Dze Ztandard !nzkr!pz!on

[anna balint]

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 Luc 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. 

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 at panix.com>:
>