The Infinite Woman

The Infinite Woman is an interactive remix and erasure poetry platform. As a feminist critique and artistic intervention, the web app remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy book The Second Sex (1949). An n-gram algorithm procedurally generates infinitely scrolling sentences that attempt to describe and critique an eternal feminine essence. Revealing patterns through iterative permutations, this algorithmic remix of Marshall’s and Beauvoir’s language stretches the logic of “the infinite woman” to the breaking point. Meanwhile, fog slowly obscures the screen, visually performing the concept and technique of erasure. Users can select sentences from the infinitely scrolling text to send to a canvas workspace, where they can erase words and rearrange sentences to create their own poems. These user-generated erasure poems proliferate possibilities for deconstructing and reimagining gendered subjectivity.