David Link: Poesiemaschinen / Maschinenpoesie. Zur Frühgeschichte computerisierter Texterzeugung und generativer Systeme (2007) [German]

Since the construction of the first computer in 1948, text is not only written and read, but also executed. Authors are now able to compose documents that produce content when run. “Poetry Machines / Machine Poetry” investigates the early history of these algorithmic artefacts in detail, traces them back to their literary predecessors, and emphasises the paradigms, contexts and phantasms that motivated and inspired them.

Computers are fundamentally alien to language. While Artificial Intelligence research in the 1960s and 1970s tried to overcome this difficulty unsuccessfully, text adventures used the same resistance playfully to enhance the suspense of the game. The book analyses variable scripts, Joseph Weizenbaum’s “Eliza”, Kenneth Colby’s “Parry”, early adventure games and Terry Winograd’s “SHRDLU” down to their source code, points out their metaphorical and logical structures, and places them in a genealogy of growing algorithmic complexity. The attempts are based on the belief that language and the knowledge about the world represented by it can be fully explained and even be formalised, emphatically advocated for instance in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”. Technically, optional elements are arranged in tree-like structures and generate seemingly endless variance.

An antagonistic tradition of thought connects the dadaist Tristan Tzara, Claude E. Shannon’s re-discovery of the Russian mathematician Andrey A. Markov and the “Cut-Up” experiments of William S. Burroughs. It focuses on operations rather than on options and develops genuinely generative algorithms, which employ different routines to turn found material into collages and to produce effects unforeseen. The lacking machinic understanding of symbols transforms into poetry.

For principal reasons, the study of algorithms cannot proceed purely theoretically. As a concrete example of generative software, whose scope is by no means limited to the medium of text, Link gives an overview of a program he developed in the context of this research, “Poetry Machine”. The interactive text generator is based on semantic networks and acquires information about language autonomously from the internet. The translation of the fundamental text “An Example of Statistical Investigation of the Text ‘Eugene Onegin’ Concerning the Connection of Samples in Chains” by Andrey A. Markov, which can be regarded as the foundation of the generative approach, is given in the appendix.

Publisher Wilhelm Fink
151 pages

author

PDF (updated on 2014-8-29)

Chris Funkhouser: Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995 (2007)

A singular and major historical view of the birth of electronic poetry.

For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of today’s most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre’s prehistoric period.

Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output, including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware, programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been presented in an English-language publication.

In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.

Publisher University of Alabama Press, 2007
ISBN 0817315624, 9780817315627
349 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-10-23)

Adalaide Morris, Thomas Swiss (eds.): New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (2006)

New media poetry–poetry composed, disseminated, and read on computers–exists in various configurations, from electronic documents that can be navigated and/or rearranged by their “users” to kinetic, visual, and sound materials through online journals and archives like UbuWeb, PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center. Unlike mainstream print poetry, which assumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media poetry assumes a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. The essays and artist statements in this volume explore this synergy’s continuities and breaks with past poetic practices, and its profound implications for the future.

By adding new media poetry to the study of hypertext narrative, interactive fiction, computer games, and other digital art forms, “New Media Poetics” extends our understanding of the computer as an expressive medium, showcases works that are visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic, and traces the lineage of new media poetry through print and sound poetics, procedural writing, gestural abstraction and conceptual art, and activist communities formed by emergent poetics.

Contributors: Giselle Beiguelman, John Cayley, Alan Filreis, Loss Pequeno Glazier, Alan Golding, Kenneth Goldsmith, N. Katherine Hayles, Cynthia Lawson, Jennifer Ley, Talan Memmott, Adalaide Morris, Carrie Noland, Marjorie Perloff, William Poundstone, Martin Spinelli, Stephanie Strickland, Brian Kim Stefans, Barrett Watten, Darren Wershler-Henry

Published by MIT Press, 2006
Leonardo Books
ISBN 0262134632, 9780262134637
425 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)