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• 1 2018-08-24T18:38:57-07:00 Out of Bounds: Searching Deviated Literature in Audiovisual Electronic Environments 15 plain 2018-11-30T18:46:32-08:00
  by Claudia Kozak1
  https://doi.org/10.7273/2WKK-BV06

  Use instructions: click on each word of the cloud –reader should rather think on it as a constellation2 – to display definitions, theoretic argumentations and closedistant reading:

  out of bounds – translanguage politics – migrations – reality – algorithms – Marino – globalization – randomness – history – visuality – Goya – fiction – terror imaginaries – glocalization – Läufer – biopolitics – BBC – Cervantes – electronic literature – sound (of silence) – Romano – formalization – violence – politics of event – translanguage net imagination – merging languages – geopolitics – tangling letters – Latin America – ciberculture – bodies – code – generative works – legibility – politics of mistake – Quixote – meaning – Gache – deviated literature – Solaas – melting languages ­– closedistant

  1

  Would this essay be multimedia net interactive based, readers could probably follow the instructions to open a set of different paths concerning a deviated literature in the age of audiovisual electronic environments.

  But as long as it is just another written essay, only one path will be displayed, hoping it suggests others. The adopted perspective of this path is centered in a theory of translanguages within a historical and critical study of electronic literature in Latin America, particularly e-poetry, if differences between subgenres could still be sustained. This means the acknowledgment of a literary transit out of bounds; the way in which certain contemporary digital literature plays inside/outside literary demarcations and literature’s former privileges which defined, at least in the Modern Age, a crucial axe for western societies’ symbolic order and sense. Literature, particularly represented by paper books and libraries, has been for a long time one of the most powerful centers around which western cultures were organized. Many studies (Hayles3; McLuhan4; Ong5; Steiner6; Vanderdorpe7 among others8) have focused on the meaning of the Modern literacy world and its transit in the second half of 20th Century into a multimedia electronic culture organized around other type of center: screens, electronic archives, the Internet, etc. Within a world where literature has lost its privileges, what kind of literature is still worth to be written and read? Besides the inertial path represented by the considerable great amount of literature which is still published as if nothing would have changed –and we could nevertheless find there something of worth due to the simultaneity of the not simultaneous–, there are at least two other options which could answer this question in what appears to me as an interesting manner. On the one hand, printed literature which establishes on purpose some kind of dialog with these changes, even if it confronts them and, on the other hand, electronic literature which can transcend the flow of hegemonic contemporary electronic culture’s meanings.

  A translanguage theory is an attempt to grasp this last option. A frame to understand how it is possible to experiment new media, but resisting the ways these media give shape to contemporary life, uniformly. In addition to this political sense of a translanguage theory, another complementary political dimension arises when considering this out of bounds movement in terms of a geopolitical reading. In a world where migration is part of globalized capitalism, migration of languages, for instance merging/tangling/melting languages, could be easily seen as going with the flow. However, we can reverse the argument: some works within contemporary electronic arts engage themselves with a translanguage politics which comments, reflects on, and even deviate globalized flows in order to expose the false ecumenism of the globalized era. They tell us about passages, displacements, violence, and migration of bodies and languages within global digital culture. And they do it in several directions: they work on procedures which focus on deviated languages, politics of mistake, menaced legibility, and nonsense in web environments; they make violence against notions of transparent language inasmuch they insist on how world violence shows itself as spectacle; but they also build through translanguage means utopian spaces of new imaginary net.languages. This whole set of devices could be read as driving electronic literature into a politics of event9 (particularly as in French philosophy of événement), in the sense of an openness to something different, which has not already been but could be as potential, one could say. It implies the possibility of producing different meanings outside the hegemonic paths of meaning within culture. It implies the possibility of change in a world where, following the logic of merchandise, everything seems to change but things that really matter seldom change.

  2

  Closedistant readings of an e-poetry corpus by Argentinean artists and/or programmers –Leonardo Solaas, Iván Marino, Belén Gache, Gustavo Romano and Milton Läufer– could be adequate to pose some necessary arguments to validate the above presumptions. In that sense, close reading is also distant reading: e-poetry is not read here as an isolate artefact but a located one within a map; the proposed "methodology" is a partial and at certain point surface "closedistant" reading –although code and processing are briefly considered–, awaiting collaborative readings which could complete/augment/redefine it. Located e-literature means here that artefact/texts -when located- are not read as isolate but as anchored ones, in time, in space, in subjectivity, in social structures, in global nets, in theory as well. In this essay I will focus only on works by Leonardo Solaas and Iván Marino, but it is worthy to consider the kind of relationship all these artists establish with literature. One of them, Belén Gache, can be considered without difficulty as an experimental writer, who has produced until now not only printed novels but different kinds of e-literature: “blogs, net.poetry and mixed projects”–as we can read on her website– including flash poetry (Worldtoys), web based random poetry (Manifiestos robots), and sound programmed poetry (Radikal Karaoke) among others; another artist, Milton Läufer, represents perhaps a liminal case between disciplines –a self-taught programmer since eight, young professor of philosophy at university, currently graduate student on electronic literature, and electronic literature author himself–; but the other three artists mentioned above would hardly defined themselves as poets or writers. Nevertheless their partial migration towards literary impulses is apparent in some of their works as Migraciones by Leonardo Solaas, IP Poetry by Gustavo Romano (programmed by Milton Läufer), El imaginario de Goya, Lingua (both part of the series Los desastres) and later works as TextField, Eliotians and Perlongherianas, all by Iván Marino.

  Generative, kinetic, typographic, combinatory, and video works which take as sources not only texts by Cervantes, Goya, T. S. Eliot, but also BBC news, random textuality, and documentary images found on the Internet are the basis of literary impulses within the works by these two artists. But why do I say literary impulses? To what extent should we still speak about literature concerning this kind of works? Is it possible to find a literary impulse in contexts where literature has lost its privileges and migrates out of bounds? If the artists mentioned above lean themselves into literary traditions, why are their works more frequently estimated by visual art critics rather than literary critics? Works to be analyzed here enable us to resituate literature outside itself, that is to say, in inter/trans media contexts, but nevertheless they are readable in terms of literary effects. Literary impulses or literary effects are in fact ways of naming a paradoxical sense of literariness in contexts of vanishing literatures. It is not that we should read this works only as literature, but it happens that nowadays critics who were educated in literary traditions can probably read in these works something that visual arts’ critics are not reading. This situation does not provide necessarily better readings, only different. And after centuries of delimitations between artistic languages, even if 20th century avant-gardes opened the path to the dissolution of those boundaries, we still lack an educational system which could deal with the merging of languages. Meanwhile, I consider here how literary critics could collaborate in order to show the way literary impulses could still be readable, instead of becoming invisible, when former visual artists and programmers tangle languages and openly lean themselves into literary traditions to which they are more or less disciplinary outsiders.

