netpoetic.com

I recently got a small commission to create a couple of self-portraits for a visual art show in Vancouver on self-portraiture. The curator saw an earlier dbCinema piece I did called The Club that incinemates the faces of my favorite North American politicians, business men, and psychopaths. He asked me to do related work with photos of myself rather than Jeffrey Dahmer, Paul Wolfowitz, Russell Williams, George Bush, and the rest of that psychotic, murderous crew. Which seemed like a remarkably strong opportunity to at least make an idiot of myself.

Let me show you the ‘trailers’ to the two resulting videos. What I’d like to show you are slideshows made of screenshots from the two videos comissioned by the Surrey Art Gallery in Vancouver. The videos are made of dbCinemations/collages of 53 images of me from the day I was born to my current grizzled state at 53 years of age. The Surrey show was called Scenes of Selves, Occasions for Ruses. The show will run from September 15 (the opening is from 7:30-9:30pm), 2012 till December 16, 2012. The show was curated by Jordan Strom.

The first trailer is at http://vispo.com/ dbcinema/selfportrait2/index.htm?n=1 . The video of which these screenshots are composed used two dbCinema brushes. One of the brushes ‘paints’ a letter from my name each frame. The other brush paints a circle each frame. Each of the brushes (usually) paints a different photo. So we see two simultaneous photos of me being drawn. The man and the baby. Etc. A brush paints a given photo for several seconds and then paints a different photo. The slideshow is composed of 47 still images.

The second trailer is at http://vispo.com/dbcinema/selfportrait3/ index.htm?n=1 . The video used one dbCinema brush: a Flash brush. In other words, the brush was a SWF turned into a mask. The shape of the brush was a curving, undulating, rotating, translated line. Each frame of the video, dbCinema rendered one brush stroke, one rendering of the brush image; the curving line’s paint was sampled from photos of me. The brush would sample from a photo for several seconds before moving on to another photo. What we’re looking at here is not the video but 17 screenshots from the video.

In the main, the man does not cohere. No coherent person emerges from this process of forcibly joining / collaging / synthesizing / remixing these 53 photos of me. It doesn’t magically tell me who I have always been. Or does it? Or if not, what does it suggest? You could say “If you don’t know who you’ve always been, no piece of art is going to clue you in.” Well I do kinda know. On the other hand, I do seem to tell myself a lot of stories.

It seems what the self-portrait does for me mainly is to problematize the notion of the existence of a person whom I have always been. The images in the video are messy. Like birth mess. Perhaps that’s part of our discomfort in life. We’re always in the midst of our own birth mess. And death stink.

Here is a short video I put together about Aleph Null, an interactive, generative, online work I wrote in HTML 5 and JavaScript using the new <canvas> tag.

The video was first shown at the Morgantown ELO confererence. It was my contribution to a panel involving Leo Flores, Giovanna Di Rossario, and Mark Marino, who presented papers on Aleph Null. The same panel presented on Aleph Null earlier in Paris at the And Now conference on “innovative writing”. I attended that one in person, however, and so presented Aleph Null myself, not the video.

If you look at the history of the movie trailer, it’s pretty clear that the primary purpose of this creation was advertising.

According to Paramount executive Lou Harris, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times of October 25, 1966, the first trailer was screened at Rye Beach, a New York-area amusement park, in 1912:

One of the concessions hung up a white sheet and showed the serial “The Adventures of Kathlyn.” At the end of the reel Kathlyn was thrown in the lion’s den. After this “trailed” a piece of film asking Does she escape the lion’s pit? See next week’s thrilling chapter! Hence, the word “trailer,” an advertisement for a coming picture. (citation)

But is the modern video game trailer serving this same purpose, or does it accomplish something else entirely?

During television commercials, (or sometimes during pre-previews in the movie theater) you can see snippets about Mr. T throwing Night Elf Mohawk Grenades and how the new Modern Warfare game is somehow different than its predecessors, but these bits are truly the exception on where a majority of the advertising for new games take place. For example, when was the last time you saw a TV spot designating the release of a new Fallout game? Bio Shock? Borderlands? Star Wars? Yet, when games of this notoriety are released, thousands of gamers line up for the midnight release all across the country (or globe.) How did they find out? Most likely, within the medium for which they are purchasing the game (XBOX Live, PSN, Steam, or for the more dedicated fans, through company blogs and press releases) – NOT through traditional film advertising means. So not only is the target audience for a game different than film, but the medium for which it is designed is also different. Yet, the trailer remains… Why?

