Algolit: Data Workers (2019) [English/French]

“Companies create artificial intelligence (AI) systems to serve, entertain, record and learn about humans. The work of these machinic entities is usually hidden behind interfaces and patents. In the exhibition, algorithmic storytellers left their invisible underworld to become interlocutors.

The data workers operate in different collectives. Each collective represents a stage in the design process of a machine learning model: there are the Writers, the Cleaners, the Informants, the Readers, the Learners and the Oracles. The boundaries between these collectives are not fixed; they are porous and permeable. At times, Oracles are also Writers. At other times Readers are also Oracles. Robots voice experimental literature, while algorithmic models read data, turn words into numbers, make calculations that define patterns and are able to endlessly process new texts ever after.

The exhibition foregrounded data workers who impact our daily lives, but are either hard to grasp and imagine or removed from the imagination altogether. It connected stories about algorithms in mainstream media to the storytelling that is found in technical manuals and academic papers. Robots were invited to engage in dialogue with human visitors and vice versa. In this way we might understand our respective reasonings, demystify each other’s behaviour, encounter multiple personalities, and value our collective labour.

It was also a tribute to the many machines that Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine imagined for their Mundaneum, showing their potential but also their limits.”

Texts: Cristina Cochior, Sarah Garcin, Gijs de Heij, An Mertens, François Zajéga, Louise Dekeuleneer, Florian Van de Weyer, Laetitia Trozzi, Rémi Forte, Guillaume Slizewicz.

Publisher Constant, Brussels, 2019
Free Art License
52 pages

Project website
Publisher

PDF, PDF, HTML (English)
PDF, PDF, HTML (French)
Git

Jean-Paul Curtay: La poésie lettriste (1974) [French]

This is the first anthology of Lettrist poetry, with a lengthy historical essay by Jean-Paul Curtay and a selection of Lettrist documents.

Works by Isidore Isou, Gabriel Pomerand, Maurice Lemaître, Roland Sabatier, Alain Satié, Micheline Hachette, Jacqueline Tarkieltaub, François Poyet, Jean-Pierre Gillard, Jean-Paul Curtay, Françoise Canal, Gérard-Philippe Broutin, Patrick Poulain, Antoine Grimaud, Pierre Jouvet, Janie Van Den Driessche, Florence Villers, Sylvie Fauconnier, Jacqueline Panhelleux, Catherine Caron, Mona Fillières, and Sandra Scarnati.

Publisher Seghers, Paris, 1974
380 pages

WorldCat

PDF (65 MB)

Henri Chopin: Poésie sonore internationale (1979) [French]

“This is a (now) historical appraisal of Poésie sonore (Sound Poetry) by Henri Chopin, a central figure in the art form. The sonic qualities of voice and abstract sound was celebrated where poets from across the globe contributed to this phenomenal shift from the purely literal expression of text and voice. Chopin references key artists in the movement, significant works and examples of what were also often visually arresting artworks where wit, design and seriality are evident in typewriter art, collage, text art.”

The book is in French with the exception of the Introduction which is translated into English and the English section ‘A History of Recorded Sound’ (pp 13-40).

With an Introduction by William Burroughs
Publisher J.-M. Place, Paris, 1979
Trajectoires series, 1
ISBN 2858930325, 9782858930326
309 pages

WorldCat

PDF (63 MB)
MP3 (ZIP) (2 accompanying cassettes, 161 MB, via David, added on 2019-1-26)
MP3 (first of the two accompanying cassettes, via UbuWeb, added on 2019-1-22)