THE MACHINE READING SERIES: 
organized by Charles Bernstein and Nick Montfort
hosted by the Kelly Writers House
at Penn University - Philadelphia.


*****MAIN RESSOURCES**********************************************
Kelly Writers House: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~wh/         
Charles Bernstein: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/    
Nick Montfort: http://nickm.com/                                               
**********************************************************************

Wednesday February 15th: with Loss Pequeno Glazier and Jim Carpenter


Charles Bernstein and Nick Montfort regularly invite poets over at Penn University for a reading held at the Kelly Writer House. This Wednesday February 15th, 2006, they invited digital poet Loss Pequeno Glazier and Jim Carpenter. Also, for the first time this hosting was christened "Machine Reading Series", signaling a focus on computer form of experiments in poetry.

Charles Bernstein introduces the event under the auspices of Gertrude Stein, asking about the difficult relationship between the readership and experimental text works. That forces the question: What does that mean? New forms of poetry "revealed" to the public are often received with a shock (the structure of poetic revolutions?), and digital poetry more or less faces the same reception problems.

The two invited poets are among the pioneers who have (or still are) moving poetry digital medium. C. Bernstein here reminded the audience that experiments with language should be thought about within the context of databases, methods of classification, archiving, implementing formats. Writing is as much about creating as about protecting, keeping tracks of written traces.
The Electronic Poetry Center, directed by Loss Pequeno Glazier (http://epc.buffalo.edu/), one of the most extensive resource database about digital writings, was cited as an example of a long-term involvement with literature but also with finding new formats of publication, distribution, and access. This website was built page by page in a very low-fi way, and has always been up and running since its creation in 1996. A practice of writing code and links as an alternative to prefabricated corporate formats

Loss Pequeno Glazier was first working in the librarian field. C. Bernstein emphasized L. P. Glazier's early interest in practices of publishing: his first book was on the subject of the Mimeo Revolution, when the poets in the 60s re-invented the DIY  (Do It Yourself) practice by publishing at low cost as little as 2 pages long poetry reviews (a "Little history of the Mimeo Revolution" can be found here: http://www.granarybooks.com/books/clay/clay4.html).
Then Glazier developed as a PHD project the Electronic Poetry Center, and published one of the first book on the subject of computer poetry: Digital Poetics:  Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media, University of Alabama Press, 2001.

Jim Carpenter has started as a high-school teacher and is now a lecturer in computer programming and systems design in the Dept. of Operations and Informations Management at the Wharton School at Penn University. He developed the Electronic Text Composition (ETC) project (http://slought.org/content/11207/). J. Carpenter specializes in digital and computer applications, implementing tools for poetry composition. His work might help change the definition of poetry itself demanding an involved participation form the public, not in the sense of mere interactivity but by demanding a knowledge of the tools at stake, avoiding the transaction intermediary (formats)

More accurate information about these persons can be found on the Kelly Writer House website and here specifically: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/wh/calendar/0206.html#15

*--*--*--*--*--*--*
*--*--*--*--*--*--*
*--*--*--*--*--*--*
*--*--*--*--*--*--*

The readings

Jim Carpenter
poem 1: "Mystic Writing Pad"
--> a computer reading structured as a sound triptych: three computers (2 feminine voices, 1 masculine: superimposed) uttering words and fragments of sentences. These words appear to be thematic keywords such as performance, evolution, speech, work, write, links, share, distributed, explore, or aesthetics concern (though without a reference): good, bad... Some semi-articulated sentences: "Whatever is supposed public land of number ?", "Write the facts".
While these are being formaluted into computer voices, their symbols as strings of letters appear in different fonts, sizes and colors on a minimalistic interface (grey or similar colored plain page)