You can read about it, or you can watch this trailer... Hmmm...

With this example , and a menacing picture of Kerrigan staring you down, its easy to see how important the trailer is to Blizzard in their effort to convince you to shell out another $59.99 for this expansion. But when you think about it, you had to actively look up this site and see this ad in the home page slideshow in order to find this… That’s a lot of work/attention that you had to commit to Blizzard before you even saw the trailer. What about one of the means where you don’t have to work as hard..?

Ok, so I like the previous two games, I wonder what this is about...

So, for this example, I was just browsing through the Steam Store and thought I would look at this title (theoretically, I personally am already sold) but what’s curious is that the most important piece of information on this page (as dictated by the laws of web design in that the most important information is placed towards the top left of the screen) is the trailer. In fact, on Steam, the option to automatically play whatever advertisements/videos they have for this game, is the default setting — so you don’t have to work/click any more to learn about this title. So this avenue seems to be a bit more about trying to advertise this title to you and get you to purchase it, rather than giving you more information about something you’re already interested in.

But when you see a “trailer” like the one below, does this really encourage you to check out the “Coming Attraction?” Do you want to go purchase this game, or wait anxiously until its release? Or do you want to go home and rethink your life, instead of playing another bout of Left 4 Dead?

Or what about this one? Do you feel covered in Skag blood or the uncontrollable urge to meet Scooter’s sister Ellie?

(Sorry, need a minute to recover from the awesome)

***

But, I digest. These trailers obviously took serious amounts of work to put together and showcase many exciting pieces of the “coming attraction” but my question is, are these meant as advertisements (public notices or acts of making known)  or isn’t the user already sold/made aware/notified of this game’s existence by the time he or she watches the trailer?

These comments don't make an iota of sense unless you're familiar with the franchise, showing a serious level of investment before these users ever saw the trailer.

By landing on the YouTube page, Steam page, or company website, you are immediately made aware at least, or, at most, moved toward a decision of liking or not liking this title. By watching the trailer you are cashing in a quantity of your interest in this title to find out more about it, until you play it for yourself. But while you are watching this trailer, you are in a “borderland” space, where you are already invested in the game enough to give your time/attention/internet currency back to the company, but do not yet have the actual product; you are neither unaware and unattached to the product, nor in ownership of the product which is being featured.

So what is their purpose? Why are they here? Why do I (as a gamer) love these things so much? Maybe it’s because these things are so damn beautiful in their own right– I am attracted to them as much as I am a favorite song or desktop-background-worthy-JPG. Maybe it’s because I was thinking about firing up Flash to start working on a new ePoem, but had to close out Steam first and before I could close it, one click led to another and, I was absolutely floored by the above Prototype 2 trailer. Maybe it’s because these game design firms are sponsoring digital art in-between attempts to survive in a capitalist system, and these little 2 minute clips are unsung heroes in modern netpoetics.

And just in case you didn’t get the idea that I’m a total Borderlands fan boy, please, consider the following with a healthy dose of testosterone and a substantial side of sarcasm and dark humor:

I put together a twenty minute video talking about a fantastic piece of digital poetry by Joe Keenan from the late nineties called MOMENT. Check it out: http://vispo.com/keenan/4 . MOMENT, written in JavaScript for browsers, is a work of visual interactive code poetry. It’s one of the great unacknowledged works for the net.

I used Camtasia 8 to create this video. I’ve used the voice-over capabilities of Camtasia before to create videos that talk about what’s on the screen, but this is the first time I’ve been able to use the webcam with it. Still a few bugs, though, it seems: at times the video is quite asynchronous between voice and video.

Still, you get the idea. I’m a big fan of Joe Keenan’s MOMENT and am glad I finally did a video on it.

The thirteenth Dr Hairy instalment, concluding the first series of short videos about the adventures and frustrations of an ordinary (but rather hirsute) General Practitioner. In this one, Dr Hairy reaches a crisis in his career and decides to seek the help of a mentor – with hilarious results!

