Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023

Book launch events are posted here and will be updated as new ones are scheduled!

This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While not restricted to poetry, fiction, and other creative projects, it reveals the rich work that has been done by artists, poets, and other sorts of writers who have taken computing and code into their own hands. The anthology includes examples of powerful and principled rhetorical generation along with story generation systems based on cognitive research. There are examples of “real news” generation that has already been informing us — along with hoaxes and humor.

It’s all contextualized by brief introductions to each excerpt, longer introductions to each fine-grained genre of text generation, and an overall introduction that Lillian-Yvonne and I wrote. There are 200 selections in the 500-page book, which we hope will be a valuable sourcebook for academics and students — but also a way for general readers to learn about innovations in computing and writing.

You can buy Output now from several sources. I suggest your favorite independent bookseller! If you’re in the Boston area, stop by the MIT Press Bookstore which as of this writing, has 21 on hand as of actually publishing this post, has 14 copies!

Upcoming Book Launches, Talks, and Events

April 5 (Saturday) Both co-editors on the panel The Literary Life of AI: Output through the Years at Baltimore’s CityLit Festival. Free & open to the public, Lord Baltimore Hotel, Hanover Suite A Mezzanine, 11:30am-12:30pm.

Previous Events

November 11 (Monday): Both editors spoke at the University of Virginia, Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge, Floor 2. Free & open to the public. 5pm.

November 20 (Wednesday): Online book launch for Output, hosted by the University of Maryland. Both editors in conversation with Matt Kirschenbaum. Free, please register. 12noon Eastern Time.

November 21 (Thursday) Book launch at WordHack with me, David Gissen, Sasha Stiles, Andrew Yoon, and open mic presenters. Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, 7pm. $15. Book sales.

December 6 (Friday) Output will be available for sale and I’ll be at the Bad Quarto / Nick Montfort table at Center for Book Arts Winter Market, 28 W 27th St Floor 3, 4pm–8pm.

December 9 (Monday) Book launch at Book Club Bar with the editors, Charles Bernstein, Robin Hill, Stephanie Strickland, and Leonard Richardson. 197 E 3rd St (at Ave B), New York City’s East Village. Free, RSVP required. 8pm. Book sales thanks to Book Club.

December 13 (Friday) European book launch with the editors, Scott Rettberg, and Tegan Pyke. University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, Langesgaten 1-2, 3:30pm. Free & open to the public, book sales thanks to Akedemika. This event was streamed & recorded and is available to view on YouTube.

January 13 (Monday) “The Output Anthology at Computer-Generated Text’s Cultural Crux”, a talk of mine at the UCSC Computational Media Colloquium, Engineering 2 Room 280, 12:30pm–1:30pm. Free & open to the public.

January 20 (Monday) Toronto book launch with me, Matt Nish-Lapidus, & Kavi Duvvoori, at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture & Technology (previously Marshall McLuhan’s seminar room), 6pm–7:30pm.

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University workshop “Ars Combinatoria: A Generative Poetics” with the editors, CFA 215, 2pm–4pm. Registration required, limited to 15.

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University book launch with the editors, CFA, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (CFA 111), 5:30pm–7pm. Free & open to the public, please RSVP.

March 11 (Tuesday) Massachusetts Institute of Technology book launch with the editors, MIT’s Room 32-155, 5pm-6:30pm. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to the MIT Press Bookstore.

March 17 (Monday) Montréal book launch with Erín Mouré, Darren Wershler, Bill Kennedy, and Sofian Audry. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to Argo Bookshop. Concordia University, 1515, Saint-Catherine St. W, EV 11.705, 4pm-6pm.

March 25 (Tuesday) New School book launch for both Output and All the Way for the Win. CaLC (Code at Lang Colloquium) series. Free & open to the public, registration required. Hirshon Suite, 55 W 13th St, Floor 2, 5-6:30pm.

March 29 (Saturday) AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, on the panel “Making a Literary Future with Artificial Intelligence,” Concourse Hall 151, 1:45pm–3pm.

When we speak of “identity,” we speak of difference. This is true whether we are philosophers like John Perry, who has interrogated what it is that makes objects identical to one another, or are focused on the social world. The works in Difference Machines explore how, in the context of computer and network technologies, people’s identities persist, rather than being erased as some imagined would have happened. This means that some can be grouped together and identified in stereotypical, harmful, even lethal ways — but there are also glimpses of how, more positively, people can identify with one another.

