Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 12:33:40 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: anna balint <epistolaris@freemail.hu>
Subject: Re:  Re:  Dze Ztandard !nzkr!pz!on


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dear anna balint,

For me the heart of this is your definition
- generative and combinatory character
- random and aleatory character
- interactivity
and my work certainly doesn't fall in these categories. The nearest would
be the "generative character" - generated from an input text transformed
through one or another text filter (in this case, perl). Some of the text=
s
are the application of a filter to itself recursively, F(F(F)) for
example.

In this sense, they could be hand-written and hand-substituted. But then,
generative poetry is based on algorithms as well which could be reproduce=
d
by hand.

I don't look at them as poetry, although others do. I see them as investi=
-
gations into language, into encoding, into the political economy of
language, into the reception-structure and phenomenology of the reader,
into the making and construction of sense. For this reason I'm also
interested in the input of 'urgent texts' - I just sent the following in
response to a query on webartery -

"'urgent text' - which also relates to the pascal implementation of a
program similar to sondheim.exe which I did in the 70s - a text which
demands to be heard - a political text - a text whose desire or body
pushes it forward - a text of discomfiture, dis/ease - as if language
had/has that urgency in a state of deprivation - as in a site or
situation of the political economy of language - language of the last
cry for example - or a structure almost toppling, weathering - the
language of the last syntax - the lost syntax - sartre's politics of
scarcity -

structure as well - exposure or duplication/shimmering of structure - its
shuddering -"

- in other words, the input text is critical.

There _are_ interactive works - for example programs written in display o=
n
linux (display is a very very simple interfacing for text input etc.) -
and I will give these programs to others for inputting/processing - the
result, however, is then fixed. In this sense, the posted texts are
similar to those of Mez and the materials from solipsis, etc., that are
garnered for the Unstable Digest on Nettime, and fall under the aegis of
codework.

Here is an example that may clarify things - there is an essay in
Classical Chinese called the 1000 Character Essay; each is different. It'=
s
a difficult text, and a friend of mine and I are slowly translating it.
Anyway, I asked Florian Cramer, who is much more adept than I am at
programming, if he could write a script that would take a text and have i=
t
do the same thing - i.e. each word would appear only once in the output.
He did that, and later I also changed the script. But the original assign=
s
a different value to words than is usually the case - instead of numerous
instances of each word, each word is unique, almost the way a person is
unique. So the result is a different economy and aesthetics, and the
resulting texts reflect that.

I do consider these works art, but not necessarily independent art-works;
the Internet Text as a whole is always in-process, in a making (one of th=
e
old Scottish words for 'poet' is 'makar'). Instead they're resonances for
me, which can both stand on their own, or possess their own fit in the
Text, which like Jabes' texts, seems to be interminable.

And finally, it's the machine that fascinates me - protocols, languages,
filterings, processes, operating systems, code in general - which
underlies what we do, but is rarely brought to the surface. In my work,
and the work of others, the surface and depths have an uneasy relationshi=
p
with each other - interpenetrating, confusing - almost as if the under-
pinnings of culture - all that desire and rupture - appeared back on the
surface, breaking through etiquette...

Finally, finally, the mode of distribution - through email lists (not, in
general, syndicate, of course, but webartery, Poetics, Imitationpoetics,
arc, wryting, Cybermind), is an intrinsic part of the texts, which often
play with the time of arrival, inbox placement, and so forth -

Alan -


On Wed, 7 May 2003, anna balint wrote:

> dear Alan Sondheim,
>
> do you consider these transformation programs
> art? Or you think that each text generated with it
> - is an individual art piece? Or we should look to
> you work as conceptual-or visual poetry?
>
> If i have to take a position, i prefer to think that
> none of them is poetry. They don't fit
> to any category with which i define computer poetry:
> - generative and combinatory character
> - random and aleatory character
> - interactivity
>
> I understand that computer poetry involves the
> charactersitics of the medium in the work,
> and i don't treat separately each text
> generated with the help of a program,
> that would much limit the area of research,
> but i consider the whole
> program and texts as one work, to the degree
> that i include ephemerality and irreproducibility
> in the list of characteristics of computer poetry.
>
> Some works that inspire my criteria:
>
> 1959 Theo Lutz devolops a program on the computer of
> the Technical Univeristy in Stuttgart that combined
> 40 words and generates gramatically correct sentences
>
> 1959 Brion Gysin together with the mathematician
> Ian Sommerville permute the words of his poem
> 'I Am That I Am' with a computer, and
> also in 1961 the poem 'Junk is No Good Baby'
>
> 1964 Jean A. Baudot publishes 'Machine a ecrire',
> the first volume with poems generated on the
> computer, at Les éditions du jour, Montréal
>
> 1965 Emmett Williams permuted on the computer
> the 10 most used words of Dante's Divina Commedia
> [occhi, mondo, terre, dio, maestro, ciel, mente,
> dolce, amor] and genereted a 213 lines long litany
> of them, and also in 1966 he generated a poem
> with the title 'IBM'
>
> 1967 Baudot's book inspired Pierre Moretti to
> present with his amateur theater company
> Saltimbaques a theater piece generated on
> computer. Baudot generated the text on the
> basis of a vocabulary defined by Moretti.
> They presented the piece with the title
> 'Équation pour un homme actuel' in  the
> Pavillion de la Jeunesse in Quebec at the
> Young Theater Festival. It became a scandal.
> After the sixths show the Public Morals Department
> of the Montreal Police accused the piece of
> immorality and they banned the play.
> [it was on stage on a boat in the port of Montreal,
> but out of the Canadian juridictional waters,
> to cover the expenses of the process]
>
> 1969  Svante Bodin, member of the Swedish group
> KVAL generates a part of his work 'Transition to
> Majorana Space' with a computer
>
> 1973 Richard W. Bailey edits the first anthology
> of Computer Poems at Protagonnising Press, Michigan,
> USA. The volume include 17 writers from Canada,
> England, and USA, among others Marie Boroff,
> Robert Gaskins, Louis T. Millic, Edwin Morgan,
> John Morris, Archie Donald, Noreen Geend.
> Edwin Morgan published already in 1967 in
> Emmett Williams's anthology of Concrete Poetry
> a poem composed on computer from 1963 with the
> title 'jollymerry' (Concrete Poetry, Something
> Else Press, 1967)
>
> 1975
> at the end of the sixties Raymond Queneau and
> François Le Lyonnais found OULIPO, and their
> first manifesto states that they plan to use
> computers for reserach and generating texts.
> Later among others Italo Calvino, Georges Perec,
> Jacques Roubaud, Michèle Métail and Harry Mathews
> joined the group. In 1975 Raymond Queneau publishes
> his Cent mille milliards de poemes, and the OULIPO
> presented the program developed for at Europalia
> in Brussels. Readers were able to generate themselves
> variants and print them.
>
> 1973
> in the beginning of the seventies Jean-Pierre Balpe,
> Pierre Lusson and Jacques Rubaud founded the
> literature research group Alamo, that studies and
> generates computer literature. Jacques Rubaud constructed
> numerous literary softwares, the most known
> is 'Alexandrins artificiels', that generates infinite
> number of perfect alexandrin verses. He introduced in
> the computer several thousand words of classic literature,
> but the verses that he generated did not cohere in a poem.
> Rubaud composed together with Pierre Lussonnal and
> Paul Braffort the plagiarist generators 'Rimbaudelaire'
> and 'Mallarm'. Jean-Pierre Balpe is known for the his
> orientation towards literary texts generated on natural
> languages, his most famous generator is 'Poèmes d'amour'
> that generates love lithanies and the '1536 peties contes
> parfois tristes ou pervers' for which he introduced in the
> computer 620 different structures and several thousand words.
> He published 1536 variants of the tales that he selected
> on the random basis out of the 10 on 45th power possible
> variants.
> 
> 1979 
> Csaba Tubak launches at the meeting of the avantgarde paper
> magazine Atelier Hongrois [Magyar Muhely] in Hadersdorf (Austria)
> his 'Electronic Game and Tool for Writers'.  This was a program
> that generated randomly texts from the 12.000 words vocabulary and
> texts of the avantgarde poet Alpar Bujdoso.  Though the semantic
> and grammatical variants of the generative process were controled
> with algorythms, just as the surrelist poems, these texts could not
> be described with criteria of lingustic competence, but with the
> avantgarde view of the literature.

> 1985 Tibor Papp presented in the Pompidou Center
> 'Les très riches heures de l'ordinateur, n°1'  -
> the first dynamic computer generated visual poem
>
> 1989 Philippe Bootz, Jean-Marie Dutez, Frédéric de
> Velaz, Claude Maillard, Tibor Papp found and edit Alire,
> a magazine that publishes computer poetry only. It
> appeared twice a year first on floppy, later on CD-ROM,
> in the nineties several magazines started that were
> possible to consult on electronic form only,
> Jean-Pierre Balpe also started the Caos magazine.
>
> and the nineties...
>
>
> greetings,
> anna
>
> Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>:
> >
>
>
>
>
>

http://www.asondheim.org/ http://www.asondheim.org/portal/
http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
Trace projects http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm
finger sondheim@panix.com

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