To view the video on my site, go to http://www.edwardpicot.com/drhairy/mentoring.mov ; or you can see it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs4O9SuYfto ; or it should be on DVblog (http://dvblog.org) in the near future.

The whole Dr Hairy series is now available in DVD form at http://drhairy.org – perfect for that late late late Christmas present! Or a very early one for next time around!

konsonant is my new app (for iOS and Mac) as well as a free mp3 release.

check it out at my site

Play with letters and sounds, build acoustic machines, control morphing clouds and experiment with the alphabet!

Enjoy the sounds and shapes of letters by line drawing, physics simulations or acoustic networks in the four sound games included in the app.

Electronic literature, despite such promotional successes as we saw at the MLA exhibition, in our two elit anthologies, the New Media Writing Prize, ELMCIP,  and the ongoing efforts by a number of people within the elit community who tirelessly promote what we do, is at a tipping point in its career. Its visibility is fairly high in the academic community and, although it was not called elit, an elit piece won a Webby last year in the Net Art category. And whether people call it elit or not, elit is alive and well on Facebook, blogs, apps, and wherever else we see multimedia used in the presentation of a story, memoir, or a recounted daily event. So our situation could be worse….

But maybe that is part of the “problem.” Elit is well-known and practiced every place we look, but we can lay little claim to it. It is well beyond its adolescence, and within a few years (if not already), except for its stand-out practitioners, it will be so common as to not be worthy of any special note.

That is our tipping point, and the moment is now. We can lay claim to electronic literature, but we need to do it (as some of us have pointed out) in an all-inclusive and democratic way. It must be presented in our classrooms in all its forms, not just random-generated poetry or game narrative, but in every way we see it appearing online or off. Our students must know that elit is not all poetry but fiction, too, and drama, and every genre in between. They must know it is not just in the classroom, it is in front of them every day on the web, although they may not recognize it. We can show them where to look, and what to look for. We can tell them how the current elit community offers an aesthetic core around which the rest can adhere.

If we have any hope of encouraging our students to read electronic literature outside the classroom, or our young creative writers to try their hand at this kind of “writing,” they must see it has a broader audience, with both an aesthetic future and (for the writers) at least some potential for financial gain, either outright or through jobs in related industries. They can not see it primarily as an art practiced, and favored, by those of us in academia: for a new form struggling to gain its larger identity, readership, and practitioners, the academic world, while a necessary part of the overall strategy, is too small.

For the original source of this post, and the previous (and ongoing) conversation, visit http://www.newmediawritingforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=6&amp;t=156

So kids….the site had been disabled to new posts….for a small while. For that I apologize. Some madness about access and php and other angry scripts. But we are back and updated and ready!

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX - selected works (screenshot - detail)

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX (remixworx) is a space for the remixing of digital media, including visual poetry (vispo), electronic poetry (flashpo), playable media, animation, music, spoken word, texts and more. In New Directions in Digital Poetry, Chris Funkhouser describes the project as “a particularly impressive display of cannibalism-by-design.” He goes on to say:

Beyond the high quality of the artworks, the collaborative axis of Remixworx commands respect, and the sheer variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically) embraced by the collective – usually involving kinetic visual poems in combination with graphical animation and sound – is remarkable.

It began as a blog in November 2006 and has grown to number over 500 individual works of media. The front page only displays the latest pieces so, recently, we created a new gallery page of selected works to open out the remixworx collection. Now there’s a browsable interface of thumbnails where you can see, at a glance, relationships between remixes and have access to the works at your fingertips.

