Collaborations in E-lit

Both of us have collaborated with others to make works of e-literature, but collaborating with each other seemed unlikely as our work is so different. When we present Sea and Spar Between (http://blogs.saic.edu/dearnavigator/winter2010/nick-montfort-stephanie-strickland-sea-and-spar-between), we specifically raise this question with the audience:

S: How did we two come to collaborate on this poem? Nick, very roughly speaking, is interested in the assembly of language, the recombination of language fragments, and getting at the heart of things by squeezing out excess.

N: Stephanie, as I understand it, is interested in flows and relationships, the systems that underlie apparent discontinuities and disturbances. She has collaborated for many years to extend her work in poetic language from the page and book through the computer and onto the screen.

S: We both like poetry, and we both like math; neither of us would choose a brute force method when there might be an elegant solution. Yet I feel cautioned by the words of Oulipian poet Jacques Roubaud, a mathematician and a poet. He insists that “mathematics and poetry are completely separate, utterly unrelated discourses: the former is eminently paraphrasable, the latter is utterly un-paraphrasable (the poem ‘says what it says while saying’ it, whereas proofs in maths can and should be rewritten in as many ways as imaginable).”

N: I agree with Roubaud, but when it comes to code, a computer program is like a mathematical proof; there is even a named formulation of the connection between the two, called the Curry-Howard Correspondence. Just as a proof can be written in different ways, so too can a computer program—unlike poetry, which is what gets lost in translation. But this flexibility in writing programs is one of the things that intrigues me about code. By leaving open space and allowing a certain amount of play, programming languages permit one program to be more beautiful than another, even when they both do the exact same thing.

S: Strangely, my interest in poetry generators is motivated not by un-paraphrasable economy of structure, something I love in poems, but by superfluity of output—by a state of affairs where one is awash in potentials we know we have, but cannot prevision. Why? Because, to my mind, language wants to evolve toward what Tim Morton calls “the ecological thought”; namely, that there is no outside, no inside, no secure perch or boundary, but only multiply woven interconnectiveness—at every level. I think that two kinds of current language practice might evolve to serve “the ecological thought”: Poetry and Code.

Collaborators dissolve their individual claims and feelings of ownership while actually heightening their responsibility.

N: To these, I’ll add Collaboration. There are many benefits to collaboration, such as the ability it gives writers to learn from one another. An even more important benefit: by sharing the writing task from the initial concept for the project through to completing the details of the work’s presentation, collaborators dissolve their individual claims and feelings of ownership while actually heightening their responsibility. They discuss matters of writing and programming which would be passed over without comment or deliberation by a single author/ programmer. The text (in this case, both generated poems and the code that generates them) becomes of utmost concern to me, as I know it is to Stephanie, without being “mine” in a narrow, exclusive sense. If we can do this in our writing, perhaps it will help us to work, create, and explore together when it comes to our cities and our planet.

Beyond interpersonal cooperation, the signal collaboration in e-literature is with “it,” the computer, or the database, the algorithm, and the limitations of protocols and software. Computational steps make it easy to re-combine, remix, mash, recycle, and appropriate every kind of legacy media—and sometimes to significantly alter it. This is true of Sea and Spar Between. The sourcetexts, the poems of Emily Dickinson and the entirety of Moby-Dick (1851), are used to generate as many new stanzas as there are fish in the sea. Well...