  3

  “Migraciones10” by Leonardo Solaas is a piece where two source textualities –on the one hand, The Quixote’s excerpts pulled out from Cervantes Virtual Library, and on the other hand BBC online global headlines– merge one into another via generative algorithms, and draw moving forms with letters. While this happens, an off voice pronounces spare phonemes in Spanish or English depending on which the source text is. The phonemes to be pronounced, visually distinguishable from the rest in red color, are the ones that randomly migrate from one text to the other. Rhythm, speed, sound volume and size also change in relation with the amount of text that appears at the screen. Text gathers itself or vanishes, and if we let the piece running without interaction for enough time, black letters disappear leaving us with a white screen starry with red letters. Letters’ migration pollute sequences taking away meaning randomly. At any time it is possible to click on the letters to allow pop ups –right or left– with the source texts: one page from The Quixote’s facsimile from Cervantes Virtual Library or one of the day news on BBC online.

  
  
  Describing the piece on his website, the artist underlines the lessening of language’s communication value; and the gain of an aesthetic presence due to the tangling of letters in random drawings. But nonsense gets sense in several ways. Concerning the two different source texts, the artist declares that “in spite of all their distances, they are made of the same stuff. The foundations of our culture, the accounts of the world we live in: all is language”. Language mediation as one of the foundations of our culture doesn’t seem a statement without consequences. In fact, we could extend a reading on how nonsense opens out sense. First, as soon as we notice that both source texts are part of different linguistic communities and distant one from the other in time as well, we could think on which the languages circulating on the Web are, and what kind of power relations they enter in. That is to say, we could consider linguistic circulation geopolitics on the Web. In this case, English –vehicular language in times of globalization– and ancient Spanish from the time Spain was a nation with global influence, disputing English power. In fact, the first part of The Quixote was released shortly after the Treaty of London, which put an end in a tie to the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). Secondly, migration, contamination and nonsense open out the piece towards a deviated linguistic imagination which takes on a certain utopian nature, gathering what is fallen apart in new shapes.

  Additionally, both source texts integrated in the same piece enable a reading related to indecisiveness between reality and fiction. The questioning that Cervantes’ novel sets out on this subject is widely known, and in contiguity and contamination with the news of one of the most influential contemporary broadcasting companies, could easily led us to a reflection on how news tell us the story.

  While both source texts are gathered in real time, they pose a commentary on the huge amount of text circulating within contemporary cyberculture as well, in line with other digital artwork, which take the web as a symbolic reservoir –sort of globalized collective unconscious– with whom they operate in playful, reflective, or contesting manners depending on the case11. Certainly, a reservoir of this kind, even if it shows itself as an open, horizontal, and free space, is also shaped by the paths built by hegemonic meanings within society. Migratory flux in contemporary global societies is not random indeed, but traversed by necessities of the system. The artist, who frequently uses generative processes, builds random pieces about migration and globalization which nevertheless exhibit the fact that there are routes and programs that canalize them, in spite of randomness. Therefore, this out of bounds piece also shows limits within contemporary cyberculture12. Asked while interviewed about his opinion on the role of uncertainty, as opposed to randomness in generative artwork, Solaas answers:

  There’s this classic text on generative art by Philip Galanter, “Complexity Theory as a context for Art Theory”, which proposes a classification of generative systems according to their degree of complexity, from the highly ordered to the completely random. I think very orderly systems, like regular patterns and crystalline structures, can on occasion be fascinating. An extremely simple rule, like repetition, can engage us through the sheer number of iterations, or through the rhythms and echoes that emerge from it. But, in general, our attention will be more readily caught by systems that are not so simple, that are to some extent unpredictable, random or disordered: systems that are, as I said before, on the edge of chaos. The rules that account for them are not plain to see, but mysterious, partially hidden, requiring investigation (…).

  Still, the rules of the system never change. We are never dealing with true randomness: it’s not like anything can happen. In my experiments I often see results I didn’t intend or imagine beforehand, but doesn’t make them any less a product of the rules.13

  Outsource me!, another work by Solaas, in this case a piece of relational art combined with software art, shows another dimension of this dynamic between rules and randomness as it plays ironically with geopolitics within globalized work –and artwork– market14. As a high qualified software programmer living in Argentina, the artist is usually hired from abroad to develop software and therefore he is fully aware about the inequalities of global work market and conditions of migration of cognitive capital15 . The work involved a series of steps beginning with the online announcement made by Solaas of his intention to outsource himself as an artist/programmer of the Third World, who nevertheless would have the power of choosing his employer: another artist who would provide the idea of a piece to be produced by Solaas. Hence, the outsourced artist would become employer of his own employer, a subverted way to make clear the market rules, but also a collaborative way to produce software art. More than twenty ideas for software art were submitted from around the world. In the general Agreement that is presented on the website, one of the clauses states that “the Contractor [Leonardo Solaas] would prefer an Employer from a developed country, but he will also be open to consider proposals from emerging (or submerging) nations”. The fact that Solaas finally chose the idea of another Argentinean programmer, Go-Logo16 by Eric Londais, perhaps could open additional lines of thought: only one idea was submitted in Spanish, but not the one by Londais; in fact he submitted four ideas, always in English, as the site of the project was launched in English. There were other artists who submitted more than one idea as well, being Garret Lynch who submitted more, five in total. On the other hand, it appears at the site one idea submitted by wrc whose title is Outsource Me!:The CREATIVE CAPTCHA Solicitation, which was likely submitted by Leonardo Solaas himself, superimposing another upsetting of the whole process.

  4

  Iván Marino is an Argentinean artist who lives in Barcelona (Spain). He initiated his career as a video artist, but from the last years on he began to merge this practice with word based artistic work. As Claudia Giannetti pointed out17, while he moved into the field of telematic technologies “pioneering online advanced streaming systems in Spain, the technique and aesthetics of the interface became core elements of his internet production”. Perhaps, his interest on generative audiovisual formats went to the encounter of generative poetry undetected. As in the case of Leonardo Solaas, media art critics more or less affiliated to visual arts, wouldn’t perceive him as producing e-poetry. However, some of Marino’s installations –as the series Texfield– or net.art pieces –as Eliotians or Perlongherianas– go from a sort of typographic and kinetic e-poetry to interactive generative and combinatory poetry. Actually, as the artist himself underlines:

  My essays could be divided in two threads: those obviously bonded to the documentary, and those with a more abstract nature, say, de-figurative. Anyway, to me they are both part of the same type of work: the strange zone where meaning is built or diluted –the pause between two words, the duration/reading time of an image, the relation between text and image, etc. Therefore, my interest in Eliot’s poetry, or in our Perlongher and J.Fijman (I accomplished a series of essays on the later, even though I don’t show most of my production). The Ipsum Lorem is another way of saying the same that the scenes of the video In Death’s Dream Kingdom say: the psychotic monolog, the delirious discourse, etc.18