On the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX blog, the source material is made available and all media is freely given to be remixed. Each new work is remixed, literally or conceptually, from other works on the blog. Then, the new work is linked to the blog post(s) that contain the component parts, thus the blog ‘talks to itself’ – “I link therefore I am” (Mark Amerika). The project promotes no single ‘author’, and we keep dogma chained outside the gate. It is not a tame place, though, and artful innuendo is evident.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is also a playful environment – as with much ‘creative discourse’ – and we are always surprised and delighted by the remixes. We respond to each other, to newsworthy events, and to trends in politics or art. Some works have been remixed several times and represent a creative dialogue that utilizes social software to explore ‘open source’, “a philosophy … that promotes free redistribution” (Wikipedia). We sometimes post completely new work because R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX needs to be fed. In regards artistic practice, R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is unabashedly new media – ‘born digital’ – but the project has roots in photography, literature, audio technology, film, animation, poetry, computer programming, dada and outsider art.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a creative micro-community. Most R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX members work or have worked professionally, in one capacity or another, with social software and/or digital media – most members were brought together, initially, by the trAce Online Writing Community. R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX continues in a spirit of learning and sharing – in the original spirit of the World Wide Web. Some members have won awards of one kind or another for digital art and writing. Often, in the heat of working on a complex project, a person needs to let off steam – R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a place for that, as well.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is an accumulation of spontaneous ideas that spawn at random intervals, a flexible community, an adaptable entity that has been shown in a variety of ways – performed live at festivals and conferences, or remixed live as part of DJ/VJ events. The present page of ‘selected works’ has been created to ‘open the project up’, so to speak, with a visual interface, separate from the blog. It is presented as an online journal of digital art and writing that spans 2006 to 2012.

Many thanks to Randy Adams (runran), who initiated the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX project, for pulling together the selected works page, currently containing 183 pieces. Also, a shout out for Chris Joseph (babel) – check out the blog for his latest remixes.

The International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging will be held on 4–6 June 2012 in Annecy, France.
Here is a selection of details provided by the organisers:
Computational Aesthetics (CAe) bridges the analytic and synthetic by integrating aspects of computer science, philosophy, psychology, and the fine, applied & performing arts. It seeks to facilitate both the analysis and the augmentation of creative behaviors. CAe also investigates the creation of tools that can enhance the expressive power of the fine and applied arts and furthers our understanding of aesthetic evaluation, perception, and meaning. The Computational Aesthetics conference brings together individuals with technical experience of developing computer-based tools to solve aesthetic problems and people with artistic/design backgrounds who use these new tools. Refereed CAe papers and artworks aim to facilitate a dialog between scientists and engineers who are creating new tools, and also artists and designers who use them. Presentations will provide a snapshot of the latest technical breakthroughs and the most recent artistic or design achievements in applying computer-based techniques to solve aesthetic problems.
CAe will be run jointly with the related conferences on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR) and Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling (SBIM). The event will be co-located with the Annecy Film Festival. (more…)

At last! A layman’s guide to the Government’s healthcare reforms, explaining them in terms so simple they might have been written by a complete idiot, and charting the development of health care from the good old days to the present and beyond – with hilarious results! In fabulous stickman-o-vision, with bits of colour. Kind of a Dr Hairy spinoff, but the Dr Hairy episode it span off from hasn’t been made yet.

To see it on YouTube go to http://youtu.be/k-heGn8QzGg ; or to download it from my site right-click http://drhairy.org/problemofhealthcare.mov and select “Save as…”

- Edward Picot

“Psychedelic Pie” is a psychedelic video with a psychedelic sound-track, created from materials found on the Web. You can see the video on YouTube  at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS4Wpx5QKXc, or on my site at http://edwardpicot.com/psychedelicpie.mov. Attributions: backward guitar and psychedelic viola by Robinhood76; psychedelic percussion by Satoration; sitar by Kaiho – all from www.freesound.org. Morning traffic timelapse by MegaTokkie, YouTube. Blackrock Sunrise (community video); London Underground (community video); and Haleakala Sunset by Mike McCabe – www.archive.org.

Also new: my review of “The Last Collaboration” by Martha Deed and Millie Niss. The review can be seen on the Furtherfield site at http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/last-collaboration, and the book itself can be seen at http://www.furtherfield.org/friendsofspork/lastcollaboration.html. Millie Niss was a writer and new media artist who died in November 2010. Martha Deed is a poet and psychologist, also Millie’s mother and long-time collaborator. “The Last Collaboration” is about Millie’s last days in hospital. It’s acutely insightful, and it’s also a significant work of art.

“Cordite 36: Electronica has been a fascinating and challenging issue to put together. It contains forty new poems, fifteen spoken word tracks, a dozen features and, for the first time, a selection of multimedia or ‘e-lit’ works. Bringing together these disparate types of content raises an interesting question for Cordite as an online journal. Have we finally broken through that invisible barrier between ‘text-based journal’ and ‘online journal of electronic literature’?

