Deforming Gertrude Stein: A scholarly book in progress Main Menu Deformance as a critical-creative research method DEFORMANCES - OBJECTS | OBJECTS Supplement: What's Behind the Door? Large Language Models in Humanities Experimental Methods Works Cited Acknowledgements

Introduction

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Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1913) marks one of the most radical breaks with the poetic tradition of literary modernism. The poems were praised by some as genius, and dismissed by others as “just rambling nonsense, private references and doolally burbling” (Hensher). The poem, organized in three sections titled “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” is set in a domestic interior populated with everyday things. There are carafes and a plate, a chair, a piano, eyeglasses, and also roast beef, sugar, potatoes, asparagus, butter. However, these objects are “enlivened” (“Celery” 53) with the goal of unleashing what Stein describes as “a violent kind of delightfulness” (“A Substance in a Cushion” 12). Surfaces glimmer and fade. Colors change into other colors. Objects resemble other objects, and cease to resemble themselves. Things are broken, cut, packed, pounded, opened, closed, taken out, and inserted into one another, and they are arranged and rearranged. Out of silence (36) and stillness erupt movement and sound. There is dancing, ringing, singing, wailing (39), clatter, and crackling. There are smells and textures and temperatures. All of these qualities seem at once to belong to the objects, to the observer, and to the room itself. “[I]n there behind the door” (64), what should be itself becomes another thing; what exists in one state occupies another; what feels like one thing starts to feel like another things.
Gertrude Stein's well photographed study, where her friends like Man Ray, Matisse, Dora Maar, and Picasso would gather, is clearly the setting for the poem. What is intriguing about this real literary place at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris was that it was full of artworks, whose position on the walls frequently shifted as her private collection grew and shrank. This literary place consolidates the history of modernism itself.


How in the contemporary moment can we feel and hear our way into this compressed, busy, noisy space? “In There Behind the Door” is a multimodal digital adaptation and remediation of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons that uses LLMs (large language models - artificial intelligence) and other digital tools to animate the space of the poetry, using practices of experimentation Stein herself would surely have adored. Archival materials and AI-generated materials including cloned voices, music, and sound are brought together.

Navigate the work in linear or non-linear fashion, and encounter Stein's poetic works, interactive text, film, animation, and generated sound designed less as illustrations and more as demonstrations – thought experiments – of the still-radical concepts that Stein had been bringing to life.


Visitors to the Transforming Literary Places exhibition in Tartu can view this work on a browser window on a laptop or desktop screen.

To open the exhibition on a mobile device, scan the QR code:
                                                                                                                                                                          

Explore the objects, food, and rooms in In There, Behind the Door in a linear fashion through the index or non-linear.
 

 





 

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  1. In There, Behind the Door Monique Tschofen

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