User:Kim/reading/Thinking Machines

Georges Perec's Thinking Machines
David Bellos
in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early computing and the foundations of the digital arts
edt. Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn

Perec rooted in belief of writing and creativity as work, the product of labour and machinery

Raymond Queneau described Oulipians as

rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.

P.A.L.F.

"production automatique de littérature française"

"translation device for automatic production of literature"

each noun of a sentence would be replaced with its dictionary definition

Perec and Bénabou: what if you feed these translations into the machines, over and over?

exhausting the lexicon – everything has the same meaning

in practice: didn't calculate ambiguity, more than one meaning of words in dictionary - decisions had to be made

Oulipo

"Workshop for potential literature"

constraint

operation that can be made fully explicit, brings forth new text

looking into algorithm / machine as author (Kafka Machine)

Die Maschine

commissioned by Saarländischer Rundfunk (SR), Eugen Helmle

Perec went through different ideas like letting imaginary computer answer question "What is Poetry?"

final piece was a deconstruction of Goethe's Wanderers Nachtlied

shift the poem about, replacing vowels, replacing nouns, truncating, foreshortening, changing tenses, persons, rearranging the letters into anagrams, "translating" it by the method known as S+7

"Die Maschine" is not computer art: here operating computer is imaginary (bringing the idea of computing into literature)

The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise

presents procedure for obtaining a raise inside organization in form of flowchart of a recursive and incremental algorithm

forming single sentence

resentment, anger (no change in tone but in level of frustration)

writing the "simultaneous" flowchart protocol Perec discovered

time reinserts itself by necessity in any narrative

like "Die Maschine", also presented in SR Radio

each of the operators in the algorithm has separate voice

Clinamen

for Oulipo important intentional irregularity

not permitted by all Oulipo constraints

Clinamen softens harshness of tex written (or organized) under constraints

intentional bending of self imposed rules

demonstrating power of author over outcome (?)

also mentioned:

Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Novel, 1978 (translated into english by David Bellos, 1987)