In her editorial introducing the issue, Jill Jones rightly points to the issue’s presumptive focus on electronica and electronic music, specifically “the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound.” The poetry in this issue runs the gamut from highly experimental works to extended meditations on musical memories and forms. It’s absorbing, intriguing and puzzling – and this is just as it should be.

The spoken word tracks selected by our audio editor Emilie Zoey Baker are similarly pre-occupied with the bleeps, hisses and clicks we associate nowadays with electronic music. From Philip Norton’s bizarro Yes I Dream of Electric Sheep to Sean M. Whelan and Isnod’s Dream Machines, the works selected here paint an aural kaleidoscope that fizzes and pops, echoing electronic art from the works of Phillip K. Dick through to Kraftwerk. Check out the individual tracks or stream the hour-plus mix of electronica as one. Headphones highly recommended!

When it comes to the selected works of multimedia or ‘electronic literature’, however, we are faced with a series of disruptions that more often than not question rather than reflect the theme of the issue. Benjamin Laird’s Sound-less-scape and nothing left in, for example, present the reader (viewer? player?) with opportunities for interaction but remain stubbornly mute, like a silent rave. Joshua Mei Ling Dubrau’s Et Tu demonstrates the jump-cut nature of screen-capture technology when applied to text, while Konrad McCarthy’s TV Life strips bare the artifice of the audio-visual in a montage of movements.

The publication of these pieces – some HTML-based, others video – inevitably raises the question of genre and form. Is this literature? Is it even e-literature? As Tim Wrights asks in his review of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2, ‘What literature today isn’t electronic?’ I’d like to think, instead, of overlapping spaces – some of which may be electronic, others organic. Beverliey Braune’s Supra-text Sequences essay offers one glimpse into such a world.

When it comes to the work of Jason Nelson, one might instead ask where the electronic world actually stops. I’m really excited to be able to publish three of Jason’s work in this issue, because in many respects his work attempts to break through the imposition imposed by the computer screen to offer a neural landscape that is deeply textured and interactive. Depth: Text and Playthings addresses this tension directly, by stating bluntly ‘Your screen is horribly flat’.

Elsewhere, Nelson’s work is playful and self-referential. Branching: branch branch is a work where the traditional branching structure of file folders clashes comically with a goofy soundtrack that is perhaps more amenable to a 1980s computer game. Meanwhile, With love, from a failed planet presents a phantasmagoria of late-capitalist logos. In addition to these pieces, I’m pleased to present an interview with Jason in which he reflects on his creative practices as an electronic literature artist.

Nelson’s work offers one possible ‘entry-point’ into the world of e-lit. The work of Mez Breeze offers another. Sally Evans’ essay entitled ‘The Anti-Logos Weapon’: Excesses of Meaning and Subjectivity in Mezangelle Poetry demonstrates that electronic literature can be just as much about ‘texts’ as traditional literature. Mez’s work is justifiably renowned in e-lit circles as innovative and highly complex. In an online world where more and more of us are exposed to the vagaries of computer code, Mezangelle chews up that code, parses it with human language and spits out art. Adam Fieled’s essay on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (a work that is itself highly amenable to remediation as a hypertext) shows that the worlds of literary practise and literary criticism remain inextricably entwined.

In terms of my own personal experience of electronic literature, Mez’s work was amongst the first that I viewed (scanned? played?). Over the course of this year, working as a post-doctoral researcher on the ELMCIP project, I’ve also been met a wide range of scholars and practitioners working in the field of e-lit. For this reason, I’ve included in this issue two interviews with my colleagues at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Karlskrona, Sweden. Both Talan Memmott and Maria Engberg have inspired me to re-think my attitudes to the digital realm.

This brings me back to the question of Cordite’s place within that realm. As Benjamin Laird demonstrates in his overview entitled Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social, Cordite is by no means alone in its attempts to engage with online communities. In fact, pretty much every Australian literature journal is undergoing a process of morphing and reinvention. I’d like to think that, in the future, Cordite will evolve to include more works of electronic literature that actually engage with the medium in which the journal ‘lives’.

This is not to suggest that the thousand-odd poems we have published on the site over the past decade or not ‘alive’, or that text-based works are somehow inferior to HTML, Flash-based or interactive works. Nevertheless, I hope that these tiny steps we have taken towards the electr(on)ification of Cordite will inspire others to create engaging, accessible art that takes advantage of the multitude of possibilities made available when viewing (reading? parsing?) information using a networked computer.”

