Electronic Literature in the Form of a Solar System

Electronic Literature is a very broad field that takes on many forms, such as electronic poems, E-books, self-generating texts, and many others. One of my personal favorite forms are interactive based narratives, that tell their story based on how you react to the piece. 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein is placed under as an interactive based narrative of the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, with each one of the 88 constellations in the night sky being given a role in the philosopher's life. 

The piece suggests that the narrative is to be played with your left hand (Wittgenstein's brother lost his right hand, but continued to be an avid piano player with left-handed music). The 88 separate constellations all give history into the life of Wittgenstein, highlighting the events occurring throughout his life, and how they are apart of his philosophy. The story of Wittgenstein ends at a place called "Storey's End", where Wittgenstein claimed that he had a wondrous life, whereas his friends saw him as having a torturous life, coming to an end on a long night in April where perhaps, "An angel got his wings."

88 Constellations plays out the events through Wittgenstein's life, and with every story, makes the reader think. apart from receiving a dose of 20th century history, the piece references to his philosophy, where it creates a constant puzzle of piecing together Wittgenstein's life and tying those events to the philosophical ideas he believed; "Wittgenstein's life was a series of moments, and our story is a series of constellations."

In our world today, 88 Constellations gives insight, and provides new thoughts and ideas, that no book would ever be capable of doing. The piece takes would could have been a story lain in a book, and animates using intriguing sounds, visuals, and voice narration to provide a much more in depth experience with Wittgenstein than that would ever be able otherwise, This piece I found to be one of the most informative, creative, and understandable pieces we have viewed so far, it brilliantly collects together the pieces of his life, but while informing, every single piece starts to question the mind, far beyond what many other works of Electronic Literature are able to do.

Blog Post #4

Creatively Un-creative Writing

In 2011, American poet Kenneth Goldsmith coined the term "Uncreative Writing" in his book of essays, called Uncreative Writing:Managing Language in the Digital Age. Uncreative writing can take many forms, including writing screenplays for existing television shows and videos, creating essays comprised of pieces of other people's writings, and transcribing audio clips. In many of Goldsmith’s works, he often infers on the idea that “re-purposing a work is not plagiarism”, a theory that has brought much criticism along with it. These criticisms stem from where credit should be given. Re-purposed works have many different authors, and it becomes hard to tell who is the actual creator of the work. There are many different collaborators in a re-purposed work that all deserve credit for their part in the new piece. 

In the link below is a poem compiled of text that has been generated by our four tribe members in a group chat. The poem we created was composed of the audio we heard from three separate videos, a KurtCobain interview, Jimmy Fallon #MomTexts, and a history of rap with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. Each member of our tribe typed into the chat bits and pieces of what we heard in these videos, and we composed them into what can really be describes as a poem of many things. The most interesting part of this work is that while simultaneously hearing the same audio feed, each member tended to chose the same words/phrases to type into the chat. This makes the poem a flow of words our brains interpret, intertwined together, creating a poem of our similarities of mind. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nFqDHeQ5QIwByBSfgwME9HB11fiVcYhCn7cNecsWrDo/edit?usp=sharing

Response to Bots & Self-Generating Texts

Whether you know it or not, there is a good chance that you have interacted with web robots at least once before, or even interact with them everyday. So what exactly is a “web robot”? These robots, commonly known as bots, are programs that run automated tasks. These bots create simple and complex works, typically with the purpose of generating what for humans would be time consuming and never ending works. However, many of these bots are often used for malicious reasons. For example, certain chat-bots are used for scamming purposes since many of these self-generating text bots can easily be confused for being actual humans writing the text. Programmers set up parameters for the bots to follow so the text they create follows grammar rules and speech patterns to make them sound more human-like.

“Taroko Gorge” is a self-generating poem created by poet/digital media artist Nick Montfort. The text is produced line by line scrolling down the screen, endlessly describing a nature scene. This work is written in a code which Montfort gives the public free permission to use, copy, modify, or distribute. His code has allowed many other authors create and publish their own works of self-generating text. These automated programs are different than other software because they produce content that humans can interact with or view from an artistic standpoint. They are also different because they do not create the same work more than once, text generating bots formulate text randomly every time. Even though the text these bots create is random, they still follow sentence structure and speech patterns.

Pentametron is a Twitter bot created by Ranjit Bhatnagar. Bhatnagar is also interested in working with language, technology, and sound materials, which helped the development of this bot. Essentially, this bot uses an online dictionary service to locate various tweets in iambic pentameter. The bot then holds that tweet until it detects another tweet with the same rhyming pattern, and retweets them both to create a rhyming couplet. For example, tweets in succession include, “up for whatever reason .. nothing new,” “been craving some Korean BBQ,” “here goes another unproductive day,” “I have an interview tomorrow, yay!” According to a statement by the Electronic Literature Collection, Bhatnagar commented on his Twitter bot saying, “as a sound artist who studied some linguistics, I’m interested in language as a material for fabricating new kinds of art".

Corrupted Image

Corrupted Image

Corrupted Image