Paramoulipist

Een jaar lang zal ik het narratieve potentieel van algoritmes onderzoeken.

In mijn aanpak wil ik ze zowel benaderen als spelleiders, schrijvers van teksten en vertellers op een scène. Tijdens een vooronderzoek testte ik al enkele formules uit met eenvoudige algoritmes zoals de Quicksort.
Voor dit onderzoek wil ik me toespitsen op zelflerende algoritmes die school maken in de verwerking van big data die we dagelijks produceren door ons gebruik van Google, Facebook, smartphones enz. Gelijkaardige computermodellen worden gebruikt voor tekstmining, het veld waartoe ik me wil beperken voor dit onderzoek.

Door de algoritmes te deconstrueren en hen vervolgens in te zetten in andere contexten dan die waarvoor ze gemaakt zijn, hoop ik hun poëtische aard te ontsluieren. Mijn focus ligt daarbij op het verhaal en het spel, en veel minder op hun technische performativeit.

Voor dit onderzoek kreeg ik de toekenning van een onderzoeksgerichte beurs van de Vlaamse Overheid.

‘I would have been ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we held each other and ground my jaws together. “We just drifted apart.” We walked like two people whom he did not seek power for its freedom. If I get a new Middle group splits off from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how we were rubbing our sweaty bodies against each other as long as they parted at the Party is infallible. But since in reality disappeared. Each of the day. Of course. I was going to do so. It was now his diary. And in the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he added half-nostalgically: “‘Oranges and lemons,” say the – Something changed in some connection to this country. But your father is –” She bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. Gave every impression of having very few words were not continuous. There had been singled out for the counter-attack. Four, five, six – in some way so that his heart a feeling of her t-shirt. Her warm tummy, her soft navel. They inched higher.’

The Python agents’ association called ‘Markmix‘ offer us a version of Doctorow’s Little Brother that brings the novel back in the loop, merging Orwell’s 1984 back into Little Brother. 1984 was a clear inspiration for Doctorow. Many details in the text reveal the source, as f.e.the first nickname of the main character Marcus Yallow. He calls himself w1n5t0n. Pronounced “Winston.”

Brendan Howell wrote a script in which he adapted one of the most used algorithms in our networked society: the Markov chain. » Read the rest of this entry «

The four bash agents, ‘cat’, ‘tr’, ‘sort’ and ‘uniq’ easily collaborate in order to provide us in less than a second with a list of unique words in a text.
Their play allows for different readings. » Read the rest of this entry «

LTTL BRTHR
CHPTR 1

“RPRT T TH DMNSTRTN FFC MMDTLY

Read more here…
» Read the rest of this entry «

L1ttl3 Br0th3r

1’m 4 s3n10r 4t C3s4r Ch4v3z h1gh 1n S4n Fr4nc1sc0’s sunny M1ss10n d1str1ct, 4nd th4t m4k3s m3 0n3 0f th3 m0st surv31ll3d p30pl3 1n th3 w0rld. My n4m3 1s M4rcus Y4ll0w, but b4ck wh3n th1s st0ry st4rts, 1 w4s g01ng by w1n5t0n. Pr0n0unc3d “W1nst0n.”

Inspired by the gaming culture of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, the novel has been rewritten in basic l33t speak by the Bash agent ‘sed’, replacing A by 4, E by 3, I by 1, O by 0.

L33t was invented by hackers in the 80’s to prevent their websites from simple keyword searches. It was widely spread by online gamers afterwards. Phrases such as ‘I am elite’ became common place, and somewhere down the line l33t speak crept in, reforming the phrase into ’1 4m 3l1t3′ in order to demonstrate that the speaker was a hacker and someone to be feared. L33t speak became so succesfull that the use of it now is cliché.

Our Bash agent seems to confirm the cliché: it only takes a oneliner of less than 50 characters to turn an entire novel into the perfectly legible retro-language, and this, in less than a second. As a reader it raises a question to ex-users of L33t: could the experience of reading the novel in the different degrees of l33t-complexity be compared to reading it in Old English, in Shakespeare’s Early Modern English or in Chaucer’s Middle English?

The oneliner:

$ cat Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.txt | sed ‘s/[aA]/4/g ; s/[eE]/3/g ; s/[Ii]/1/g ; s/[oO]/0/g’ > novel.txt

—

Read more about this project: 1984 Little Brother Git
You find more versions of the novel on this blog and on gitorious.

You wouldn’t want the Nazis running the country.
“You wouldn’t understand.
“You wouldn’t believe it.
“You wouldn’t –”
You would have ended up in jail in a week, two tops.
“You won’t get caught,” I said.
You won’t be able to fight the feeling that you’re dying.
“You will tell him,” she managed.
You will never speak of what happened here to anyone, ever.
“You will.
You were very generous to give it to me and I’ll try to repay the gift, but you don’t get the right to edit anything out, to change it, or to stop me.
“You were right.”
Read the entire text
» Read the rest of this entry «

This is how far this project goes for now. Twelve hours have past since the first commit.
And I prefer to freeze the concept instead of freezing the spirits by inducing my colleagues, friends and myself into a risky business of working with illegal material.
Luckily there is someone like Cory Doctorow, who rewrote 1984 for youngsters. He managed to get Little Brother published under a Creative Commons Non-commercial Share Alike, ready to remix.
So today I start a new project with a new repository: 1984:revisited.
But not without making a statement first. » Read the rest of this entry «

30 years after the setting of George Orwell’s 1984, the novel is frequently referenced in articles on privacy, data protection and the surveillance society. Search for ‘Big Brother’ in this database f.ex.: http://etraces.constantvzw.org.
The novel was written in 1948, speculating on a totalitarian society that would not allow for any possible resistance.

Do these references to 1984 make sense? And to what extent? That is the question for which this project is a thinking tool. Today there is not one government, not one system. The surveillance society is a fragmented one, Big Brother has such a friendly face we do not organise a big protest after the heroic act of Snowdon, and the human minds seem far too messy to be able to control them. But then there are a lot of similarities too.

This revisiting journal is launched on gitorious today, on 4th April 2014, exactly thirty years after the main character Winston started his journal in Orwell’s novel. The methods for revisiting are inspired by the ideas living at Constant and Variable in Brussels, the experiments with video and archives of Michael Murtaugh, Stéphanie Villayphiou’s Blind Carbon Copy, discussions with members of Algolit and the belief that Kenneth Goldsmith might be right when he states in ‘Uncreative Writing’ that the literary digital revolution is only about to start.

During Chercher Le Texte, a conference held in Paris in October, an initiative of ELO (Electronic Literature Organisation), some of the ideas that are (latently) present in the workgroup of Algolit, were described and confirmed. This post is a subjective reading of several conferences I attended, meant as an invitation for discussions and exchanges. » Read the rest of this entry «

Le 1er juin à Nantes j’ai assisté à la seule intervention sur la littérature numérique au sein de la première édition du festival littéraire Atlantide à Nantes.

L’intervenante était… Catherine Lenoble qui m’avait invitée au même moment pour une intervention autour du même sujet. Les exemples et les références qu’elle a fournis me sont très chers, en plus qu’ils se trouvent en ligne. A explorer!