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| The user interface for David Jhave Johnston's PennSound MUPS (see below). |
Erica T. Carter / Issue 1
Erica T. Carter was a pseudonym used by Jim Carpenter for work written by his Electronic Text Composition program (ETC), which was created about a decade ago while working as an adjunct at UPenn's Wharton School of Business. This sophisticated writing algorithm, which was available via the web until Carpenter's retirement several years back, allowed users to generate poems with great control over variables like length, syntactical complexity, and so forth. What I recall hearing was that ETC's word bank was drawn from digesting the collected works of Emily Dickinson, however it seems that the poems were generated from a much more diverse array of materials — from canonical authors like Joyce and Hawthorne to daily news articles. I do know that Carpenter successfully published a number of poems in various journals, and Erica was often praised for how well she captured the essence of a modern woman's life. You can browse through ETC's collected works here, which comes complete with a record of source texts, seed words, and other determining factors in the composition of each poem. If you're interested you can also read a more technical description of how ETC works here.
One can't mention ETC without also mentioning the controversy surrounding Issue 1, a 3,785 page collection of poems by practically everyone and anyone in the poetry world, living and dead, published in the fall of 2008. The only problem was that none of these people had actually submitted work — the work attributed to each author was generated by ETC and then assembled into the anthology by (at first) clandestine editors Stephen McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor, and Vladimir Zykov. As Al Filreis notes in a blog post on the episode: "Many poets google themselves, or receive messages called 'Google alerts' whenever their names appear anywhere on the web, and so, in short, they found themselves 'published' in this 'issue.' When they read poems they had not themselves written, some were tickled (gotten by the gotcha) while others were angry." You can get a fuller sense of the reactions by reading Kenneth Goldsmith's Harriet post on Issue 1 and the comments that follow it. As he notes, "either you're in or you're not," and that alone was enough to piss people off. Towards that end, I should add that I felt deeply hurt that I was not "in," until several years later when I realized that the editors had just butchered my last name (Hennesy, instead of Hennessey)(I'm just kidding)(not really . . .). You can browse Issue 1 here.
As a footnote to all of this, while researching the fate of ETC, I spoke briefly with McLaughlin, Carpenter, and Chris Funkhouser (see below) and there's hopes that ETC might soon be resurrected.
Chris Funkhouser
It's hard to categorize Chris simply, because he wears so many hats — poet, scholar, audio archivist, musician, media theorist, one-time webmaster of Amiri Baraka's homepage, and so on — but for today, I'd like to draw your attention to a few projects of his.
First, there's Funk's Sound Box 2012, available in two different interfaces, which catalogues each and every one of the 427 recordings Funkhouser made during 2012. "My initial aspiration," he notes, "was to reduce a hundred hours of material I recorded to something along the lines jukebox-length cuts. That did not happen fully, largely because of the difficulty involved with what of such interesting material to select, along with the belief that chopping it all up into three minute segments seemed unwise." "I also seek to encourage play, and what I have only partially accomplished — and still aspire towards — is creating a sound environment and visual interface that efficiently allows users to mix and match different segments," he continues. "The Stereoeo and Table interfaces do allow users to layer and unify audio segments (about a quarter of which is musical or sonic, without language, noted with a symbol), which can be extremely enjoyable and stimulating."
I also welcome you to look at some of Funkhouser's Flash-based digital poetry pieces, which can be found by scrolling down to the bottom of this page. These pieces, which often showcase a Mac Low-esque etymological fascination by all of the words contained within a word of phrase, make good use of sound, image, text, color, and movement to create ever-changing wordscapes that challenge readers to actively hew their own path through the presented materials. Finally, as a supplemental text (and a wholly optional one) I gladly offer up Funkhouser's 2007 talk on IBM Poetry at the Kelly Writers House, which is segmented thematically with links out to the discussed works.
Brian Kim StefansAs a footnote to all of this, while researching the fate of ETC, I spoke briefly with McLaughlin, Carpenter, and Chris Funkhouser (see below) and there's hopes that ETC might soon be resurrected.
Chris Funkhouser
It's hard to categorize Chris simply, because he wears so many hats — poet, scholar, audio archivist, musician, media theorist, one-time webmaster of Amiri Baraka's homepage, and so on — but for today, I'd like to draw your attention to a few projects of his.
First, there's Funk's Sound Box 2012, available in two different interfaces, which catalogues each and every one of the 427 recordings Funkhouser made during 2012. "My initial aspiration," he notes, "was to reduce a hundred hours of material I recorded to something along the lines jukebox-length cuts. That did not happen fully, largely because of the difficulty involved with what of such interesting material to select, along with the belief that chopping it all up into three minute segments seemed unwise." "I also seek to encourage play, and what I have only partially accomplished — and still aspire towards — is creating a sound environment and visual interface that efficiently allows users to mix and match different segments," he continues. "The Stereoeo and Table interfaces do allow users to layer and unify audio segments (about a quarter of which is musical or sonic, without language, noted with a symbol), which can be extremely enjoyable and stimulating."
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| A screenshot from Aleatory Constellation (2007). |
Stefans appears here for two different reasons: first, I'd like you to look at some of the examples discussed in his 2008 Kelly Writers House talk on "Language as Gameplay" — including the Flash setting of the E chapter of Christian Bök's Eunoia (which we'll be looking at shortly), Jason Nelson's Literary Textual Games (n.b. you will be haunted by the phrase "come on and meet your maker" after playing), and Judd Morrisey's "The Jew's Daughter" — and listen to his comments on each.
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| A screencap from Stefans' Suicide in an Airplane 1919. |
Then listen to his comments on his own work and interact with some of those pieces (don't worry about the expired security certificate — it's safe to proceed). Another wonderful piece by Stefans not available on the aforelinked UbuWeb page is his "Suicide in an Airplane 1919," which you can view here.
Finally, I'd like you play around with David Jhave Johnston's PennSound MUPS, a mash-up engine that uses pre-selected tracks from the PennSound archives, allowing for some interesting textual (and textural) interactions. Here's Al Filreis' initial write-up of the project on Jacket2, which also includes comments from Charles Bernstein, Johnston, and yours truly:
Working with our PennSound audio files, Jhave Johnston has created a prototype mashup machine that enables on overlay of poets' sounds, with an option to turn on WEAVE, which senses silence (e.g. between lines or stanzas in a performance) and automatically intercuts from one short file segment to another, creating a flow of shifting voices. "I always figured," says Charles Bernstein, my co-director at PennSound, "that once we had a substantial archive of sound files, the next phase would be for people to use them in novel ways." "Reminds me," says Michael S. Hennessey, PennSound's editor, "of one of my favorite things to do with the site before we switched to the current streaming codec, which doesn't allow for simultaneous play: pull up a few author pages — best of all Christian Bök — and start layering tracks over his cyborg opera beatboxing." Jhave adds: "My motivation for building it is similar to Michael's: a joy in listening to things overlap."
You can interact with PennSound MUPS here.
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