  Certainly, in a great part of his word based pieces legibility is menaced when black letters bounce playful and randomly on a white screen. Eliotians, for instance, presents four net.interactive pieces in which the first section’s verses of “Burnt Norton” from The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot appear randomly, either in verses’ blocks (Eliotian 1) or spare letters which drop down from a poem’s line (Eliotian 2, 3, 4), when the “interactor” passes the mouse on the screen. In the first three pieces, letters or verses fall, bounce, and accumulate at the bottom of the screen, overlapping and making up sorts of smudges ultimately illegible. In the last piece, letters fall down as well but they float without gravity at a slower rhythm, although it always depends on the speed and direction with which the reader “brushes” the screen with the mouse. Additionally, in the number 3 piece, legibility is compromised due to the font and the spaces either between or within words. Interaction with these pieces opens out experimentation with time –acceleration, hiatus, and suspension– in a remediation which both pays tribute to and deconstructs a famous poem about time19. The randomness by which the text decomposes produces not only distortion and emptiness but filling with an opaque textuality, added to Eliot’s own opacity.

  The fact that the artist, a migrant himself, uses in his works English or Spanish indistinctly –but not translations from one to another– also speaks as in the case of Leonardo Solaas’ work about translangue geopolitics. On the one hand, his website is basically English based; one could think on the use of the vehicular English in order to reach larger audiences –but losing at the same time most of his native language audience–. On the other hand, linguistic based pieces, as the ones mentioned above, keep their original language. In the cases of Eliot’s poem we have, of course, a piece in English; in the case of Perlongher, we have Spanish. We have some kind of mixing as well, as in the case of In Death’s Dream Kingdom, produced in collaboration with Luis Negrón and Andrea Nacach. The piece’s title is a quotation of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”; explanations on how it works –which appear on the screen when clicking the [T] icon– are also in English; but most of the language heard at the video sequences, which the “interactor” can arrange in different orders, suggest a deviated Spanish, as it is part of mini documentaries shot in Argentinean “institutions housing disabled people whose sense of perception is altered” (In Death’s Dream Kingdom). In fact, the work presents itself as having “the structure of an experimental poem: dead time without anecdote, collage of realistic pictures with images of the subconscious, and a synchronous montage using the technique of simultaneous accumulation of time”.

  The mixing of languages at In Death’s Dream Kingdom points out translanguage politics at least in two directions: on the one hand, we deal here with a vehicular global English as part of the contemporary media art international scene –it should be taken in account the fact that only in the last part of the work, where the images resemble the sponsor’s logos, the heard language is English; in contrast with the other parts where the voices of the fragmented mini documentaries are Spanish spoken–. But on the other hand, the work’s power lies in those Spanish delusional voices as part of an impossible discourse.

  Another work by Marino, Lorem Ipsum which actually appears on his website when clicking at the title of the series named Textfields, offers an additional approach to translanguage politics as the bouncing letters make up words, surprisingly in Latin! In fact, it is not only a kinetic and typographic poem in Latin, but a variation of the “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet”, the text which the printing and typesetting industry has been using since the 1500s in order to compound meaningless discourse to occupy the space where text should be included and to show the best proprieties of a font family. In that sense, this particular typographic e-poem is a commentary on typography, on its history, and on language and texts involved in a screen based electronic visual literature. Printers using “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” in the Renaissance were of course familiar with Latin, even if the source text of Cicero wasn´t recognizable due to meaningless variations. Nowadays, however, readers would be probably lost (in translation), unless they were familiar to typographic conventions. We can think of it as a way of discussing meaning in the context of the Internet visual culture.

  Considering these works, one could appreciate an interesting reversion of the usual path related to audiovisual and literacy cultures. Coming from literature to audiovisual culture seems to be a common path nowadays; the other way around could produce perhaps unexpected but even more significant results, because it disarranges usual arrangements. Of course, images that go towards literature don’t go towards literature as it used to be, even if the literature taken as source is part of the western canon. They go instead towards a potential literature, yet to be. A migration within digital culture ultimately due to the fact that even images are written language, that is to say, code. As an example that auto-refers to this, we have Marino’s work “Pn=n!” –part of the series Los desastres–, a generative audiovisual installation which combines randomly the frames of the torture scene in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arch, and whose powerful visuals in the forefront wouldn’t be unnoticed for anyone. However, as the work develops in time, the written code is superimposed to the images. We can even isolate a scene of writing –a frequent auto-referential procedure in literature– within the whole random sequence, when Joan holds a quill.

  When explaining his works at the bilingual catalog of the exhibition Los desastres/The disasters, Marino says that in generative audiovisual formats “frames are stored in databases that allow them to be ordered by means of open associative systems20”. And he also specifies in a note:

  We can find various antecedents of this project. Mallarmé, Saporta, Queneau, the concrete poetry, Stockhousen (KlavierstuckXI) and Pierre Boulez (in his Troisième Sonate), among others, have made research on structures focusing on permutation, literature and music, respectively. Haroldo de Campos reflects on this subject in “El arte en el horizonte de lo probable”, in Revista de Cultura Brasileña magazine (edited by Brazil’s Embassy in Spain). In the theoretical field, we can highlight Umberto Eco’s Open Work21. Although the concept of “open work” is inherent in the nature of art, the possibility of identifying an open structure with an open format or support has arisen with contemporary art. Some references in the audiovisual domain are, among others: ZKM/Centre for Art and Media, MIT and MECAD.22

  Hence, while he makes clear the tradition of combinatory music and literature which offers a frame to his work, it doesn’t seem untimely to speak about a migration from generative audiovisual formats to generative textual formats and vice versa, even more if we notice that Marino acknowledges a great difference between analog and digital images, inasmuch the second ones are products of writing:

  DI is detached from the facts it represents, divided by a translation system that places it in the realm of writing: images are not “drawn”, nor are they a related continuum of facts, but they are written by means of codes which have the same grammar rules and abstraction levels of any other language.23

  Certainly, Marino has not abandoned his interest in images because of his leaning towards literature/writing. He is clearly interested in globalized images –he usually uses found footage, particularly documentaries, downloaded from the Internet–. But we could think that the blurring of boundaries between images and linguistic code enables a reflection on a globalized word as well. In that sense, his thought on globalized images could also apply to our translanguage theory:

  Nowadays, the image engenders existential conflicts that it did not have in the past, when facts and their representation were unmistakably linked by a cultural consensus that celebrated its own icons, spread them and worshipped them within the limited framework of its own traditions. The case of the globalized image is different: icons are reproduced and spread beyond the territory where they originated. It is worth considering that this journey, encouraged by the ease of multiplication and circulation that technology gives to it, is not only a geographical displacement, but also a semantic one: images bloom as malignant growths which, linked with other images by laws of continuity, randomness, etc., are detached from their original significance and launched into the abyss of new meanings.24

  Multiplication and displacement applies to words in a frantic way within globalized societies too. But while the anonymous launching of images and words’ new meanings is certainly a property of globalized technological culture; it is also true that there are standardized paths that put back on track their overflowing growth. When interacting with the kind of works here analyzed, new deviated impulses arise: the ones that step out of bounds, allowing new incarnated-sonic-imagi-literatures which point out the instable landscapes of globalized societies. Perhaps it is all about a new language, standing at the edge of abyss. Maybe that is what art is about.

