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Generative Text

The dynamic nature of digital language art as a medium was what the readings focused most on. I was really interested in the notion of how to think about traditional art as digital art brought up in "Digital Oulipo: Programming Potential Literature." Specifically, the Cent mille milliards de poemes, which humanizes computer generated poetry. When I think of computer generated poetry, I think of a random assortment of non-meaningful words and sentences. However, visualizing it as a compilation of different poems composed by a person whose lines can be isolated and reconfigured by turning pages and make some sense brings in the human actor that I would otherwise not have even thought about. Computer generated poetry isn't just random words stacked together, it's randomness with a purpose in mind which is a point "Context Free Grammars" brings up in explaining how people are able to program computers to make meaningful sentences. A really good example of computer generated poetry was the Bot or Not website. It was interesting to see how similar the computer generated poems were to the traditional ones, and how well put together the computer generated ones were.

I do wonder what this means in terms of poetry, though. There is a degree of control that the creator has in terms of writing the lines, and that the reader has in terms of the amount of times or when they want a poem generated. But neither one has full control of the poetry. The randomized algorithm of the computer is what controls the poem that gets generated. Does this concept point to a lack of humanism in digital poetry, or does it point to an artistic acknowledgement of our lack of control in other facets of life?

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