Click, and a previously unseen poem appears. Click again, and it vanishes forever. Another takes its place. Yet none existed in the Mac’s memory beforehand. The Web opens onto the festival of possibilities created by generative literature.
Artists relish challenges. Jean-Pierre Balpe, who wrote the first interactive television scenario broadcast by Canal+ in 1985, has explored computer-assisted literature for twenty years. On his Mac he designs software capable of generating endless original forms and literary texts “in the manner of…” Proverbs, haikus, detective fiction, classics—no genre resists him. He can father Jules Verne-style novels or imagine virtual planets for the Little Prince.
When his poet friend Henri Deluy, editor of Action Poétique, dared suggest that the magic box could not imitate the poems he painstakingly wrote on his blank page, Balpe took up the challenge. He went further, also modelling Joseph Guglielmi, another contemporary poet whose multilingual, sonorous prose is highly original. Balpe thus built an engine producing poems in real time, successively in the distinctive worlds of all three authors.
None of the displayed texts, however, is stored in memory even a second beforehand. A sophisticated combination of structures and semantic dictionaries developed with the creators enables endless fresh odes. This is not combinatorics—the mathematical association of prewritten, stored phrases—but procreation. A fourth artist joins the unusual trio: the blind poet. A metaphor for the computer, a fleeting shadow encountered in Paris Métro corridors, he learns from his fellows, mixes and grows with each generation. Inventing his own form, he writes. Sometimes he gets carried away. That is part of the game.
Performance
Trois mythologies et un poète aveugle was born live on 14 November at IRCAM, before a packed hall, and with music. As poets on stage deciphered and interpreted “their” poems appearing in real time on a giant screen, a music generator responded. Under its creator, young Italian composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, musicians and a soprano modified an ephemeral computer-played score live, through modulation of their MIDI instruments—percussion and piano—and voice.
Participating in an endless circulation between artists and networked screens, Henri Deluy freely criticised the computer or altered “his” texts as he read. “The poet is completely free,” Balpe had insisted. Had he won his bet? Afterwards, Deluy, unwillingly imitated, remarked philosophically: “What I like is the massive arrival of chance, which underlines the derisory nature of writing…”
Metamorphoses
For Balpe it was only a stage. Since then, the generator’s textual component has been downloadable, and will soon run online, on the website of the Hypermédia department he directs at Paris VIII. As ephemeral as during the IRCAM performance, the poems cannot be saved or printed. “You can always copy them by hand,” he jokes. Performance remains essential.
“Of course it is a choice: we could have programmed all sorts of recording. I believe this kind of writing—this is not a guarantee of value, since each individual poem is interesting—is not meant to be stored. Because it produces quantity, it is meant to operate in the moment and the context. The great novelty of these generators is precisely that they prevent things from becoming fixed.”
The work’s staging continues online. “The work is not finished or closed. From home I will upload other dictionaries into the generator. I can always keep the work alive. It will remain Trois mythologies et un poète aveugle while being different. I do not know how far I will take it. It is always evolving, and the reader has no way of knowing when I modify it. It was conceived for one evening, but can also be programmed to last three years… It is simply a matter of enrichment.”
He is considering a public version in which everyone can enter personal parameters. “The difficulty is explaining to people who have never considered problems of writing how to model writing. Without an authorial intention, the computer does nothing by itself. For creators, however, learning is very quick.”
An interactive opera on Bluebeard is also gestating. “What increasingly interests me is not creating from existing models, but inventing models and seeing how this kind of literature innovates.” The performance will take place on stage and online, screens displaying staging interpreted differently by real artists according to context. “My wild dream,” Balpe adds, “is to imagine Bluebeard playing simultaneously on every stage on the planet and in every home, on the same day but differently.”
So, shall we?
Françoise Derollepot
Sidebar: Readers can switch between poets through the generator’s control window. Written in Java, the software is freely downloadable from the Paris VIII website.