- David Prater, Cordite’s Managing Editor

I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to help organize – alongside Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens – the first ever electronic literature exhibit and reading at the MLA Annual Convention in Seattle, WA January 5th through the 7th. The exhibit in particular, which is formally supported by the MLA, marks an important moment in the establishment of electronic literature – another pivotal point at which the field moves further into the center and away from the margins. I’m hoping it’s a moment marking the subtle shift from “electronic” or “digital” literature to just, well, literature.

From January 5th through the 7th at the Washington State Convention Center in Room 609, visitors will have the opportunity to view/read/interact with: e-literature from the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One and Two; historically significant works such as those by bpNichol and those published by Eastgate; locative works such as Kate Armstrong’s “Ping;” formally experimental works such as David Jhave Johnson’s “softies;” multimodal narratives such as Christine Wilks’ “Underbelly;” literary games such as Ian Bogost’s “A Slow Year“; and mobile works such as Mark Amerika’s “Immobilité.” These are just some of many different modes of e-literature that will be on display. The complete list of works is available on the exhibit website.

Also, on Friday January 6th from 8pm to 10.30pm, there will be an MLA off-site reading of electronic literature at Richard Hugo House (1634 11th Ave  Seattle, WA 98122-2419). If you are in Seattle in early January, please make sure you stop by as it’s a rare treat indeed to have the opportunity to hear these extraordinarily innovative writers read together: Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Marjorie Luesebrink, Jim Andrews, Erin Costello and Aaron Angello, Mark Marino, Talan Memmott, John Cayley, Ian Bogost, Brian Kim Stefans, and Kate Armstrong.

Announcing a collection of poetry generated interactively with computer programs: Gnoetry Daily Volume 1! It includes:

• N-gram generations (word-based and character-based) * Diastic readings * Cut-ups * n+7s * template generations * codework transformations
• metaphysical speculation, startling juxtapositions, profane ranting, unpopular political perspectives, and moments of great (though possibly incomprehensible) beauty
• our favorite poems from the past several years of the group blog Gnoetry Daily
• creative Foreword by C.T. Funkhouser (of “Prehistoric Digital Poetry” fame)

All for the low low price of FREE. Get the pdf file, and follow our continuing adventures on Gnoetry Daily and our Chapbooks page!

Since I don’t want to post an ad without any additional content, I’ll now consider the question: how should we refer to the act of generating text poetry using computer tools and algorithms?

This becomes a question because there are at least four traditions of computer poetry generation:

• The Poetic tradition – people like Jackson Mac Low and Charles Hartman, who are primarily interested in writing good poetry. They may use the term aleatory and draw from the Surrealist, Language, Flarf, and Conceptual traditions.
• The Oulipo tradition – influenced by the French academics/practitioners who are interested in novel constraints and methods of automation. They may use the term combinatory and potential, and frame the use of corpora as a constraint (i.e. only using a certain set of words.)
• The Programming tradition – recreational “hackers” and professional programmers whose goal is developing interesting programs, e.g. the developers of Travesty, Dissociated Press, Racter, and JanusNode, as well as computing pioneers such as Lutz and Stratchey. They may use the term stochastic, and focus on the types of algorithms and interface affordances involved.
• The Research tradition – both scientific and literary theoretic academics who are exploring issues in language and cognition. Scientific approaches may use terms such as poetry generation (following the more general “natural language generation”) and may think of poetry generators as a long-term project towards modeling the creative process by determining which parts can be automated. Literary theoretic approaches may use terms such as appropriation and uncreative.

People can be in more than one category to different degrees, and all of these have valuable contributions to make. But because these different traditions emphasize different histories and different aspects of the activity, they are likely to continue to require different names for the activity.

But maybe the best approach is ludic; roll 6-sided dice 4 times and consult the following expression:

(((1d3)(post-,avant-,'pata-))
 ((1d6)(computational,digital,procedural,appropriative,stochastic,aleatoric))
 ((1d3)(poetic,lyric,verse))
 ((1d3)(generation,production,authoring)))

so rolls of (4, 3, 1, 2) would get you “avant-procedural poetic generation”, for example!