Jim Carpenter launched the application and put an end to it in a seemingly arbitrary way. The first thing he said after the multi-vocal poem stopped was that he was a conceptual artist. Though J.Carpenter said almost everything in an ironic tone, I will write down what I remember (almost) as if there was not too much staging in that reading (it is difficult, because there was much staging).
This text-generation software has been conducted for almost 7 years. It is structured on 2 main supports:
- an extensive language database that incorporates words of the British National Corpus (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ - here I remember that the voices were definitely identifiable as British), each tagged (semantic relationships) and re-organized in what Carpenter calls "bigrams". The output is determined by frequency of use.
- a series of software modules structured as trees and based on the principles of  transformational grammar (as opposed to context free grammar). This allows the use of standard English to be rationalized. There is no input string but a generation from an initial semantic ceiling.
The process is repetitive and results in leaving traces: Carpenter calls this a "geodesic structure", as an analytic analysis of how code and semantic relation support each other.

It was first a research project that asked: is it possible for a generated text to compete with a 'normal text' (human words). Here Carpenter stresses out that there are a lot of text generators out on the internet but that a lot of them don't work. He also wants the machines (British accent) to read the poems because he cannot claim authorship himself (cf. the post on the cyborg author).
Also, he introduces the notion of "competitiveness" opposed to the notion of "quality". Competitiveness points out to the market of literary reviews: a competitive poem is one that can compete (can have the same value) with the standards of these reviews. I infer from this that a "quality" poem is one that is out of the market standards - I guess it has to be ahead of these standards. Also, if the competitive poems are judged in regard to external properties (the correspondence to standards. i.e. topics, genre, figures, forms), the "quality poem" should have inherent properties that make it good. These definitions seem to bring us back to the idea of the poem as a tautologic object: their quality is what define them its own properties.
Jim Carpenter states that if the poems he produces with his language engine are not based on quality but on competitiveness, the act of programming, in contrary, is an aesthetic experience, thus it is based on quality. I am not sure if this theoretical distinction is really helpful, because once again this aesthetic experience is based on values of good and bad that are effective in a competition world. But I discuss this later.

The poems J. Carpenter is going to read are all implementing an idea of what is competitive according to J. Carpenter (I would say, he made good pastiches). But there are also allow multiple readings (a poem can be feminist & modernist for instance). Carpenter has only edited lightly the poems: punctuation and particles.
- poem 2: "Nuclear"; a good example to show how the ETC language machine is good at paratactic structures. This is a good point for competitiveness as paratax is one of the favorite topics of postmodernist poetry: it allows the affective description to be disconnected from the subject (or what is left of it).
- poem 3: "Peripheral"; here the machine performs a tonal capacity
- poem 4: "With a heartfelt unhappy sigh": here, within the range of romantic modernism (very competitive according to J. Carpenter)
- poem 5 : "Bullshit": an experiment with obscenity words; because they are a minority in the corpus, the program run faster.

Jim Carpenter decided to submit these poems for evaluation, as a possible test to answer the question: What is the test to prove the value of research?
In order to verify this, he thought of different procedures in the submission process:
- handing out texts as machine-written to be read and judged by a fellow poet? --> dismissed because the poet could be too kind too really evaluate them
- read out loud texts as human-written in a poetry workshop? --> dismissed for the same reason
- send texts to poetry reviews? it worked.

These texts were published under the name Erika T. Carter, an amalgam of the machine and J.Carpenter, a "bio-mix". J. Carpenter insists on the fact that they are 2 personalities at work, not conflicting but influencing each other. For example, he thought that he would be good that the machine-poet Ericka should be a lesbian precisely because of the inability of its doppelganger human-poet Jim to conceive a love relationship with males.

Jim Carpenter ends by talking about programming as an abstraction = "language spread out into pure signs". Opposed to this, the human poet's task is to concretize, to inject some flesh into the skeleton (machine-poet) he created.

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

Loss Pequeno Glazier

Glazier admitted as well having always had problems with publishing in literary reviews and magazines. But he was more frustrated by the fact that whenever a poem was published, he, as a poet, was urged to change it, but could not do it. With the digital medium, he could experiment on that.

