Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature

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.[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.[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.”[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”[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.

[1] Taylor, 5.  Taylor is quoting John Morris’ 1967 article from the Michigan Quarterly Review.

[2] Taylor, 6.

[3] Taylor, 5.  Taylor is citing from Jeanne Beaman’s 1960 essay entitled “Computer Dances.”

[4] Taylor, 6.  Taylor is citing Paul Brown from Preston, “Art Ex Machina.”

Controversy

Despite the loose parameters for what qualifies as art today, the debatable literary status of algorithmic outputs has been an ongoing contention even amongst new media artists.  Digital technology theorist Yuk Hui called algorithmic outputs “algorithmic catastrophes” rather than anything worth studying at all, defining outputs, or “the product of automated algorithms,” as “the failure of reason,” not even “material failure.”[1]  Portuguese experimental poet Rui Torres, whose corpus of creative works includes presenting poetry in hypermedia contexts, asserted, while fielding questions after a talk delivered at the University of California, Berkeley in April 2016,[2] that algorithmic outputs can never transpierce the literary realm, thus barring algorithmic outputs as literature and siding with Hui’s idea that algorithmic behaviors suggest a “failure of reason.”

[1] Hui, 123.

[2] Torres, “Unlocking the Secret Garden.”

Examples of Generative Literature