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== History ==

Generative art increasing popularity was due, in part, to the new computational and algorithmic possibilities offered via computers, which gave generative art a new platform. Art historian Grant D. Taylor notes that computer art’s introduction in 1963 sparked outrage, mostly from non-computer artists who feared that the written poem, representing “communication from a particular human being” and “one last refuge for human beings” would no longer serve that function in the computer age.[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn1|[1]]] Computer art was often seen as “another example of the vulgarization of science, where besotted artists, dallying with the latest scientific and technological media, produced what was tantamount to science as kitsch,” paralleling the fascination of computer art with modernist responses to the development of pure sciences in the early twentieth century.[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn2|[2]]]  Prior to the mainstream acceptance of computer poetry as art in 1990s, people had hoped that machines would fail, having coveted art as a “refuge from the onslaughts of our whole machine civilization.”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn3|[3]]] The stigma attached to computer art was voiced by artists such as Paul Brown, who lambasted the use of computers in art as the “kiss of death”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn4|[4]]] to describe computer artists who were rejected from galleries once it was revealed to curators and directors that computers played a role in their work’s creation.

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[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref4|[4]]] Taylor, 6.  Taylor is citing Paul Brown from Preston, “Art Ex Machina.”

Unlike generative art, the introduction of generative literature did not receive such negativity.  One of the first, most prominent uses of generative literature as a term can be traced to French generative writer and theorist [[Jean-Pierre Balpe]], who in the mid-1970s, was inspired by [[Surrealismo|surrealism]], which fueled his exploration of automatic text generation’s artistic potential.  Balpe defines generative literature as “the production of texts that continually change since they are based on a specific dictionary, on a set of rules and the use of algorithms”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn1|[1]]] and that understanding the complexities of generative literature requires awareness of its “''niveaux d’engrammation''” or different levels of engrammation that specify modes of communication between humans and machines behind the generativity.[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn2|[2]]]  Balpe spent the early 2000s working on several computer-generated novels online, including ''Fictions'' and ''Trajectoires'' (2001),[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn3|[3]]] including creating the poetry machine ''Babel Poésie'' (2004), which produced poems by generating French, Italian, and Spanish words (but interestingly not German, as it was created to be exhibited as a gallery installation in a Berlin poetry festival).  Poems from ''Babel Poésie'' cannot be generated more than once, and while the content of its poems has been described as “the poetry of trash language, word garbage, chaos speak,” the poems’ forms have been praised as “a new poetry which works with boundless text flow and is conceived as an associative and endless process.”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn4|[4]]]  According to Balpe, generative texts dismantle normative reading habits of temporally situating texts in relation to texts encountered earlier on the diegetic axis because “[t]he narrative is not totally built in advance but put together from a lot of virtualities which are — or are not — actualizing themselves in the course of reading.”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn5|[5]]]  In other words, readers will neither see the same texts presented to them a second time nor read the same the text as another reader.

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref1|[1]]] Gendolla and Schäfer, eds. ''The Aesthetics of Net Literature'', 13.

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref2|[2]]] Genolla and Schäfer, 25.

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref3|[3]]] Links to Balpe’s generative novels were disabled at time of writing this article.

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref4|[4]]] “Babel Poesie.”

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref5|[5]]] Balpe, “Principles and Processes of Generative Literature: Questions to Literature”.

Balpe’s citation of surrealism as an influence draws comparison of how both styles involve the withdrawal of a conscious human in the writing process.  Surrealism’s contention with authorship derives from the conscious abandonment of logic and reason to allow the subconscious to potentially uncover some degree of truth when least expected.  In generative literature, the human author cedes creative control to allow the program to generate output, similar to how the surrealist willingly retreats from a state of consciousness to relegate creative control to the subconscious. The difference, however, between these two forms is that while surrealists were actively seeking to be surprised by their subconscious when they ceded conscious control, surprise has been interpreted as a source of both positive and negative fascination amongst generative art critics.

== Controversy ==

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[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref2|[2]]] Torres, “Unlocking the Secret Garden.”

To address this skepticism maintained by Hui and Torres, as well as other generative art skeptics — that algorithmic output cannot qualify as art — inevitably attracts past debates on art’s definition that have been hashed and re-hashed out since the emergence of the avant-garde.  According to Galanter, the oft-discussed question of “What is art?” within art theory does not go unnoticed when formulating generative art theory.  If art is to be understood as a product of expression, then generative art, Galanter notes, faces another obstacle, namely, the frequently encountered question within artificial intelligence discourse: “Can it be claimed that a computer can and will express itself? Alternatively, when the computer determines forms not anticipated by the artist, does its creation still qualify as the artist’s expression?”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn1|[1]]]

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref1|[1]]] Galanter, “Generative Art Theory,” 169.