Loss Pequeno's homepage on the Electronic Poetry Center website is full of resources and poetry online: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/

Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt Publishing 2003): a different book. It shows Glazier's interest with language more than with computers. And especially language within language: Glazier's poetry owes a lot to his upbringing within a bilingual family (Mexican mother & Anglo father) where the Hispanic language could not be spoken except undercover. Glazier considers Sapnish as a mark up code. His relationship to computer languages has first to do with this (language within language), and he first used computer terms in a metaphorical way within linguistic language. "Getting all mixed up".
You might find this useful for more information: http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1844710017.htm

White-faced Bromeliads: (online work : http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/java/costa1/00.html)
This experiment (with text and photos) helped him to deal with the frustration of having a poem getting published with the impossibility to change it. Every line has 2 possible lines or variances. You get to change every line of the poem 1 time by refreshing the page (or waiting that it refreches by itself). Reading becomes a challenge because lines change when you're actually reading. It is not a text in the closed sense but a text in movement (open text - Eco). The question that arises is : how do you grab a literary analysis (made on correspondence and structure?) which demand an access to the ensemble. Here the sum of the part is larger of the ensemble: that's also the variable principle of the database.

Territorio Libre (online work: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/e-poetry/Territorio/)
Another possibility for variation, based on word concatenation. There is a video from the performance at the E-Poetry festival in 2003: http://epc.buffalo.edu/video/e-poetry2003/day3/glazier02-030425.wmv. "Touchlexicalby concussion" can be a symbolic concatenated sentence for the whole work as this was written after a car accident that left him slightly bewildered and also with a lot of time in his hand.

Io Sono at Swoons (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/java/iowa/index.html)
 Words broken into stems in different ways: a new generation each time; fully original poems, never reproducible, highly ephemeral (takes a click on the page or even a simple wait). Again, a video : http://epc.buffalo.edu/video/le/glazier-021108.wmv

Glazier classifies the evolution and the actual differentiation between digital poetics in 4 categories:
1/ hypertext
2/ visual kinetic text
3/ interactive text: reader can help shape how the poem look (Cog: to play with)
4/ text in variable/programmable media; make things occur unforeseen

The last category is the one in which he wishes to include himself. It is important that the reader has the reflex of finding and reading/deciphering the code, however hard it may be (the simple "View Source" option could be a good start). Himself he often includes jokes in his working code. Writing code is creative in the sense that it's interacting with the language on the screen. "Code as potent of codeine", says he.

His main interest his directed towards the Unix system, as an environment within an environment.


_?_?_?_?_?_?_?_?
_?_?_?_?_?_?_?_?
_?_?_?_?_?_?_?_?
_?_?_?_?_?_?_?_?
_?_?_?_?_?_?_?_?

Discussion/Q&A

-  (to J.C.): what are the social consequences of hoaxing?
J.C.: it happens that the literary world is made of isolated islands that never talk to anybody else. The literary production becomes a fiction in which you can assume a persona. The process of submitting things for publishing is highly eye-opening. It is also a harsh world: what if you're a young writer who wants to gain a career? They probably won't let you do it. The dynamics of publishing are frustrating. The hoaxes deal with that.

- (to both): what is your relationship to the machine? a partnership? competitive?
J.C.: as a developer, I can only say that the machine is a means to an end for me. I often like the most complicate things, not as a challenge but as a way to make money.
L.P.G: a complex of language (language within language). I like the metaphor of the 'brick', having to assemble pieces together. I enjoy working at the code level (non interface) = sorting out signs like you would sort rocks from beans.

- (to J.C.): how much power of combination and novelty you have at your disposal? at the same time what would it be like to reverse the process, to make the machine a reader?
J.C.: There are experiments in speech recognition: you speak into a microphone and the computer answers; of course it reduces the scale of human speech, because the computer could not keep up. Also, the Turing experiments tradition are the holy grail of machine understanding (the communication language robots Racter or Eliza); but there are far from what they would like to achieve.

C.Bernstein: You can interpret the machine as a reader in a different way: a machine reading some traditional literature corpus for instance. Again we have to talk about database and semantic issues: when you search for something, what do you consider valuable, significant? Reading is also determined by metadata...
In a more aesthetical way, you can ask what a poem is in terms of a database that you can read through in several ways.