I got to see Difference Machines just before it closed on January 16, so I have to settle for telling you about what you missed. One of the more remarkable aspects of the exhibit is that it was light-flooded and in a space where sound could call out invitingly from some of the pieces without derailing one’s experience of artworks nearby. While I would exhaust myself (and you, dear reader) were I to try to thoroughly review the show and relate much of what was so compelling about it, I’ll at least write some about three of the works in it, to give an idea of what machines were running and how they engaged with shared themes.

Many of the artworks spoke against the concept of a flattened, egalitarian cyberspace (metaverse?), but the photos and texts by Sean Fader in his 2020 Insufficient Memory go beyond this. They document hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people, including many murders and instances where people have been provoked to kill themselves. As a viewer approaches, the low-res photos, taken on a very early consumer digital camera, have a beauty that inheres in the often natural scenes, is intensified by how they are framed, and becomes even more compelling because of the lossy, “cool” (McLuhan’s term) nature of these highly compressed images. Walking around to the back, the viewer, become reader, discovers how each photo is the scene of a brutal crime. The victims did not find positive community through common identity; they were marked as different and in most cases directly killed because of their difference.

To given an idea of the range of this show, turn to ‘Ye or Nay by A.M. Darky (2020). This artwork is a game for two that invites a chat as each player tries to pick out the card that is showing on the other’s screen. It’s not some antigame or disorientation machine, but an actual fun game with a compelling soundtrack, graphics, and interface. (Go play it online!) The cards all display portraits of Black male celebrities. Part of the concept is that some will be better equipped to play this game for various reasons — they will have a more extensive vocabulary to describe the hairstyles shown, for instance, or they will know more about who was born where. The game/artwork playfully tickles players to consider what they’re able to articulate (or not). My only critique is that the piece is already showing its age in one minor way: The apostrophe at the beginning should now be removed!

The last piece I’ll turn to is by a well-known digital media artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. His Level of Confidence (2015) is a free and open source software project in which biometric software matches the face of the viewer (also the viewed, in this case) to one of 43 students who were kidnapped from the Ayotzinapa normalista school in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The project memorializes this event and exposes the working of a face-recognition system which, it seems, is doomed to never make a match. As I read the piece, though, this artwork also uses computer technology to present the viewer with someone who looks like them, making the connection to this kidnapping more personal and acute. This does not result in some sort of naïve empathy machine. A museum visitor in Buffalo is not likely to suddenly feel, “ah! It could have been me being kidnapped!” But the piece is also not purely a slam on surveillance technology, as I see it. The face-recognition system that is central to this interactive artwork is used to invite a novel viewing and works to help keep an event alive in memory.

Well, I could go on! There were many other great works in the show. But I can’t write a catalogic discussion of them all, so I’ll have to let those three stand as examples of the different approaches artists in Difference Machines took.

• Can the Subaltern Speak? by Behnaz Farahi
• Concrete by Matt DesLauriers
• Curse of Dimensionality by Philipp Schmitt
• Gender Generator by Encoder Rat Decoder Rat
• Greed by Maja Kalogera
• Hexells by Alexander Mordvintsev
• Letter from C by Cho Hye Min
• Pac Tracer by Andy Wallace
• P.S.A.A. by Juan Manuel Escalante
• Seedlings_: From Humus by Qianxun Chen & Mariana Roa Oliva
• Self Doubting System by Lee Tusman
• Someone Tell the Boyz by Arwa Mboya
• Songlines by Ágoston Nagy
• This Indignant Page: The Politics of the Paratextual by Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato

There is a (Screen) manifestation of Generative Unfoldings, which lets people run the artworks in their browsers. In addition, a (Code) manifestation provides a repository of all of the free/libre/open-source source code for these client-side artworks. This exhibit is a project of MIT’s CAST (Center for Art, Science & Technology) and part of the Unfolding Intelligence symposium. The opening, remember, is April 1, 2021! See the symposium page, where you can register (at no cost) and find information about joining us.

Agnieszka Kurant   response by Mary Flanagan

Christian Bök   response by Paul Stephens

Daniel Temkin   response by Craig Dworkin

Derek Beaulieu   response by Amaranth Borsuk

Forsyth Harmon   response by Simon Morris & Valérie Steunou

Lauren Lee McCarthy   response by Daniel Temkin

Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault   response by Fox Harrell

Olia Lialina   response by Mary Flanagan

Manfred Mohr   response by Craig Dworkin

Mark Klink   response by Daniel Temkin

Renée Green   response by Paul Stephens

Sly Watts   response by Fox Harrell

Susan Bee   response by Amaranth Borsuk

You can scroll through the entire Post Hoc show as a single page. However, you’ll only see the images at their original size, and be able to read the responses, if you go to each post individually.

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