A jumble of electronic words upon the electronic jumbling of other words.
I am thinking about form. You might find more content-related stuff at narrative or rhetoric.
Where did the author go?
Colton (2019):
Childbirth
by Maureen Q. Smith
The joy, the pain, the begin again. My boy.
Born of me, for me, through my tears, through my fears.
This short poem naturally invites interpretation, and we might think of the joy, pain, tears as fears as referring literally to the birth of a child, perhaps from the first-person perspective of the author, as possibly indicated by “My boy… Born of me”. We might also interpret the “begin again” as referring to the start of a baby’s life, but equally it might reflect a fresh start for the family.
Importantly, the poem was not actually written by Maureen Q. Smith. The author was in fact a man called Maurice Q. Smith. In this light, we might want to re-think our interpretation. The poem takes on a different flavour now, but we can still imagine the male author witnessing a childbirth, possibly with his own tears and fears, reflecting the joy and pain of a woman giving birth. However, I should reveal that Maurice Q. Smith was actually a convicted paedophile when he wrote this poem, and it was widely assumed to be about the act of grooming innocent children, which he referred to as “childbirth”. The poem now affords a rather sinister reading, with “tears” and “fears” perhaps reflecting the author’s concerns for his own freedom; and the phrases “Joy and pain” and “Born of me, for me” now taking on very dark tones.
Fortunately, as you may have guessed, the poem wasn’t written by a paedophile, but was instead generated by a computer program using a cut-up technique. Thankfully, we can now go back and project a different interpretation onto the poem. Looking at “Joy and pain”, perhaps the software was thinking about… Well, the part about “Born of me, for me” must have been written to convey… Hmmmm. We see fairly quickly that it is no longer possible to project feelings, background and experiences onto the author, and the poem has lost some of its value. If the words have been put together algorithmically with nothing resembling the human thought processes we might have expected, we may also think of the poem as having lost its authenticity and a lot, if not all, of its meaning. We could, of course, pretend that it was written by a person. In fact, it’s possible to imagine an entire anthology of computer generated poems that we are instructed to read as if written by various people. But then, why wouldn’t we prefer to read an anthology of poems written by actual people?
For full and final disclosure: I actually wrote the poem and found it remarkably easy to pen a piece for which a straightforward interpretation changes greatly as the nature of the author changes. I’ve been using this provocative poem to try to change the minds of researchers in Computational Creativity research for a few years, in particular to try and shift the focus away from an obsession with the quality of output judged as if it were produced by a person.
Of course, many of us do centaur writing now, see e.g. How independent writers are turning to AI.
Interactive fiction
Putting interactive stories online, in a texty way.
Twine is a classic tool. See Adi Robertson’s Text Adventures: how Twine remade gaming
Texturewriter
Easy to play: We created a word-on-word interaction mechanic suitable for touchscreen phones and tablets, as well as web browsers.
Easy to create: Our WYSIWYG editor makes composition and design a right-brained, no code affair — right in the browser.
Easy to share: Click a button to publish and publicly share your work on social media. Or download an .html file to host it yourself or share via email.
inform7
See Em Short’s inform7 intro
ink claims to be a literate coding language for narrative that is more like writing than coding. Also
The powerful scripting language behind Heaven’s Vault, 80 Days and Sorcery!
Presumably those were good games?
Incoming
It Awaits Your Experiments.:
back in the early two-thousands Christian Bök, famous for accomplishments lesser poets would never even dream of attempting […] started work on the world’s first biologically-self-replicating poem: the Xenotext Experiment, which aspired to encode a poem into the genetic code of a bacterium. Not just a poem, either: a dialog. The DNA encoding one half of that exchange (“Orpheus” by name) was designed to function both as text and as a functional gene. The protein it coded for functioned as the other half (“Eurydice”), a sort of call-and-response between the gene and its product. The protein was also designed to fluoresce red, which might seem a tad gratuitous until you realize that “Eurydice”’s half of the dialog contains the phrase “the faery is rosy/of glow”.
An amulet is a kind of poem that depends on language, code, and luck. To qualify, a poem must satisfy these criteria:
- Its complete Unicode text is 64 bytes or less. [1]
- The hexadecimal SHA-256 hash of the text includes four or more 8s in a row. [2]
Jeff Noon, Cobralingus, and his “post-futurist manifesto”, Poemage, rhymedesign.
Machine-learning-based rhyme and portmanteau generation? Rhymebrain. Or perhaps botnik writer:
The web prototype of the Botnik predictive keyboard offers word suggestions based on any text you feed it. Load a text file via the menu in the top left, then write using the grid of options.
Oh, and all the LLMs ever, of course.