  ---

  NOTES

  1. 1. The title alludes, in a pale translation, to "fuera de sí", which in Spanish has several nuances: to be out of bounds, trespassing borders but mostly metaphorically, when said about a person, to be “beyond oneself” –out of one’s mind–. A literature “fuera de sí”, “desaforada”, could imply that it has surpassed disciplinary boundaries, at the same time, getting probably a bit crazy. But it could also mean a literature which, in legal sense, has lost its privileges or “fueros” (“desaforada” = “que ha perdido sus fueros”).back

  2. 2. This essay aims at certain –limited– point to challenge academic writing concerning e-literature: a different color and font is used whenever a side reference is implied and not mention or fully developed; also with the intention to “give color” (as in the Argentinean idiom “dar una nota de color”), that is to say, to give a tidbit of information.back

  3. 3. Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 2002.
     Hayles, N. Katherine. Literatura eletrônica. Novos horizontes para o literário. Sao Paulo: Global Editora. 2009. back

  4. 4. McLuhan, Marshall. La galaxia Gutemberg. Barcelona: Planeta-Agostini. 1985.
     McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. Guerra y paz en la aldea global. México: Artemisa. 1986.
     McLuhan, Marshall. Comprender los medios de comunicación. Las extensiones del ser humano. Barcelona: Paidós. 1996.back

  5. 5. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London-New York: Methuen. 1982.back

  6. 6. Steiner, George. “After the Book?” In On dificulty and other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978. 187-203.
     Steiner, George. Lenguaje y silencio. Barcelona: Gedisa. 1982.
     Steiner, George. “¿Toca a su fin la cultura del libro?”. Letra Internacional. 1990. 18: 43-45.back

  7. 7. Vandendorpe, Christian. Del papiro al hipertexto. Ensayo sobre las mutaciones del texto y la lectura. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 2002.back

  8. 8. Flusser, Vilém. Filosofia da caixa preta. Ensaios para uma futura filosofia da fotografia [1983]. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará. 2002.back

  9. 9. Within contemporary philosophies of the event, even in versions so distant one from each other as those of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze, the event is always what enables change: the unpredictable and the very possibility of the new. For an analysis of the tension between programs and de-programs within digital literature, and between new and novelty see Claudia Kozak, “Poésie numérique et politiques d’événement”. Pratiques du hasard. Pour un matérialisme de la rencontre. Ed. Jonathan Pollock. Perpignan, Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2012b, pp. 165-178. An extended version in Claudia Kozak, “Poesía digital e políticas do acontecimento”. Potências e práticas do acaso: o acaso na filosofia, na cultura e nas artes ocidentais. Eds. María Cristina Franco Ferraz e Lia Cabral Baron. Rio de Janeiro, Editora Garamond/FAPERJ, 2012c, pp. 193-210.
     Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Diálogos. Valencia: Pre-textos. 1977.
     Badiou, Alain. Deleuze. “El clamor del Ser.” Buenos Aires: Manantial. 1997.
     Badiou, Alain. “Presentación de la edición en castellano de El ser y el acontecimiento”, revista Acontecimiento. 2000. 19-20. Accesed January 12, 2016. http://www.grupoacontecimiento.com.ar/articulos/19Badiou3.pdf
     Zourabichvili, François. Deleuze. Una filosofía del acontecimiento. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. 2004. back

  10. 10. Solaas, Leonardo. Migraciones 2012.
      This work is no longer available in the main menu on the artist website but archived under the following direct access: http://solaas.com.ar/works/migraciones/migraciones.htm. The description and analysis provided in this essay takes in account the experiencing of the work in May/June 2013. It is also possible to access a video version shot in March 2012, at the Laboratory NT2 (http://nt2.uqam.ca/fr/video/migraciones-navigation-filmee-1), which includes slight differences with the one I experienced in 2013. back

  11. 11. IP Poetry by Gustavo Romano is an excellent case to read this.back

  12. 12. A broader analysis of the relationship between “programs” and “de-programs”, concerning the dynamics of chance, randomness and event is developed in Kozak 2012a and b.
      Kozak, Claudia and others. Tecnopoéticas argentinas. Archivo blando de arte y tecnología. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. 2012.
      Kozak, Claudia. “Poésie numérique et politiques d’événement”. In Pratiques du hasard. Pour un matérialisme de la rencontre, edited by Jonathan Pollock, 165-178. Perpignan : Presses Universitaires de Perpignan. 2012a.
      Kozak, Claudia. “Poesía digital e políticas do acontecimento”. In Potências e práticas do acaso: o acaso na filosofia, na cultura e nas artes ocidentais, edited by María Cristina Franco Ferraz and Lia Cabral Baron, 193-210. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Garamond/FAPERJ. 2012b. back

  13. 13. Solaas, Leonardo. “Towards the Edge of Chaos.” Interview by Jeremy Levine. DIGIMAG. The Digicult’s Project Journal. 2010. 51, February . Accesed January 12, 2016. http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-051/towards-the-edge-of-chaos-an-interview-with-leonardo-solaas/back

  14. 14. In his website Leonardo Solaas explains: “Outsource Me! is an ironic subversion of the practice of outsourcing, which consists on the hiring of foreign low-wage workers by employers from developed countries. My proposal was to temporarily upset that power relationship. I chose my own employer, within the context of an agreement established by myself, to develop a piece of software art as an outsourced worker. At the same time, I was outsourcing myself the task of thinking of an idea for the piece. The project was developed in two stages: an open call for ideas, for which I built a special website, and the execution of the piece itself after the specifications of the winning idea. More than twenty proposals were submitted. I chose one among them: Go-Logo, by Eric Londais. As the winner of the call, he became my boss for a while, and collaborated on the development of his plan. The project was funded by Readme 100 Software Art Festival, and its outcome was presented to the public on November 2005 in Dortmund, Germany”.back

  15. 15. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Políticas del acontecimiento. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. 2006.back

  16. 16. At first sight, the name of the submitter didn’t sound as Argentinean, despite the fact that Argentinean society, particularly at big cities, could be considered as a “mosaic culture”. Nevertheless, although the occasional viewer of the site could not recognize the name of Eric Londais, it is highly probably that Solaas did meet him before.back

  17. 17. Gianetti, Claudia. “Machine and Reality: Some Thoughts on the Work of Iván Marino.” In The Disasters. Politics of Representation, edited by Iván Marino and Antonio Franco. Post Local Project (PLP) 05, 9-11. Badajoz: Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC). 2008.back

