Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature

Generative literature refers to literature that is completely or partially generated by an autonomous system, such as a computer program, that algorithmically produces generated literary texts. Closely related to the field of generative art, generative literature is its subset, as both artistic forms rely on an autonomous system, recognized as a non-human entity that produces the literary text independently from a human author, for its literary production.

History

Generative art's increasing popularity in the late twentieth century was due, in part, to the computational 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.^[1] 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.”^[1] 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”^[1] 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.

Jean-Pierre Balpe and surrealism

 

Jean-Pierre Balpe in 2000.

Unlike generative art, the introduction of generative literature did not receive the same 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 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”^[2] 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.^[3] Balpe believes that all literature, to an extent, is generative.^[4]

Balpe spent the early 2000s working on several computer-generated novels online, including Fictions and Trajectoires (2001), including creating the poetry machine Babel Poésie (2004), which produced poems by generating French, Italian, and Spanish words. 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.”^[5] 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.”^[6] Readers of generative literature neither see the same texts presented to them a second time nor read the same the text as another reader.^[6]

Codework poetry

The idea that code can be read, analyzed, and written as literature is not unprecedented: codework poetry is the construction and stylization of verse using a mixture of programming languages with natural languages to produce literature. Using programming languages like natural languages by giving them syntactical and semantic meanings produces a concrete poem-esque effect when juxtaposed together in the same context. Published anonymously in the networked discussion system Usenet, “Black Perl” (1990) serves as an example of a codework poem. Written in the programming language Perl (“Practical Extraction and Report Language”) as an example of Perl Poetry, “Black Perl” was intentionally written in valid Perl commands so that it could be understood by computer and human reading. The step-by-step commands listed in each line of the program transform into a narrated event when read line-by-line as a poem. The code’s form, such as the inclusion the asterisks and parentheses, influences the readability of the code as a poem, as various punctuation marks serve different semantic purposes when read in Perl than in English, for example. However, “Black Perl” was intentionally written as a poem, meaning that this particular codework poem has more in common with practices of constraint writing than generative literature. In fact, “Black Perl” is not generative for the reason that it is not program-generated output but, is, instead, the program itself.

Examples of generative literature

Raymond Kurzweil's "Cybernetic Poet"

 

Raymond Kurzweil speaking at Stanford University in 2006.

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,” 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."^[7][8]

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 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.”^[8]

William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter's "Racter"

«Slide and tumble and fall among/

The dead. Here and there/ Will be found a utensil.»

(Racter, "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed")

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.^[9] Racter generates text from a database containing 2,400 words, matching nouns with contextually appropriate adjectives, and it ensures continuity by tracking used phrases,^[10] 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 “conceptual justification (seemingly out of thin air) for vaguely related strings of words.”^[10]

In the preface, Chamberlain writes that Racter’s goal is to “replicate human thinking” — or, in other words, represent a utopian actualization of the vision that certain people had for computers during the mid-1980s, precisely that computers were “designed to accomplish in seconds (or microseconds) what humans would require years or centuries of concerted calculation effort to achieve,” and, in some cases, were absolutely needed, as certain tasks could not be accomplished without the use or assistance of a computer.^[9]

Nick Montfort's #!

More recent examples of generative literature include Nick Montfort’s book entitled #! (2014) but pronounced ‘sha-bang’ (which means “the set of all circumstances.”)^[11] Published thirty years after Racter and Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet, #! contains generated poems and their algorithms. The book is divided into sections: each section begins with the algorithm, followed by its output on the subsequent pages. Some of the outputs end with ellipses to signify that they could not be printed due to their infinite length. #!'s title is also a valid Python command: the placement of a hashtag before any given text commands the computer not to read any text following the hashtag. 

In a review of #!, literary critic John Cayley writes that the programs are meant to read by the program producing the output, but the inclusion of both program and output in #! makes the code “a (constitutive) facet of the poem. It is (also) the text.”^[12] The effect of sharing the source code, according to Galanter, not only further creates confusion as to whether the source code is the text but also allows other artists to create variations of the output, which “breaks with the paradigm of the heroic single artist creating a ‘fixed’ masterpiece.”^[13]

Controversy

The literary status of algorithmic outputs has been an ongoing contention even amongst new media artists and critics; 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.”^[14] 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,^[15] 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.”

According to generative artist and critic Philip Galanter, the oft-discussed question “What is art?” does not go unnoticed when conceptualizing a generative art theory. Generative art, Galanter notes, however, additionally faces the question frequently encountered within artificial intelligence: “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?”^[13]

References

1. (EN) Grant D. Taylor, When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art, a cura di Francisco J. Ricardo, collana International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics, vol. 8, New York, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 5-6.
2. ^ (EN) Peter Gendola and Jörgen Schäfer (a cura di), The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in the Programmable Media, Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2007, p. 13.
3. ^ (EN) Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer (a cura di), The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in the Programmable Media, Bielefeld, 2007, p. 25.
4. ^ (FR) Jean-Pierre Balpe, Fiction et écriture générative (PDF).
5. ^ (EN) P0es1s.digitale Poesie, su p0es1s.net. URL consultato il 12 giugno 2016 (archiviato dall'url originale il 24 maggio 2019).
6. (EN) Jean-Pierre Balpe, Jean-Pierre Balpe: Principles and Processes of Generative Literature, su dichtung-digital.de, 2005 (archiviato dall'url originale il 24 maggio 2019).
7. ^ (EN) Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, New York, Penguin, 1999, p. 163.
8. (EN) Raymond Kurzweil, Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies Home Page, su kurzweilcyberart.com (archiviato il 24 maggio 2019).
9. (EN) William Chamberlain, The policeman's beard is half constructed : computer prose and poetry by Racter ; [the first book ever written by a computer ; a bizarre and fantastic journey into the mind of a machine], Warner Books, 1984, ISBN 0446380512, OCLC 311319022. URL consultato il 2 giugno 2019.
10. (EN) Roberto Simanowski, Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations, vol. 35, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. 96-97.
11. ^ (EN) Nick Montfort, #!, Counterpath Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-933996-46-2.
12. ^ (EN) John Cayley, Poetry and Stuff: A Review of #!, su electronicbookreview.com. URL consultato il 2 giugno 2019 (archiviato dall'url originale il 2 giugno 2019).
13. (EN) Philip Galanter, Generative Art Theory, in Christiane Paul (a cura di), A Companion to Digital Art, 1ª ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016, pp. 169-171.
14. ^ (EN) Yuk Hui, Algorithmic Catastrophe—The Revenge of Contingency (PDF), in Parrhesia, vol. 23, 2015, p. 123.
15. ^   (EN) Rui Torres, Rui Torres – Unlocking the Secret Garden: Electronic Literature from Portugal, Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley, 4 maggio 2016. URL consultato il 24 maggio 2019.

External Links

• Raymond Kurzweil, The Cybernetic Poet.