GLOSSARY / USEFUL CONCEPT

Algorithm

Algorithm is a general computational procedure. In actual operations, algorithm is a finite set of instructions that "must be able to deal with an input which is not restricted in its size." [Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford: OUP, 1999), p. 46] In brief, the essence of algorithm is the full-scale mechanization of successive thought procedures. This is the base for the Writing Machine Collective which is a "thinking device," or a "thinking machine."

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that "studies how to program computers to exhibit apparently intelligent behavior." Principia Cybernetica Web, Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems , http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/ARTIFI_INTEL.html

Classical AI studies individual minds and neglects all the other agents in the environment, it emphasizes top-down processing and central planning. On the contrary, new AI stresses very much the bottom-up processing in programming, so that complex behavior will emerge out of the local interactions among simple units without a central commander, which echoes the idea of emergence embraced by the writing machines .

Automatism

Automatism , a creative method upheld by the French surrealists, celebrates chance, accidents, and surprises derived from rule-driven creative processes free from idealism or any attempt to assert the transcendental subjective control of the author. Since an automatic method exploits free association, it draws its energy from truncated thoughts and works with fragments, or, isolated semantic units, rather than logical sequences with complete narrative meanings. The "brokenness" inherent in automatism , therefore, facilitates the assemblage of textual and visual units for algorithmic operations .

Automatic writing is one of the creative tools derived from automatism, it serves different purposes such as to cure writing blocks, to go beyond our rigid thinking patterns, to break away from our social and moral norms, to go beyond our established writing habits so as to find new tones, new styles and new voices, and to understand ourselves better by reaching the unknown territories of our inner world. In this sense, automatic writing is our inner fortress – a safe place to admit our true emotions. It allows us to engage with our life and view it with greater detachment, that is, to build an observer self. It also allows us to affirm the fact that there is an individual world of our own despite our busy social life, and that we can gain understanding of it.

Guillaume Apollinaire's "Calligrammes"

"Calligrammes" was introduced by the French Artist Guillaume Apollinaire in 1925. "Calligrammes" are poems with their texts arranged in visual forms, trying to create and to induce a new level of text-image communication (poetry as visual experience) by the collapse of the rigid distinction between poem and image via spatialization of its visual and verbal composition.

Co-creativity

Co-creativity encourages collaboration unprecedented in conventional art practices on three levels: between author and audience/ viewer/ user , between artists and technologists, and between art and technology in general. It was discussed and promoted in Linda Candy and Ernest Edmonds, Explorations in Art and Technbology (Surrey, UK: Springer-Verlag, 2002), and presented at the Fourth International CaiiA-STAR Research Conference titled "Consciousness Reframed 2002: Non-local, Non-linear, Non-ordinary," as part of the BEAP (Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth). The conference paper was titled " Co-creativity in Art and Technology Exploration."

Infinite Possibilities of Conceivable Books

The idea of the infinite possibilities of conceivable books is a principle that a finite system can produce infinite ways of reading , it is often quoted in Umberto Eco's "Afterword" to The Future of the Book , in which he writes, "We must make a careful distinction... between systems and texts. A system (for instance, a linguistic system) is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given language. In this framework it holds the principle of unlimited semiosis...The system is perhaps finite but unlimited. ...In this sense certainly all the conceivable books are comprised by and within a good dictionary... If conceived in such a way, hypertext can transform every reader into an author ." – Umberto Eco, "Afterword" in Geoffrey Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book ( Berkeley , Los Angeles : University of California Press), p. 302.

Cybertext

Taking a broader view, cyber-textuality is not unique of computer-driven textuality. Cybertext is in a way similar to ergodic literature , and it "focuses on the mechanical organization of the text by positioning the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange," Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 1, which is very much the characteristics of the OuLiPo writers who, starting in the 1960s, have upheld rule-driven principles and the incorporation of mathematics into literature. From this perspective, "Machine" is an effort to integrate a number of literary theses and digital principles and is itself a statement to re-define literature.

Writing Machine aims to be a cybertext . In terms of human agency, it focuses on the readers' co-authorship and automatic creative input . In this sense, Writing Machines as cybertexts are closer to game-world-labyrinth than narratives: whereas the latter concern the ultimate delivery of story information, the term "labyrinth" itself denotes complex artistry, inextricability, and difficult process.

With such design, viewers become authors themselves. By doing so, the "Writing Machine" falls in line with many attempts in recent media art to re-define the identity of a work of art as well as the notion of an author. The conventional artist now is no longer the sole, ultimate author, but becomes the initiator of a series of infinite creative possibilities by many co-/ post-authors. A work of art is then captured as here-and-now moments along an open process of limitless emergence.

Emergence

Emergence occurs whenever a collection of interacting subunits give rise to new and unpredictable characteristics that are not found in the individual subunits, through simple algorithmic rules . "The emergent behavior is unanticipated and cannot be directly deduced from the lower-level behavior." Gary William Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: the MIT Press, 1998), p. 449.
An emergent property is normally the product of collective activity without a central commander, its complexity is formed by a self-organization system , where a characteristic self-organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a complex global order built out of local interactions.

Ergodic Literature

Reappropriated from the words "ergon" and "hodos," meaning "work" and "path" in Greek physics, "ergodic literature" is compared to cybertext by Aarseth. Examples of ergodic literature are the I Ching (1122-770 b.c.), Guillaume Apollinaire's "calligrammes" from the early 20th century and so on, in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text ," as opposed to literature that is non-ergodic, "where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages." Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 1-2; 9-12.