-----------the-end
-----------the-end
-----------the-end
-----------the-end
-----------the-end
-----------the-end

&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~&
My perspective on the event:
In my opinion, the readings were focused on what Espen Aarseth calls the "cyborg" author. In his Cybertext. Perspective on Ergodic Literature, Aarseth places this notion under the literary authority of Umberto Eco's Opera Aperta and the "space medicine analyst" Manfred Claynes.

The latter coined the word "cyborg", from the expression "cybernetic organism", as a new entity that results from the alliance between humans and technology.
The former theorized the concept of "open work" that implies aesthetics that foregrounds the general topic of variable expression in works of art. A correlate term is "work in movement", i.e. unplanned or physically incomplete structural units that involve the idea of randomness. Of course, the context within which Eco is writing is the experiment of modernist music composition (Stockhausen, Cage). But he nonetheless tries to define a poetics concept, underlying that these works should be read as texts and that they convey a new dialectic between the work and their interpreter.

This last point in particular provides an interesting analogy for text in the cyborg era to the extent that textuality cannot be envisioned as a mere author/reader or emitter/receiver relationship, but as a participatory operation that redefines the practice of authoring, writing, reading. Aarseth's perspective on the subject is tri-polar: the text as a kind of machine, a "symbiosis of sign, operator and medium" that implies automatically the cyborg. He then raised this question:

"Any cyborg field, as any communicative field, is dominated by the issue of domination or control. The key question in cyborg aesthetics is therefore, Who or what controls the text? " (55)

The reactions of the audience during the readings and Q&A, even if highly ironic and amused, revealed a more or less implicit concern for this question of control. There was a general uneasiness regarding how to read these works. The performance of Jim Carpenter most of all did imply this ironic relationship to the "fake text" (= non human), even if he was constantly reminding the audience the intimate relationship based on shared identity he had with his computer double, a certain Ericka. He was staging his own loss of control over the power of the machine: not because the machine would suddenly become over-powerful and get a total control, but because himself as a researcher and a poet could not help always relying on the machine. The little fiction to introduce this new relationship was that no poetry review ever wanted to publish Carpenter's poems, so he thought he could trick them with a little help from the computer (and a lot of help from this new entity created: the cyborg).
Here what seemed to be uneasy for the audience was control over the text not so much in cyborg authorship terms as in reading/evaluating issues. And this was at the heart of Carpenter's project: quality or competitiveness? What do you make of a text half-produced by a machine? How do you judge it? (Should you judge/interpret it at all?)
The binary opposition between 'quality' (value of the poem to 'true' poets - the term was never defined if I remember well) and 'competitiveness' (value within the literary world of reviews: economic requisites) was a tricky way to, eventually, not answer this question of evaluation. It triggered the narcissic conflict between the good people that think and write, and the bad people that imitate and sell. As if we didn't know at least since Hume that aesthetic qualitative values are based on expertise standards that turn them into quantitative values. There is a more than a continuity between the two: it is the same process. This competitiveness seems to me a concrete result of the construction of literary history, an quantitative indexing (in semiotic terms) of what was first thought as traces of experiments (what can be thought as quality, with its correlates: originality, invention, etc.).

The problem over control that I was talking about seemed to me to have been transfered from the author to the reader within this discussion at Penn. What do you chose, legitimate, defend what you read? What is worth reading? In the era of blogs, of course there is no easy answers. Fed up with post-modernism, we cannot really answer "everything". Also this is highly dependent on how you read. Etc.

Charles Bernstein tried to orientate the debate over the issue of database and acess (which is also fondamental to Lev Manevich informational esthetics in The Language of New Media). He re-articulated the traditional definition of the poem as an object to be interpreted in several ways in terms of database and sorting techniques. This allows the necessary shifting from interpretation to practise, according to me (= what can you do with a poem?). Thus the poem is re-inserted in the communication process when it is losing its status of exception and treated as any text.