Digital and Visual Poetry, Week Nine
Digital Poetry-sometimes called e-poetry, electronic poetry or cyberpoetry-is a relatively new area of literature, much of it written in the 1990s. Its boundaries are far from sharp-overlapping with hypertext fiction, time-based art, installation art, net art, performance poetry and sound poetry-as well as genres such as virtual reality, computer games and MUDs.
DIGITAL POETRY - WEEK NINE
Theo Lutz, Stochastic Text
In 1959, on a Zuse Z22 computer, Theo Lutz inserted 16 chapter titles and subjects from Kafka's The Castle into a database and programmed them to recombine into phrases joined by grammatical glue.
Not every look is near. No village is late.
A castle is free and every farmer is distant . . .
It seems appropriate to hail Lutz as the first computational poet: until the archives yield a new figure, until new research reveals that Allan Turing was composing love letters in a basement lab using algorithms as a teenager; or that Ada Lovelace has a functioning Difference Engine; or perhaps as many speculative fiction writers might remind us, some alien civilizations predate our human computer generation by eons; or as Florian Cramer writes: "The oldest permutational text adapted in Permutations is Optatianus Porfyrius' Carmen XXV from the fourth century A.D.")
Lutz's 1959 essay is remarkable in that it recognizes the problem of meaning as being central and even suggests as a potential probablistic pathway toward resolution:
It seems to be very significant that it is possible to change the underlying word quantity into a "world field" using an assigned probability matrix, and to require the machine to print only those sentences where a probability exists between the subject and the predicate which exceeds a certain value. In this way it is possible to produce a text which is "meaningful" in relation to the underlying matrix.
One predominant domain of AI research follow this thread suggested by Lutz: statistical probability. In addition Lutz' notion implies the matrice of language is analogous to a network and that proximal sets may evoke meaningful relations, or perhaps that meaning is a pathway between mathematically linked nodes. All of these notions are still currently active as research paths.
C.T. Funkhouser - David Jhave Johnston
http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/07/16/1959-theo-lutz-stochastic-text/