User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/The New Media Reader/The Oulipo

• Read it here
• Recommended by Steve Rushton

The New Media Reader, Edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, 'collects the texts, videos, and computer programs that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media'. It presents a timeline starting at the 40s with the likes of Borges and Turing, spanning to the 90s.

Chapter 12 is dedicated to the Oulipo, with a selection of six works and a general introduction contextualizing the group. This introduction attempts to shed some light on some of their core ideas, for example:

[T]he Oulipians realized that such a system had the potential to define a new type of computer-mediated textuality, producing custom poems in ways that give the reader an enhanced role in the process of literary creation.

One might wonder how this expands to other fields -- especially now that the technological capabilities much more easily facilitate for interaction -- like film and gaming. In the latter case, there are many examples of games that are 'merely a framework for the players' creation': Garry's Mod, Ultimate Chicken Horse, Super Mario Maker, even Minecraft.

In film, there are choose your own adventure projects, but in my experience so far, they are often stiff and don't realize the full potential of their form. Again, if we return to games, we do see interactive video projects, like Her Story.

Either way, I see this 'enhanced role' as hopeful. In the current landscape of media, one is flooded by content in ways that reduce agency, to a point that one wants agency no longer, just consumption. Maybe this enhancement can be a challenge, a provocation to combat the symptoms of a generation.

[A computer that takes a very large space of possible stories and narrows it down to one] is a potentially powerful story-production method, and yet the conclusion of Clavino's essay argues that the solution of any algorithm, the narrowing of even the most artfully constructed set of combinatory possibilities, cannot create literature. He states that it is the 'clinamen' which alone can make of the text a true work of art. The climanem is the deviation, the error in the system.

This is echoed in Calvino's lecture Cybernetics and Ghosts -- the text read before this one in the chronology of the relation between these specific texts and this specific figure of a reader. This idea resonates with me. Not only in arts, but in life in general I have found many activities to be awkward, frsutrating and painful experiences that I stick to, because I know that sticking to it means eventually finding the 'click', that one connection, or one climanem or however you want to describe it, that lets me find a new meaning within myself. In many ways, this reader (referring not to my person, but to this collection of annotations and thoughts) is such an experience.

The potential that lies within such an understanding of interactive experiences is a recongifuration of the relationship between reader, author, and text. The playful construction within constraints that the Oulipo defines as the role of the author can become an activity extended to readers, who can take part in the interpretation, configuration, and construction of texts.

Reader is a curious word for an 'object' like this. It describes an agent, whether that is the agent 'to be read works', or the agent 'reader' created when interacting with this object. It occurs to me that it is no coincidence, perhaps, that this particular reader is not a noun, but rather an adjective: a suggestion of what this interaction for 'the object reader' might be like for 'the person reader'. A word capturing their connection, maybe.

A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

According to Jean Lescure , Raymond Queneau's A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes) is 'perhaps the prototypical example of the Oulipian potential'. It presents 10 sonnets -- all not only following the same rhyme scheme, but the same rhyme sounds, too. Allowing the reader to swap any line with another from the same position in another poem, the reader is invited to become part of the process of literary creation.

Online versions (like one by Beverly Charles Rowe ) beg the question what role materiality plays in this process. I myself notice my exploration of the potential to be subtly different rearranging paper versus selecting by mouse click.

Yours for the Telling

A graph representation of the story nodes in Yours for the Telling

• Read on 2024-06-19
• By Raymond Queneau, translated by John Crombie

A cute, short choose-your-own-adventure-like story that with 21 'nodes' manages to realize many mechanics of the genre: branches, different endings, loops, and directions that let you escape the graph of story nodes all together (in this case by referring you to a dictionary to acquire your own interpretation).

This work was originally published in 1973, preceding the CYOA books made by Edward Packard that started serial publishing in 1976 and book publishing in 1979 . Just like these stories, Yours for the Telling doesn't shy away from making the choices explicit, though not diegetic -- contrary to the way this is often done in contemporary video games. However, there is a difference between Queneau's story and those of Packard: in Yours for the Telling, the 'you' addressed in the story is the individual of the reader. There is no seperation between the 'you' reading the story and the 'you' addressed in the story. This in stark contrast to the CYAO books: the addressed 'you' deciding to venture into a dark cave is a 'puppet-you', controlled and existing in the mind of the 'reader-you', but whose existences doesn't fully coinside. (Compare this to Calvino's Cybernetics and Ghosts, section II)

Just like with A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, there's the question how the form factor impacts the experience. I have noticed that digital choose your own adventures (literal ones, or more videogame-y ones where the options are implicit or the option space invisible) often don't convey this feeling of sprawling potential to me. In a paradoxical manner, being able to capture the bounds of the story, its graphical finality, makes me feel the optionality and interconnectivity more.