John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961)
Filed under book | Tags: · composing, composition, experimental music, history of music, music, poetry, sound
Silence, A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X (in this order) form the five parts of a series of books in which Cage tries, as he says, “to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them.” Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called “writing through”).
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 1961
ISBN 0819560286, 9780819560285
Length 276 pages
Tan Lin: Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · ascii, blogging, facebook, fiction, plagiarism, poetry, search
Poetry. Cross-genre. HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE) exists somewhere between a Project Gutenberg version of Samul Pepys Diary and a minute-to-minute news feed and blog of Heath Ledger’s death. Sad, appropriated, lyrical and confused, the book contains a brief history of recent performance art, a legal defense of plagiarism, the diary of a poetry workshop at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, an MP3 protest song, and an examination of SMS and GMS technologies as distribution networks for human sadness. Multi-authored, and with numerous text blocks and photos, HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE), NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE, UNTITLED HEATH LEDGER PROJECT, A HISTORY OF THE SEARCH ENGINE, DISCO OS is in full color.
Publisher: Zasterle Press, 2009
ISBN: 9788487467479
Pages: 86
Annotated edition (by Danny Snelson)
Direct download (no OCR)
Comment (0)David Link: Poetry Machines / Machine Poetry. On the Early History of Computerised Text Generation and Generative Systems (2007) [German]
Filed under book | Tags: · algorithm, code poetry, digital poetry, poetry
Since the construction of the first computer in 1948, text is not only written and read, but also executed. Authors are now able to compose documents that produce content when run. “Poetry Machines / Machine Poetry” investigates the early history of these algorithmic artefacts in detail, traces them back to their literary predecessors, and emphasises the paradigms, contexts and phantasms that motivated and inspired them.
Computers are fundamentally alien to language. While Artificial Intelligence research in the 1960s and 1970s tried to overcome this difficulty unsuccessfully, text adventures used the same resistance playfully to enhance the suspense of the game. The book analyses variable scripts, Joseph Weizenbaum’s “Eliza”, Kenneth Colby’s “Parry”, early adventure games and Terry Winograd’s “SHRDLU” down to their source code, points out their metaphorical and logical structures, and places them in a genealogy of growing algorithmic complexity. The attempts are based on the belief that language and the knowledge about the world represented by it can be fully explained and even be formalised, emphatically advocated for instance in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”. Technically, optional elements are arranged in tree-like structures and generate seemingly endless variance.
An antagonistic tradition of thought connects the dadaist Tristan Tzara, Claude E. Shannon’s re-discovery of the Russian mathematician Andrey A. Markov and the “Cut-Up” experiments of William S. Burroughs. It focuses on operations rather than on options and develops genuinely generative algorithms, which employ different routines to turn found material into collages and to produce effects unforeseen. The lacking machinic understanding of symbols transforms into poetry.
For principal reasons, the study of algorithms cannot proceed purely theoretically. As a concrete example of generative software, whose scope is by no means limited to the medium of text, Link gives an overview of a program he developed in the context of this research, “Poetry Machine”. The interactive text generator is based on semantic networks and acquires information about language autonomously from the internet. The translation of the fundamental text “An Example of Statistical Investigation of the Text ‘Eugene Onegin’ Concerning the Connection of Samples in Chains” by Andrey A. Markov, which can be regarded as the foundation of the generative approach, is given in the appendix.
Poesiemaschinen / Maschinenpoesie. Zur Frühgeschichte computerisierter Texterzeugung und generativer Systeme
Publisher: Wilhelm Fink
Approx. 150 pages, 23 b/w images
Gayle Zachmann: Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, epistemology, impressionism, literary criticism, literature, mimesis, photography, poetry
Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure “ivory-tower poet,” Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé’s quest for “scientific” language, and convincingly links the poet’s production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé’s poetry and his circumstantial writings.
Publisher SUNY Press, 2008
ISBN 079147593X, 9780791475935
Length 209 pages
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Štěpán Vlašín (ed.): Avantgarda známá a neznámá (1970-72) [Czech]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, art criticism, art history, constructivism, czech, literature, poetry
Svazek I.
Od proletářského umění k poetismu 1919-1924.
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Svazek 2.
Vrchol a krize poetismu 1925-1928.
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Svazek 3.
Generační diskuse 1929-1931
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K vydání připravil pracovní tým Ústavu pro českou literaturu Akademie věd České Republiky vedený Štěpánem Vlašínem.
Vydalo nakladelství Svoboda, 1970-72.
Craig J. Saper: Networked Art (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · conceptual art, network culture, poetry
Outlines an exciting new approach to this confluence of art, media, and poetry.
The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems—money, logos, corporate names, stamps—to create intimate situations among the participants.
In Saper’s analysis, the pleasures that these aesthetic situations afford include shared special knowledge or new language among small groups of participants. Functioning as artworks in themselves, these temporary institutional structures—etworks, publications, and collective works—give rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social system. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus’s Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana. Networked Art is an essential guide to the digital artists and networks of the emerging future.
Key words and phrases: Fluxus, concrete poetry, mail art, mail artists, visual poetry, Dick Higgins, Big Dada, conceptual art, Ray Johnson, George Maciunas, sound poetry, Ken Friedman, Guy Bleus, Bauhaus, detournement, neoist, Max Bill, Augusto de Campos, George Brecht, Joseph Beuys
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 0816637075, 9780816637072
198 pages
