Computer generated books & fanzines

Computer-generated literature draws on the experimental literary practices of Dadaism, Gertrude Stein, Concrete Poetry, the poetic-informative texts of the Stuttgart School, Oulipo, as well as the early language research of Artificial Intelligence. These lines of tradition shape the landscape of code literature today.

In 1959, computer scientist Theo Lutz programmed an algorithm that ran on the Z22 developed by Konrad Zuse and threw out what he called "stochastic texts." They are considered the first German poems from a computer. Some of the early techniques of writing have become part of our daily interaction with texts. We have become accustomed to reading mash-up-style texts on the Internet, or to poetry bots and similar text generators writing posts on Facebook or Twitter.

Since those mid-20th century beginnings, "computer poetry" has evolved in many ways, and not just technically. In particular, the cultural and social issues raised by computer-generated literature today are very different from those of the last century.

Description

Download Books & Fanzines as *.pdf

Exhibition »code | literature < journey«

Exhibition View – »code | literature < journey« @ KHM Rundgang “außer der Reihe” 2022

Downloads as *.pdf

All books and fanzines below are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Fanzines from the Seminar Human Machine Readable

During the two-week compact seminar “Human Machine Readable”, students programmed their own textbots, using methods from Markov models, a more traditional statistical way to generate texts, to GPT-2/3 (Generative Pre-Training Transformer) state-of-the-art neural language models for NLG (Natural Language Generation). Some of the computer-generated texperiments you’ll find below as fanzines.