  18. 18. Iván Marino, in a mail from 2013.back

  19. 19. The poem first section’s verses (“Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable”, and so on) are clearly readable in some pieces until they decompose.back

  20. 20. Marino, Iván. “Introduction” and “On the Format of the Pieces”. In The Disasters. Politics of Representation, edited by Iván Marino y Antonio Franco. Post Local Project (PLP) 25. Badajoz: Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) http://ivan-marino.net/. 2008.back

  21. 21. Eco, Umberto. Open Work, Barcelona, Planeta. 1979.back

  22. 22. Marino, Iván. Op.Cit. 2008. 27.back

  23. 23. Marino, Iván. Op.Cit. 2008. 27.back

  24. 24. Marino, Iván. Op.Cit. 2008. 27.back

• 1 2018-08-24T18:39:45-07:00 Reading the Drones: Working Towards a Critical Tradition of Interactive Poetry Generation 5 plain 2018-09-14T20:16:09-07:00
  by Calum Rodger

  Abstract

  Les logiciels spécifiquement conçus pour produire de la poésie ne sont pas une nouveauté ; cependant Internet met aujourd'hui ceux-ci à la portée de tous. Cet article propose d’examiner la possibilité de considérer ces logiciels en tant qu'objets possibles d'une analyse littéraire. Dans un premier moment il s'agira de définir ces logiciels, en tant que interactive poetry generators [producteurs de poésie interactifs] ; le poème de Tristan Tzara, Pour faire un poème dadaïste, sera proposé comme précédent. La deuxième partie de cet article sera l'occasion d'une analyse attentive d'un de ces logiciels – le JanusNode de Christ Westbury – en rapport à l’approche phénoménologique de Bachelard ainsi qu’à la poésie concrète d'Eugen Gomringer. Il s'agira finalement d'aborder l’influence des études sur les interactive poetry generators sur le discours concernant la poétique actuelle, en tant qu'’antidote’ hédoniste à ‘l’écriture non-créative [uncreative writing]’ de Kenneth Goldsmith, cette dernière ayant tendance à dominer celui-ci.

  Keywords

  computer-generated poetry, digital poetics, close reading, JanusNode, Tristan Tzara, Gaston Bachelard, Eugen Gomringer, Kenneth Goldsmith

  Introduction

  Computer-generated poetry is now almost sixty years old, stretching from the work of Christopher Strachey, Jackson Mac Low and Theo Lutz in the 1950s to the wealth of programs available online today. As Antonio Roque notes in his essay “anguage Technology Enables a Poetics of Interactive Generation”, it is without an “overarching community”, instead comprising four distinct but overlapping traditions:

  ● “The Poetic tradition includes those who are interested primarily in the resulting poems: for Mac Low and the Gnoetry poets, the automated techniques being used are generally secondary to the poems being produced, and the program’s output may be modified to produce an interesting poem. Most of the Digital Poets of the turn of the century may be classified here.

  ● The Oulipo tradition includes those who are interested in developing novel poetic forms, and in studying the types of poems that are generated from a given constraint or combinatorial method. To these poets, the authoring method being used is usually more interesting than the poem that it produced.

  ● The Programming tradition includes those aligned with the hacker sensibility, referring to those who enjoy understanding the workings of complex systems and finding creative and effective solutions to technical problems (Raymond 2004). Such programmers traditionally value the free distribution of resources such as programs, information, and infrastructure (Raymond 2011). JanusNode, ETC, and West’s POETRY GENERATOR were distributed for the general good; Strachey’s love letters, Dissociated Press, Travesty, and Mark V. Shaney were developed in computer labs principally for enjoyment.

  ● The Research tradition covers those interested in understanding language use and cognition (including critical work in the humanities) as well as those developing innovative techniques in language engineering. Examples are Lutz, Manurung, Gervás, and the NLP/CL/AI investigators of the past decade.”(2011)

  This paper begins with the premise that despite the inherent literariness of computer-generated poetry, one tradition is conspicuous by its absence: the Lit-Critical. While Roque pays lip-service to “critical work in the humanities”, the examples cited invariably come from the fields of computational linguistics and natural language processing. This is no typological deficiency, but points to the historical failure of literary criticism to engage seriously with computer-generated poetry. Although occasional figures such as Charles O. Hartmann have brought their critical background to bear on their creative explorations of the mode (1996), and the more recent work of Christopher Funkhouser presents an invaluable history of computer-generated poetry attentive to its literary context (2007, 31-84), the existence of a Lit-Critical tradition as such is doubtful, and its parameters remain ill-defined. It is the object of this paper to rectify this solecism, proposing a mode of critical engagement that might allow computer-generated poetry or, more specifically, the programs that enable it, to be naturalised as objects of study according to the protocols of literary criticism. Christian Bök has stated that “the poets of tomorrow are likely to resemble programmers, exalted, not because they can write great poems, but because they can build a small drone out of words to write great poems for us.” (2002) Bök – who taught himself programming – sits squarely within the poetic tradition. This paper proposes a Lit-Critical analogue: we read the drones.

  To achieve this, the paper first gives a working definition of the object of study, defined as an interactive poetry generator (or IPG), sketching out its history and suggesting some reasons why literary critics have failed to engage with such programs, and why this failure is no longer tenable. It then proceeds from the what to the how, close reading the earliest IPG – Tristan Tzara’s “To make a dadaist poem” – with one of the most recent (and most powerful) – Chris Westbury’s JanusNode. It argues that a full understanding of Tzara’s text can only proceed from a phenomenological engagement, attentive to what is termed the reader-plays-poet dynamic that is a feature of any Dadaist poem. This approach is then applied to present-day IPGs via an interface-centred close reading of JanusNode, drawing on the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard and the concrete poetry of Eugen Gomringer. This analysis asserts the literary pedigree of interactive poetry generation and establishes some ways to critically fix an object for which flux is a primary characteristic. Finally, the paper addresses why literary critics should study IPGs, referencing the work of Kenneth Goldsmith to show how these programs develop and augment discussions of contemporary poetics. Throughout, the paper strives to encourage deeper critical engagement with computer-generated poetry and the recognition that IPGs constitute virtual aesthetic objects in their own right worthy of literary study. Furthermore, it aims to engage Roque’s other traditions in dialogue, in the hope of further developing and extending the myriad possibilities of the form.

