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Kissing the Steak: The Poetry of Text Generators
Syntext, developed by Pedro Barbosa and Abílio Cavalheiro in the early 90s (later partially re-versioned on the World Wide Web), is a collection of fifteen computer programs from the 70s, 80s, and 90s that automatically generate various styles of poetry in DOS. Though the texts made by each of the programs are thematically unrelated, through these pioneering works by Barbosa, Nanni Balestrini, Marcel Bénabou, and others, each of the predominant fundamental attributes of text-generators is clearly divulged. Syntext, despite being primitive on the surface, powerfully brings to light the expressive possibilities, versatility, and variation within permutation texts, and provides sufficient evidence upon which a typology of computer poems can be established.
(Source: abstract of conference presentation)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 31.01.2011 - 15:28
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Warfare and Conventionality: How avant-garde computer-generated text can be
Computer generated text has been considered warfare carried out against conventionality and was accordingly tagged “cybernetic Dadaism”, which seems to be obvious given that most computer generated text is nonsensical. However, there are attempts to have the machine generate meaningful text ideally indistinguishable from text by a human. This is where the problem starts. If a machine aims to be as good as a human writer, can it still afford to do what a human writer may aim at: writing like a machine? Wouldn’t any idiosyncratic style – which might in conventionally generated literature be understood as avant-garde – be perceived as a failure of the program? In other words: Can literature be avant-garde (or rather: advanced) in both, its way of production as well as its style? The lecture will discuss the issue with a closer look at Michael Mateas’ and Andrew Stern’s interactive drama Façade.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.12.2011 - 10:44
