Runeberg

A lost work that according to the author's later description of PoemStar (1989) was a meme generator created in collaboration with Pekka Tolonen, the composer and AI expert. From the description of PoemStar:

The aim of Runeberg was straightout: the computer is a medium and its message differs from the bardic tradition, as that voice-resident and era-active poetry diverses from the printed literature. When Gutenberg & Co invented moveable type they made the literature unmovable. They did more than spring the Bible. Or their invention ultimately provided a meaning-proof shed, an opportunity for the consolidation of language. --Shakespeare jumped on that opportunity. He reconfigured poetry bringing together history, tragedy, and comedy under its roof.

Poetry in print became more permanet, less permutable: more visual, less aural. But at that time we didn't have a computer to free us from that mental and verbal stiffness.

The typewriter, produced by manufacturers of firearms since early 1870, made not only the poem, the scriptum, even more linear, but affected the process of writing and reading by forcing even the reader to stay int eh bullet-straight rows of letter.

The computer changes the linear message. It is a medium based on no kind of types.

The computer is a fundamentally new medium.
For the first time in the history of the written language since the disc-shaped Linear A 1600 B.C. at Crete the writer not only is able to write on disc, but he/she is now uncommitted from the discipline of rows and columns and circles.
--To defend typewriter against computer aided text processing would be as meaningful as arguing how the solo cello sounds greater than any chamber orchestra.
And the readers can feel safe: the computer poetry threatens the existence of printed book as remotely as the camera affected the fine arts.