  1. What?

  Among the most powerful IPGs available online today is JanusNode, a freeware program by Chris Westbury. The manual describes it as “a very simple virtual robot built to fulfil a single function: to manufacture textual possibility (known to some as: nonsense) that material entities such as yourself endow with value” (2012, 2); or, more conventionally, an IPG. The term succinctly addresses the processes at work in the program. The generator component is that “manufacture [of] textual possibility” – the raw text that constitutes the program’s output. To become poetry, however, it requires a “material entit[y to] endow [it] with value” – a reader who discovers poetic images and turns of phrase in that output. But so far this is only a one way process, hence the interactive component. Using the interface, the reader can modify the output in various ways both before and after generation. Thus we arrive at the model of dynamic engagement shown in Figure 1: the program responds mechanically to our input as we respond imaginatively to its output. According to the manual, JanusNode operates on a principle of “Divine Indifference” (Westbury 2012, 4), the opposite of divine intervention. That is, whenever we discover ‘meaning’ in JanusNode’s output, whether banal, hilarious, profound or otherwise, it is always us who put it there. This is a creative act; it is not a critical one. But the possibility of critical engagement with IPGs becomes real if we look beyond the poetry component – those results that we subjectively imbue with value – to the interactive component which, as is shown, encompasses the others in its loop. In the terms of literary analysis, this requires a phenomenological approach. We have to read ourselves reading or, more accurately, using or playing.

  
  As Funkhouser and Roque note, the first computerised poetry generator was written by Theo Lutz in 1959, generating lyrics using words and structures from Kafka’s “The Castle” (Funkhouser 2007). Its title, “Stochastic Text”, is telling. Until computers are developed enough to engage with language on a deep semantic level, all computer-generated text will have a random element. Certainly, JanusNode works on a similar, albeit more advanced, principle of aleatoric selection and combination. But Lutz’s program cannot be considered an IPG, as it lacks one crucial prerequisite: interactivity.

  In a discussion of interactive fiction in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Espen J. Aarseth criticises the term ‘interactive’ as either meaningless or trivial. Since a non-trivial definition of the word implies “a functional equality between the interacting agents” – that is, human and machine – and that a functional equality can only exist “if the machine is somehow aware of the situation”, which remains impossible, it follows that interactive fiction is no more interactive than conventional fiction, insofar as a “successful fiction must […] in one sense be interactive, just as a lie needs a believer in order to work.” (Aarseth 1997, 50) Likewise a poem needs a reader in order to be understood and enjoyed; such is the case too with the IPG. The difference is that if we assume that poets can understand and enjoy their own work, then the output of an IPG needs a reader to be understood and enjoyed at all. Moreover, while the trivial interactivity of IPGs is, as Aarseth suggests, “perhaps better described as participation, play, or even use,” (1997, 49) it requires an engagement not only cognitive, but also physical – not just reading, but doing. Hence Lutz’s text cannot be described as interactive insofar as the program itself remains inaccessible to the reader/doer, whether through lack of suitable distribution channels or of a user interface that requires no specialised knowledge.

  As such, the first IPG proper precedes Lutz’s program by forty years and falls into none of Roque’s traditions. It is rather a key text of experimental modernism, Tristan Tzara’s “To make a dadaist poem”:

  Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors. Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out the article. Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. Shake it gently. Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag. Copy conscientiously. The poem will be like you. And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar. (1920/1979, 92)

  This text will be examined in more detail below; in the meantime it is enough to state that it invites the construction of an interface-like space in which the reader must engage physically with the ‘program’ in order to produce the desired result; namely, a new poem. It is therefore closer in kind to JanusNode than “Stochastic Text” and remains the best literary model against which to read contemporary IPGs. The next major development is Brion Gysin’s cut-up method, invented in the 1950s and popularised by William Burroughs. If the Dadaist poem is construed as an agrarian method of poetry generation, then the cut-up constitutes an industrial revolution, allowing for the production of chance juxtapositions with brutal efficiency (in contrast to the laborious operations of Tzara’s text). Like the Dadaist poem, the materials for its creation are widely and immediately available, as is the ‘program’ itself, described several times throughout Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy. The ease with which the reader/doer can access and produce these texts has more in common with contemporary IPGs than Lutz’s program, for which engagement is only possible through a sample output.

  The first flickerings of a digital revolution occur in 1985 with the publication of “the first book ever written by computer” (RACTER, 1985), The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed, and the commercial release of its ‘author’, the text generation program RACTER. Here, the interface is no longer one of scissors and Stanley knives but pixels and a keyboard. In principle, this program brought the digital IPG outside the exclusive province of literarily-minded programmers and technophile poets. Like avant-garde poetry books, however, such programs are rarely profitable, so it takes the advent of the web for the digital revolution of IPGs to truly arrive. Today there are dozens of programs available online for free download. Advanced text generation is accessible to all. In such an environment, the failure of the literary critic to engage with IPGs is no longer tenable. But how can this failure be overcome?

  2. How?

  When we first open JanusNode it displays an epigraph, the final line of Tzara’s Dadaist poem (Figure 2). This is our point of departure: as the first IPG, by reading Tzara’s text, we learn how to read JanusNode. The Dadaist poem presents three possible approaches. We could study a sample output, but as a product of “Divine Indifference”, this would constitute a creative act, not a critical one. We could study the instructional text itself, treating it as a kind of meta-poem. This has its uses, but is akin to studying respiration in a cadaver. The Dadaist poem invites us not just to read, but to do. The comprehensibility and value of both output and instructions are contingent upon the activity itself. Therefore it is necessary to take a phenomenological approach: we have to play Tzara’s game.

  In doing so, the first thing we realise is how time-consuming it is: cutting up even a short article is a precise and boring task. This combination of mechanical attentiveness and intellectual disengagement gives the task a meditative quality. Like any repetitive physical labour, it encourages daydreaming, which may or may not be triggered by the suddenly rootless signifiers in hand. But the Dadaist poem is a game of two halves. It pivots on the volta-like “Shake it gently”. As we take the words out one by one our daydreaming focuses on the emergent text. Long before the poem is finished we are reading ‘meaning’ in its output, fulfilled and denied by turns with each successive element we reveal. Crucially, this mode of engagement is predicated on the instruction “copy conscientiously” – the only instruction that cannot be performed by a robot (a robot, of course, is without conscience). Hence the gentle shake engineers an ontological shift: from reader to writer; consumer to producer; robot to poet. Tzara’s text is often considered a rhetorical gesture, a negation of culture concerned only with short circuiting modes of everyday discourse. But this reading fails to acknowledge the dynamic at work whenever a reader is prompted to reach for the scissors. The Dadaist poem is an assertion of activity over passivity, creative play over consumption, situation over spectacle. This assertion is only made clear, however, if we consent to play poet and follow Tzara’s instructions. The Dadaist poem follows this formula: reader-plays-poet. We begin as readers and, if we choose to play the game, become poets, “infinitely original” in Tzara’s words. There is a parallel here with the dictum of Language poetry, that avant-garde movement in American poetry of the latter half of the 20th century, which may be expressed as reader-constructs-meaning. But here it is taken to its ludic extreme – a limit-case of Roland Barthes’s writerly text. Significantly, although ‘reader’ precedes ‘poet’, neither term is dominant, as both are consolidated in the idea of ‘player’. Much as the player of a musical instrument is both reader (of the music) and performer (of the song), the maker of a Dadaist poem must both follow the signifier and perform the signified, otherwise the poem cannot exist.

