In order to contextualize the work Global Telelanguage Resources is doing toward the creation of an independent set of writing tools for writers and language enthusiasts that allows for the literary enhancement and creative design of texts via digital technology, it may be interesting to take another look at some of the early experiments in digital literary text-generation mentioned in TCR 2-50 guest editor Andrew Klobucar’s essay, Artifice and Intelligence: New Writing, New Technologies:
If writing’s political capacity to invoke conflict between the visual and the voice, between representation and reasoning, can be traced back to the Socratic dialogue, it is not surprising that literary experiments with computers began within years of their first commercial appearance in the mid-twentieth century. The earliest attempts at computer poetry, the digital caves of Lascaux, so to speak, are usually identified as the German programmer Theo Lutz’s “Stochastiche Text” (1959), a text-generating programme written for the early ZUSE Z22 computer. Working with his teacher, Max Bense, one of the earliest theorists of computer poetry, Lutz used a random number generator to create texts where key words were randomly inserted within a set of logical constants in order to create a syntax. The programme thus demonstrated how logical structures like mathematical systems could work with language. The capacity to simulate reasoning in an algorithm, where words are randomly selected and placed within a template, is clearly evident:
Not every look is near. No village is late.
A Castle is free and every farmer is distant.
Every stranger is distant. A day is late.
Every house is dark. An eye is deep.
Not every castle is old. Every day is old.
Not every guest is furious. A church is narrow.
No house is open and not every church is quiet.
Not every eye is furious. No look is new.Theo Lutz, “Stocastiche Texte,” Augenblick 4 (1959): 3-9.
Andrew Klobucar goes on to say: This programme consisted of only fifty commands, yet theoretically it could generate over four million different sentences. Twenty-five years later, modern print technology finally discharged the last vestiges of human input, producing the first book composed entirely by machine. William Chamberlain’s “The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed” (1984) claims that, save for its introduction, “the writing … was all done by computer,” specifically by a program called RACTER able to generate grammatically consistent sentences with the help of a pre-coded grammar template. Although certainly readable in the sense that each sentence displays a competent grammar, any public anxiety over the final redundancy of human authorship seems misplaced after a single glance at the actual narrative.
At all events my own essays and dissertations about love and its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be known and understood by all of you who read this and talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject of this essay. We will commence with a question: does steak love lettuce? This question is implacably hard and inevitably difficult to answer. Here is a question: does an electron love a proton, or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does a man love a woman or, to be specific and to be precise, does Bill love Diane? The interesting and critical response to this question is: no! He is obsessed and infatuated with her. He is loony and crazy about her. That is not the love of steak and lettuce, of electron and proton and neutron. This dissertation will show that the love of a man and a woman is not the love of steak and lettuce. Love is interesting to me and fascinating to you but it is painful to Bill and Diane. That is love!
Racter, Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed: Computer Prose and Poetry (NY: Warner, 1984).
Andrew Klobucar: Although perhaps not Booker prize material, the book, along with its originating software, garnered praise among critics as a prototype of Artificial Intelligence, that Holy Grail of the computer sciences. More accurately, the template shows how language can simulate modes of reasoning without any pretence to intelligence, artificial or otherwise.
‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,’ the linguist Noam Chomsky once famously said, his perfectly well-formed sentence: grammatically correct, signifying nothing. Ellen Ullman, The Bug
For more history check out Christopher T. Funkhouser’s excellent book: Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms 1959-1995. Eds. Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. (Tuscaloosa, AB: UP Alabama,
2007); as well as this exhaustive article posted to Neatorama in January 2008:The Wonderful World of Early Computing
other islands in this text-fed stream
