The Trivial Program "yes"

A trivial program, one that simply prints “y” or a string that is given as an argument repeatedly, is explicated and examined at the levels of function and code. Although the program by itself is neither interesting or instructive, the argument is presented that by looking at “yes” it is possible to better understand how programs exist not only on platforms but also in an ecology of systems, scripts, and utilities

Katie and Jay, An Odious Essay

This alphonetic tale of Katie and Jay described fornication and violent death. Children should read instead William Steig\u27s excellent illustrated works C D B and C D C

Conceptual Computing and Digital Writing

In 1952 computer scientist Christopher Strachey wrote a parodical love letter generator. This system, the prototype of all computational conceptual writing – the almost completely secret prototype – was up and running not only before conceptual writing was formulated but even before conceptual art had arrived. The program predates the earliest work that is consistently identified as part of the (yet unnamed) conceptual art movement, Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing. It was not created by someone who identified or was identified as a writer, or as an artist, and it seems to have been seen as more the server-room equivalent of a parlor game than as a part of the tradition of literary arts. Only recently have programmers and scholars provided versions of the generator that appear in an installation and Web contexts and discussed in depth the literary aspects of the system. All of this makes Strachey’s program not only the first in its category but also quite typical of the scattered, marginal, often overlooked projects that have explored the computer’s ability to write conceptually over the last sixty years

Upper Typewriter Row

I tutor you, reporter: to write, wipe out type. Out, out, type! Retire your repertoire, Totter type--teeter your type tower. Put up your weir! Tie your tripwire! Rewire your typewriter

New Novel Machines: Nanowatt and World Clock

My Winchester’s Nightmare: A Novel Machine (1999) was developed to bring the interactor’s input and the system’s output together into a texture like that of novelistic prose. Almost fifteen years later, after an electronic literature practice mainly related to poetry, I have developed two new “novel machines.” Rather than being works of interactive fiction, one (Nanowatt, 2013) is a collaborative demoscene production (specifically, a single-loading VIC-20 demo) and the other (World Clock, 2013) is a novel generator with accompanying printed book. These two productions offer an opportunity to discuss how my own and other highly computational electronic literature relates to the novel. Nanowatt and World Clock are non-interactive but use computation to manipulate language at low levels. I discuss these aspects and other recent electronic literature that engages the novel, considering to what extent novel- like computational literature in general is becoming less interactive and more fine- grained in its involvement with language. (Text of a presentation at the 2014 ELO Conference in Milwaukee. To appear in Polish translation in ha!art, issue 48.

XS, S, M, L: Creative Text Generators of Different Scales

Creative text generation projects of different sizes (in terms of lines of code and length of development time) are described. “Extra-small,” “small,” “medium,” and “large” projects are discussed as participating in the practice of creative computing differently. Different ways in which these projects have circulated and are being used in the community of practice are identified. While large-scale projects have clearly been important in advancing creative text generation, the argument presented here is that the other types of projects are also valuable and that they are undervalued (particularly in computer science and strongly related fields) by current structures of higher education and academic communication – structures which could be changed

Begin Now

In the following love poem all the words are in alphabetical order. I am indebted to the much more extensive, if much less sensible and cyntactical, Legendary, Lexical, Loquacious Love by Eve Rhymer. Her work contains all the words from a romance novel, alphabetized into 25 chapters (no X). A more sensible and very impressive work of this sort is the last chapter of Walter Abish\u27s novel Alphabetical Africa, a list of alphabetized two-word phrases that recapitulate the novel

The Case for Concise Computational Creativity Systems

In formalizing the notion of creativity – defining that concept so that it can be dealt with in the context of computing – researchers have sought to develop the most concise possible definition that captures the essence of creativity. But in building computational creativity systems, these same researchers are content to develop extremely elaborate and complex systems that implement a cornucopia of different ideas and approaches, or perhaps implement single ideas that are themselves very complex. Using examples from the literary arts, I argue that it is helpful to write very small programs that model specific techniques in different domains of creativity. These programs can then be used to identify how those specific techniques contribute to creativity, serving as the foundation for further work. By aiming for brevity and developing small, elegant systems, researchers can explore new aesthetic territory and better relate their results to the particular ways in which their systems operate. Keywords: constraint, brevity, modeling, domain-specific techniques, story generation, poetry generatio

No Code: Null Programs

To continue the productive discussion of uninscribed artworks in Craig Dworkin’s No Medium, this report discusses, in detail, those computer programs that have no code, and are thus empty or null. Several specific examples that have been offered in different contexts (the demoscene, obfuscated coding, a programming challenge, etc.) are analyzed. The concept of a null program is discussed with reference to null strings and files. This limit case of computing shows that both technical and cultural means of analysis are important to a complete understanding of programs – even in the unusual case that they lack code

Autopia and The Truelist: Language Combined in Two Computer-Generated Books

Autopia (Troll Thread, 2016) and The Truelist (Counterpath, 2017) are computer-generated literary books. I reported at ELO 2014 on two of my text-generating “novel machines” (Montfort 2014). The two projects discussed in this paper are about novel-size, but are different sorts of projects. Autopia’s text consists of headline-style sentences made entirely of the singular and plural names of cars. This project manifests not only as a print-on-demand book from a post-digital publisher, but also as a web project and a gallery installation. The Truelist’s 140 pages of verse are available in offset printed book form and also as a complete studio recording; additionally, anyone is welcome to run the even simpler and shorter program to generate the exact text. The main component of each line of The Truelist is a solid compound (or kenning, or conceptual blend). Neither program is interactive in the usual sense, but they are both short, use no external data or libraries, and are explicitly licensed as free software, inviting people to explore or revise them as programmers. Autopia and The Truelist both produce straightforward combinations of a limited set of linguistic units. They differ, however, in several ways: certainly in register, but also in that one of them, Autopia, is meant to be an ultimately illegible flood of micronarratives, the other, The Truelist, I hope will welcome a complete reading by some dedicated and imaginative individuals