  Therefore, in order to read JanusNode and IPGs like it, we should take a phenomenological approach that focuses on the ways in which reader-plays-poet. Hence, we should focus not on specific outputs, but general structures, trends and possibilities. We should examine how this output is presented and – crucially – how it can be controlled and edited by the user. Though we should attend to the accompanying documentation as we would the critical writings of a poet, the locus of our investigation should be the interface itself and the mode of engagement it encourages. We now turn to JanusNode to demonstrate how this might be done.

  Where Tzara has us choose a newspaper article, JanusNode offers a whole array of possibilities, such as Definitions, Conversation Topics and Haiku. The user clicks “Go!” and the screen fills with poetry. JanusNode produces the text quicker than we can read, so we see it being generated before we can read it. Once generation has finished, however, poetry begins.

  In order to read ourselves reading “Divine Indifference” this paper draws on the work of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard’s phenomenological philosophy of poetry and the imagination, most fully realised in The Poetics of Space, has three aspects which, while perhaps resistant to use in conventional literary criticism, are particularly amenable for reading JanusNode. The first is his emphasis on the isolated poetic image to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. He states:

  One must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears: if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image. The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche […] (Bachelard 1964, xv)

  While this presents a serious obstacle to reading anything longer than a short lyric or haiku, it is on the level of the isolated image that JanusNode operates best. So as the maker of a Dadaist poem must be “conscientious”, the reader of JanusNode must be “receptive to the image at the moment it appears”. How? As if panning for gold in a virtual Heraclitean river, we sift through the results, our cursor hovering over the scroll down button, until something glitters – a result gives us pause. But whereas the glitter of gold is an objective phenomenon, the glitter of poetry is a subjective process of the active imagination. The randomly generated combination of signifiers resonates poetically; we experience that “salience on the surface of the psyche”; we go ‘wow’ or ‘oooh’ or ‘cool’, and probe deeper into its ‘meaning’, supplying the text with imaginative content. Bachelard calls it valorisation, defined by his translator Colette Gaudin as “the spontaneous activity of imagination attributing subjective values to its objects (1987, 5). As we respond imaginatively to items of JanusNode’s output, we imbue them with the value of poetry. Figure 3 shows one output that caught this author’s imagination.

  Hence the second reason: for Bachelard, being “receptive to the image” entails a strategy of reading antithetical to the literary critic. While the critic’s reading is “necessarily severe”, the phenomenologist must begin in admiration: “[w]e can admire more or less, but a sincere impulse, a little impulse towards admiration, is always necessary if we are to receive the phenomenological benefit of a poetic image.” (1964, xxxvi) To an extent, computer-generated literature already encourages this strategy of reading. A reader who is well disposed towards technology will be more forgiving of a computer-generated text than one composed by a human author, as stylistic criticisms are muted by the ‘awesome factor’ – the amazing fact that a computer can be programmed to write something imaginatively resonant at all. Ultimately, what we’re marvelling at here is not the technology as such, which at any rate isn’t particularly advanced, but the power of language to mean. “Language dreams” (1964, 146), says Bachelard; it is remarkable that it does so even with no human point of origin. The aleatory language of Dada, Burroughs, RACTER and JanusNode exhibits a surprising degree of imaginative inhabitability – but only for those with that “sincere impulse.”

  For Bachelard, this impulse is the consequence of another; namely, that readers of poetry dream of being poets. He states: “in reading we are reliving our temptations to become a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.” (1964, xxxvi) So our admiration for and imaginative responses to poetic language are the result of a deep creative drive. Hence the third reason why Bachelard is useful: if his statement can be expressed in the formula reader-dreams-of-being-poet, then the reader-plays-poet dynamic of JanusNode erases the distance between these two positions – from dream to (virtual) reality. It achieves this via the interface.

  JanusNode features a variety of scripts, but its controls are not limited to this jukebox selection. Prior to generation checkboxes allow the user to employ a number of poetic devices, including assonanciate, alliterate, and Bökify (a lipogrammatic constraint). After generation, further manipulation is possible, either manually or using various buttons, including Dadafy (an emulation of Tzara’s game), eecummingsfy (breaks the words down into parts) and Text mapping (‘translates’ the text into various idioms including postmodern, leetspeak and dubyabushism). There are more advanced functions too, such as the option to randomly generate a poem using text harvested from URLs. The interface is a sandbox laboratory wherein reader-plays-poet, testing out various possibilities and measuring the results. Following the extended definition of interactivity provided above, we work on the text imaginatively and actively. While bound by the functions and limits of the interface (we are not completely free), this degree of active control heightens imaginative engagement, as we literally ‘play’ the texts that are generated before us.

  Before concluding this analysis we must first turn briefly to the concrete poetry of Eugen Gomringer. Figure 4 shows “wind” (1968, n.p.), an example of what Gomringer called the “constellation”. A constellation, he says, is “a play-area of fixed dimensions […] ordered by the poet. He determines the play-area, the field or force and suggests its possibilities. The reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play and joins in.” (1954) Reading “wind”, we follow the letters however we wish. Soon, the movement of our eyes becomes an active metaphor for the movement of the wind – in this sense, we ‘play’ the text, responding cognitively to our own physical engagement. If we continue reading we approach semantic saturation, whereby the poem becomes less a vehicle of meaning as a material object in its own right. JanusNode presents a virtual field of imaginative possibility that can be construed as a kind of advanced textual “play-area”. Though ultimately “ordered by the [programmer]”, it depends to an unprecedented degree on a reader who “grasps the idea of play and join[s] in”. And much as Gomringer’s poem is designed to emphasise its materiality, the interface of JanusNode has a function designed solely to emphasise its playability: the “[b]e extra-brilliant!” checkbox (Figure 5).As the manual tells us, this button is “a placebo. It doesn’t actually have any effect but you can probably fool yourself into believing that it does, and that will make you happy.” (Westbury, 2012, 37-38) Like the concrete poem, which Gomringer considered a “functional object” (1960), the “[b]e extra-brilliant” button is functional, but like the concrete poem, its function is entirely aesthetic and imaginative. It basically purports to be a turbo button for the imagination. And while the manual concedes that it is only a placebo, it nevertheless emblematises the processes at work in JanusNode. It reminds us that we must “be receptive to the image [or to brilliance] at the moment it appears” and to read with that “sincere impulse towards admiration” (that is, if we believe, or affect to believe, that it works, and ‘imagine harder’ accordingly, we will be rewarded). Moreover, by embedding this reminder in the interface itself, it affirms these imaginative processes as intrinsic to the whole enterprise of poetry generation, and establishes the interface as the locus of this activity. In short, it embodies the reader-plays-poet dynamic.