== Examples of Generative Literature ==

=== Raymond Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet ===

First introduced sometime in the mid-1980s, Raymond Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet is an online program that generates poetry by reading an extensive collection of poems written by human authors.  On his website, entitled “CyberArt Technologies,”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn1|[1]]] Kurzweil introduces the Cybernetic Poet’s functionalities in greater detail:

RKCP [the Cybernetic Poet] uses a recursive poetry-generation algorithm to achieve the language style, rhythm patterns, and poem structure of the original authors whose poems were analyzed. There are also algorithms to maintain thematic consistency through the poem.  The poems are in a similar style to the author(s) originally analyzed but are completely original new poetry.  The system even has rules to discourage itself from plagiarizing.[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn2|[2]]]

The Poet’s ability to produce original poetry by reading, first, an extensive selection of poems by one or several authors mimics a writing process that could very well be practiced by human poets — especially if we recall that novel literary forms and styles often emerge from the influence and desire to depart from current and preceding literary movements. Kurzweil has seemingly programmed the Cybernetic Poet to function like a human author, as its abilities to “maintain thematic consistency through the poem” and “discourage itself from plagiarizing” all suggest the development of an authorial personality.  Functioning as a “poet’s assistant authoring tool,” the Cybernetic Poet aids human authors by “assist[ing] and stimulat[ing] a (human) poet in finding the right verbal images and phrases,” which, Kurzweil notes, “are often intriguing and surprising.”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn3|[3]]]  The Cybernetic Poet’s participation aids the human author in a way that could potentially contribute to the authoring process as a co-author, even though it does not replace the role of human authors by writing for them, as they could always reject the bots’ suggestions. 

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref1|[1]]] “Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies.”

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref2|[2]]] Kurzweil (1999), 163.

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref3|[3]]] Kurzweil, “The Cybernetic Poet.”

In spite of its popularity, the Cybernetic Poet was not the only poetry generator from the mid-1980s. William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter’s Racter, whose namesake derives from ''raconteur'', is a software written in the programming language BASIC that generates prose on an IMS (Information Management System) computer without prompts from a human operator.  A collection of Racter’s early fiction was published in a book entitled, ''The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed'' (1984), and aside from spelling mistakes corrected by Chamberlain himself, the text is completely computer-generated.  Racter writes from a database containing 2,400 words to match nouns with contextually appropriate adjectives, and it ensures continuity by tracking used phrases,[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn1|[1]]] allowing the book to have some form of cohesion that we might call a narrative (even though there are human-drawn sketches that serve as visual aids that potentially contribute to this cohesion). Racter’s choice of words is completely random, producing senseless text that literary critic Jack Barley McGraw calls “empty text” resembling “Dadaist nonsense” that cannot be close read.  Any attempt at close reading Racter’s “disturbingly superficial” prose, according to McGraw, would be a futile exercise in “conceptual justification (seemingly out of thin air) for vaguely related strings of words.”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn2|[2]]]

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref1|[1]]] Simanowski, 96-97.

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref2|[2]]] Ibid. Quotes are Simanowski’s quotation of McGraw.

== Computational Sublime ==

The “computational sublime” addresses this fascination voiced by generative art critics and generative artists respectively, that code could be programmed to produce writing that may have discernable meaning and make sense.  Termed by digital poets and critics Jon McCormack and Alan Dorin in 2009, the computational sublime borrows from the notion of sublime established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the fear of being unable to experience or quantify the totality of all that exists to be experienced in the world while also feeling overwhelmed (but potentially in a pleasurable way) while acknowledging this fact.  Per the authors’ formulation, the computational sublime is:

the instilling of simultaneous feelings of pleasure and fear in the viewer of a process realized in a computing machine.  A duality in that even though we cannot comprehend the process directly, we can experience it through the machine — hence we are forced to relinquish control. It is possible to realize processes of this kind in the computer due to the speed and scale of its internal mechanism, and because its operations occur at a rate and in a space vastly different to the realm of our direct perceptual experience.[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn1|[1]]]

The feeling of dual pleasure and fear that programs can produce text that, from a human perspective, could pass as human-authored is exacerbated by an awareness of a computing machine potentially becoming or, at least, approaching the status of a creative equal to humans. Furthermore, the loss of control allows humans to experience the work through the machine and through an understanding of the machine’s computational abilities rather than engaging with the output directly.  The feeling of being overwhelmed by the recognition that machine operations “occur at a rate and in space vastly different to the realm of our direct perceptual experience” draws a concern echoed by generative and computer art critics, namely the possibility that computer programs, generating surprising and unexpected output, could either amount to or supersede the human capacity for literary production.

McCormack and Dorin’s computational sublime echoes generative artist Marius Watz’s notion of “genuine surprise,” defined as “a temporary loss of subjectivity, as a relinquishment of one’s subjective intention, either to another’s control or to objective forces beyond one’s control.”[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftn2|[2]]]  According to Watz, the experience of surprise is key to generative art, and one way of aesthetically judging generative art might depend on the work’s ability to induce surprise.  It is, however, arguably anxiety-inducing when program-generated outputs and human-authored literature cannot be confidently differentiated, as such was experienced in new media artists Daniel C. Howe and Braxton Soderman’s undergraduate digital writing workshops at Brown University from 2007 to 2008.  Having discussed Watz’s genuine surprise with their students, who created and analyzed generative literature, Howe and Soderman reported that program-generated texts often prompted students’ anxieties about the texts’ meaning and authorship, supported by their fear that the computer might even have an “individuality.”  As the article will later discuss, the problem of authorship is always central to debates regarding generative literature, providing interesting perspectives on questions of authorship that have been central to criticisms of existing literary forms.

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref1|[1]]] McCormack and Dorin, 78.

[[Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature#%20ftnref2|[2]]] Howe and Soderman, “The Aesthetics of Generative Literature: Lessons from a Digital Writing Workshop.”

== References ==

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== External Links ==