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1. List(en)ing Post

   Raley's essay is a careful and descriptive reading of Hansen and Rubin's interactive installation "Listening Post" paying particular attention to complexities of reading a textual work based on live information feeds contributed by an anonymous crowd, a literary work that is perceived as a live embodied experience in a multisensoral "polyattentive" environment.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 31.01.2011 - 12:04

2. 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

3. Generating Books: Paradoxical Print Snapshots of Digital Literary Processes

   Since the advent of the internet, advocates and critics alike have heralded the end of the book. George P. Landow observed that hypertextuality and poststructuralism emerged at the same moment, both due to dissatisfaction with the printed book and hierarchal thought. Derrida argued the question of writing could only be opened if the book was closed. Consider, then, the paradoxical position of Vienna-based publishers TRAUMAWIEN. Recognizing that although the vast majority of the text produced by computer systems – protocols, listings, error logs, binary codes – is never seen or read by those who consume it, this text is internal to our daily thoughts and actions and is thus literary. TRAUMAWIEN conceives of the print books it publishes as snapshots of computer generated literary processes which would otherwise be disappearing as soon as they are written. This paper will discuss the iterative processes by which I generated one such book published by TRAUMAWIEN in 2010.

   J. R. Carpenter - 25.11.2011 - 12:05

4. 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

5. Who Grabbed My Gorge

   Who Grabbed My Gorge

   Meri Alexandra Raita - 19.02.2012 - 19:52

6. The E-ssense of Literature

   Many works of electronic literature use text generation algorithms or interactive interfaces to present the reader with a different text upon each reading. Such variable texts can be difficult to analyze and discuss because it can be prohibitively difficult to take into account all possible permutations. The standard critical methodology for approaching these texts is to discuss excerpts from different readings, perhaps comparing passages that involve alternative renderings of the same textual content. While this approach can convey a general sense of the work and its possibilities for variation, it usually doesn't allow a thorough treatment of a complex work's structural framework. This essay presents a method for analyzing a work's source code to define the most important constant and variable properties of its constituent elements. It then applies the method to a generated electronic poem, "Snaps," by Dirk Hine. The source structure thus defined provides a springboard for critical interpretation of the work.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.10.2012 - 21:12

7. Generative Visual Renku: Poetic Multimedia Semantics with the GRIOT System

   A polymorphic poem (polypoem) is a generative digital artwork that is constructed differently upon each instantiation, but can be meaningfully constrained according to aspects such as theme, metaphor, affect, and discourse structure. The Generative Visual Renku project presents a new form of concrete polymorphic poetry inspired by Japanese renku poetry, iconicity of Chinese character forms, and generative models from contemporary art. Calligraphic iconic illustrations are conjoined by the GRIOT system into a fanciful topography articulating the nuanced interplay between organic (natural or hand-created) and modular (mass-produced or consumerist) artifacts that saturate our lives. GRIOT, which is a system for composing generative and interactive narrative and poetic works, is used to semantically constrain generated output both visually and conceptually. On the one hand, this project extends the GRIOT architecture's support for composing graphics and has resulted in new theory to provide cognitive and semiotic groundings for the extension.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.10.2012 - 21:20

8. The Aesthetics of Generative Literature: Lessons from a Digital Writing Workshop

   This paper explores a range of issues related to the pedagogy and practice of generative writing in programmable media. We begin with a brief description of the RiTa toolkit – a set of computational tools designed to facilitate the practice of generative writing. We then describe our experiences using these tools in a series of digital writing workshops at Brown University in 2007-2008. We discuss and theoretically examine a set of core issues raised by workshop participants — distributed authorship, the aesthetics of surprise, materiality, push-back, layering, and others — and attempt to situate them within the larger discourse of generative art and writing practice.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.10.2012 - 21:23

9. ELIZA Revisited

   This presentation reconsiders one of the most famous works of electronic literature: Joseph Weizenbaum'sEliza/Doctor. Created in the mid-1960s, this conversational character's success led Janet Murray to name Weizenbaum "perhaps the premier" literary artist in the computer medium. Such evaluations, however, don't take into account what happens during the playful engagement that the system's freeform textual interaction encourages: a breakdown that reveals the shape of the underlying processes. An alternative to this is extremely constrained interaction, which can help maintain the illusion. But a more exciting direction is to design processes that reward readers as they are revealed.

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:47

10. A Travesty Generator for Micros

    Literary critical Hugh Kenner and computer scientist Joseph O'Rourke introduced their Perl text scrambler "Travesty" in an issue of BYTE magazine.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.06.2013 - 23:48

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