Hypertext

Aarseth differentiates between a superior definition of interaction , after Lippman's, and a weaker definition of interaction, which simply means participation, play, or even use. Aarseth calls a work after the weaker definition hypertext, and that after the superior definition cybertext . Cybertext is dynamic, whereas hypertext is static: both the content of the hypertext and the permutations potentially open to the reader are fixed. By contrast, in the case of cybertext, a machine to generate extended possibilities of expression, "the actual content of the text may be determined by a script that enables the computer to evolve its own stories" according to parameters written into the application. J. Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books – or Books without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives ( Ann Arbor : the University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 4

Most existing interactive narratives are hypertexts. They are in the form of a journey with something to acquire, a task to accomplish, a reward to grab, a destination to reach and so on. Or there is simply something to look at. Or there are a few story lines to follow depending on where one randomly branches off. In most cases, the reader merely follows links already constructed by the author, realizing several of the author's scripted permutations of the narrative or prescribed resolution. Many tree structures are actually very much stuck with linearity. Forward motion of the narrative hinges on simple recognition of the users' choice of limited options. The main difference between one work and another is in the degree of complexity and predictability. Pre-set destination of hypertext – though reachable via many different routes – implies a closed system after all.

Immersion

Immersion is considered to be an attempt to draw readers into the story world that the author creates. Emphasizing senses involvement and the feeling of "being-there," immersion is a holistic experience that includes readers' bodily presence, spatial exploration and mental simulation in the story world.

An immersive experience also stresses readers' empirical participation. Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979) is an example of supplying readers with a role in its story. Readers are treated as the participants of the story world. Immersion is thus regarded as entering a journey, a full ritual, a labyrinth .

Interactivity

"Interactivity," the key issue in new media narratives, is still very much a debatable term. The most ideal case of interaction, after Andy Lippman of MIT's Media Lab, implies the discourse of a narrative itself is unknown in advance or subject to change. Lippman summarizes the characteristics of interactivity as interruptibility, the absence of a single, clear-cut default path or action, and the impression of an infinite database , which more or less applies to the Writing Machine Collective . J. Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books – or Books without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives ( Ann Arbor : the University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 42-3.

Labyrinth

S ome of the Writing Machines we want to achieve are meant to be labyrinths.

Aarseth refers to Penelope Reed Doob who distinguishes between two kinds of labyrinth: the unicursal (where there is only one path, normally pointing towards the centre) and the multicursal (where there are more than one path for the wanderer to choose from).

Despite the difference between the two and the prominence of the multicursal ones since the Renaissance, both types denote the same essential qualities of the labyrinth: complex design, artistic order and chaos, inextricability, and the difficult process the wanderers experience. Labyrinth is therefore very similar to cybertext , and it is indeed beyond the dichotomy of linearity and non-linearity, even if it can be divided into and described as unicursal and multicursal. Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 5-8.

Machine

A "Machine" here is a logical structure, not a physical object: "A machine can be defined as a man-made, artificial construction, which essentially functions by virtue of mechanical operations." As a part-whole dynamic system, "[a] mechanism consists of movable parts that work together and periodically return to a set relation with respect to each other." Georges Canguilhem, "Machine and Organism," in Jonathan Crary, Sanford Kwinter (ed.), Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 46. The various "machines" in this project are grouped together as a text and image engine that can re-arrange and generate text and images with both prepared and user input text and images – probably in a semi-unpredictable way.

Permutation

Permutation is a mathematical term for describing the different patterns of an ordered set of units. Therefore, if A, B, and C are the individual units of a set, the permutations of the set, that is, the various ordered arrangements of the set are: ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA, and the number of permutation is 6.

Permutation offers possibilities within a finite system. In the context of Writing Machine , permutation is no more a mere mathematical concept but in a way similar to the idea of serialism which also concerns the compositional organization of a set. Permutation makes a particular ordered set unique and distinct from all the other sets consisting of the same individual units. Raymond Queneau's book Cent mille Milliards de poemes (1961) is one of the examples applying permutation into literature. The book consists of ten sonnets, each of which fourteen lines is placed on a separated strip; the one hundred and forty lines/ strips can combine and form all together 100,000,000,000,000 (10 14 ) different sonnets.

Reader-as-author

The notion of "reader-as-author" is most often alluded to Roland Barthes famous essay, "The Death of the Author," in which he says, "[A] text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not... the author... To give writing its future... the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." – Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett (ed.), Media Texts, Authors and Readers: A Reader (Clevedon, England; Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters in association with The Open University, 1994), p. 170.

Rule-driven Creativity

Rule-driven principles in creative activities have been upheld by the OuLiPo Group (the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or in English: the Workshop of Potential Literature) since the 1960s. Not unlike the phenomenon of emergence , rules are applied to their creative works in order to open up new, complex and unpredictable outcomes. One of the famous examples is "Mathews' Algorithm " done by one of the OuLiPo members Harry Mathews, where set rules are applied to make positional and permutational arrangements to the words of a poem so that completely new poems can be produced, even by the same materials (words).

Serialism

"Serialism is a method of composition by which the order of occurrence of one or more musical elements is determined by a preexisting arrangement." Bryan R. Simms, "Serialism," in Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure (New York: Schirmer Books; London: Prentice Hall International, 1996), p. 61.

The term was originally applied to describe the compositional process in 20th-century music, but it was made common to all types of formal organization after the Second World War. Serial thinking concerns about individual set with its individual units, and the mathematical/ structural operations of individual units through repetition, invariance, and variation, to form each set a unique system.

David Bordwell emphasizes serialism as a method to generate formal complexity , as he explains in his discussion of the idea of parametric narrative: "The goal of integral serialism was a new unity, in which a single structure dictates the entire piece, from local textual to overall form." David Bordwell, "Parametric Narration," in Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 274-310.