.

Weaving together Kaye's pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.

(Source: Publisher's description)

Designed by Anne Burdick.