  All IPGs participate in this dynamic, although the ways in which they do so varies. For example, another popular IPG, Gnoetry, limits its “play-area” to a single poem, whose contents the user regenerates in a process reminiscent of the dice game Yahtzee. For this reason other IPGs may well demand different frameworks through which to be read, but these readings should at least share the interface-centred, phenomenological approach that is proposed here, concerned with elucidating the mechanisms of the reader-plays-poet dynamic. While on the surface this may seem like a major departure from the study of poems in a book, it is hoped that this analysis has shown how the theoretical toolkit of literary criticism is well equipped to make this shift and, moreover, that for those used to working with experimental and avant-garde texts, it is not such a departure after all.

  One final question remains, however: how do we know the game is finished? Put differently, is there any ontological distinction between the reader-playing-poet and a real poet? Some might consider this a moot point, but it is at least practically useful to localise the point at which the game – as defined by the IPG in question – ends. With Tzara it is easy: when the bag is empty. Likewise it is simple enough to define the game limits of JanusNode. Its output window, although it allows manual editing, is a volatile environment. It has no redo function, and one wrong click can all too easily wipe it clean. Hence any choice nuggets we want to keep must be saved and transferred into a word processor for further editing and, ultimately, posterity. Once the text is shifted from the playful JanusNode interface to the sober environment of the word processor, it is game over. The good news, of course, is that the game is won: we are now poets.

  3. Why?

  Of course, things are not as simple as the closing rhetoric of the previous section makes out. In terms of the close reading presented above, it makes sense to equate the limits of the ‘text’ under study with the limits of the interface, but the critic’s work does not end here. The ontological distinction between the reader-playing-poet and the poet, while localisable in terms of activity, still requires a great deal of theoretical interrogation. Furthermore, if it is the case that when the game ends, the poem begins, it is necessary to emphasise that the study of IPGs should not be at the expense of poets who use them. Some of the most interesting contemporary poetry is written in collaboration with IPGs and is yet to receive the critical attention it deserves – see, for example, Gnoetry Daily and Beard of Bees press. Ultimately, however, once removed from the reader-plays-poet dynamic, such poetry must survive (or otherwise) on its own merits. But as this paper has argued, IPGs constitute virtual aesthetic objects in their own right which, though not without precursors in the literary avant-garde, engender entirely new modes of poetic engagement. That these programs are usually hobbyist projects, bearing the idiosyncratic marks of their creators, only make them more conducive to close and comparative analyses. Moreover, they participate in a counter-tradition of extending the limits of poetic possibility that goes back at least as far as Dada. For these reasons alone they are worthy of literary study. Not only that, but as discussion around contemporary poetics centres on questions of appropriation and authorship in a virtual culture of information overload and archive fever, it can be argued that such programs have never been more relevant. How, then, can IPGs and their study contribute to this discourse?

  Few contemporary poets are as engaged with technology and new media as conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, as the title of his critical work, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, suggests. There is a Futurist ecstasy running through Goldsmith’s rhetoric, centred on the increased possibilities for the manipulation of text presented by new technology:

  The writer’s solitary lair is transformed into a networked alchemical laboratory, dedicated to the brute physicality of textual transference. The sensuality of copying gigabytes from one drive to another: the whirr of the drive, the churn of intellectual matter manifested as sound. The carnal excitement from supercomputing heat generated in the service of literature. […] Language in play. Language out of play. Language frozen. Language melted. Sculpting with text. Data mining. Sucking on words. Our task is simply to mind the machines. (2011, 221)

  Is Goldsmith describing something akin to the reader-plays-poet dynamic? Not quite. He exhibits Bachelard’s “sincere impulse towards admiration”, but it is less admiration for the poetic image – the ‘literature’ per se – as it is for the “supercomputing heat”, the technology itself – not the image, but the “brute […] transference”. Goldsmith’s rhetoric, much like his (un)creative work, fetishizes the process at the expense of the product. This seems to tally with the interface-centred phenomenological approach advocated in the previous section. But Goldsmith generally publishes his work in book or pdf format, thereby inviting a traditional critical approach, so that any dynamic mode of engagement is closed to the reader. The result is a series of books that are unashamedly and unbearably dull, such as his infamous work Day, a retyping of one edition of the New York Times. Goldsmith wears this dullness as a badge of pride, boasting that he is “the most boring writer that ever lived” (2004) and that he prefers a “thinkership” to a readership. In terms of interactivity his work travels in the opposite direction to IPGs, reducing participation to the purely cognitive as IPGs augment the cognitive with the physical. While both Goldsmith’s work and IPGs emphasise process, the latter makes the reader an instrumental part of this process. It is therefore an imaginatively proactive experience, and so serves as a playful corrective to the more problematic aspects of Goldsmith’s work and the Conceptual Writing movement in general.

  Moreover, if the implicit point of a work such as Day is that the glut of information in the digital age nullifies any scope for originality and creativity, then are we not better, polemically speaking, to renounce our ties to ‘information’ in the conventional sense and bask in the ludic space of the reader-plays-poet dynamic? A space where the poetic image reigns supreme, and where our “temptations to become a poet” are not reduced to the mechanistic procedures of Goldsmith but are realised in an aleatoric and engaging virtual environment. Goldsmith is fond of quoting John Cage’s quip that “technology essentially is a way of getting more done with less effort” (in Goldsmith, 2011, 82). The IPG suggests a shift in emphasis that might rescue poetry from the void of the boring yet: technology essentially is a way of having more fun with less effort.

  William Carlos Williams famously said that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” (2009). Goldsmith asserts the truth of this statement in its most literal sense, composing his works according to procedural constraints that might be construed as specially designed ‘programs’. But in so doing he forgets another truism of Williams’s: “if it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem” (1951). Williams’s joyous celebration of the imagination in Spring and All has its contemporary echo in the reader-plays-poet dynamic of the IPG, whose operations are wholly dependent on the active imagination of the user. We give it meaning; we find the poetry; we bring the joy. Nor is this an entirely frivolous activity, so long as we have the capacity to experience that “sudden salience on the surface of the psyche”. There is a passage in Spring and All that seems to refer to this process which, with a small alteration, may well be spoken by JanusNode itself, describing the very essence of the reader-plays-poet dynamic:

  And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed – To the imagination – you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply: To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force – the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and see. In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a [virtual] embrace, the classic caress of [interface] and [reader-playing-poet]. We are one. Whenever I say “I” I mean also “you.” And so, together, as one, we shall begin. (1966, 178)

  It is thus that the role of IPGs in contemporary poetry should be considered: a means of retaining the imagination as fundamental to poetry even as discussions tend towards ideological, technological and paratextual concerns, whilst still participating in those discussions. In other words, IPGs serve as a hedonistic antidote to the driest excesses of Conceptual Writing and its ilk without losing sight of the pertinent critical issues raised by that work. As literary critics, it is our duty to accommodate ‘texts’ like JanusNode in such discussions, and to help foster appreciation of them and bring them to a wider audience. It is hoped that this paper has offered some tentative early steps as to how this might be achieved.