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JL![]()
author
J A Lee
I write books with a software tool I’ve developed called the Différance Engine.
What started me on this road was my first (and conventional) book. It was a semi-autobiographical comedy set in the v...ver maisI write books with a software tool I’ve developed called the Différance Engine.
What started me on this road was my first (and conventional) book. It was a semi-autobiographical comedy set in the video games industry in the 1980s. The book concentrated mostly on the squalor and japery that arose when teenagers were brought together as professionals. It sold for a month or so. However, a book I put out to keep it company, Computer-Generated Short Stories, kept on selling. I was puzzled. Why was the surreal more appealing than the real?
I knew from my time as a philosophy and art student that cutting up words into new compositions had a history. From DaDa to beat novelists to the OuLiPo to Pop Art, collage has been used for decades. Music is now entirely produced with sampling technology. What I didn’t understand was this: why aren’t computers used as compositional writing tools? Wouldn’t new avenues of writing open up?
There’s a competition, NaNoGenMo, in which programmers write a short piece of code that writes a 50K-word novel. The coding ideas are stimulating. The results are amusing. But they’re not intended for serious reading. Why would they be? There’s a commonplace understanding that machines simply lack the lived experience to be properly creative. We can go further. Machines lack the ‘flaws’ (contradictions, beliefs without evidence etc.) that give humans character. What makes machines fascinating is our relationships with them. And this is how I ended up programming code that creates output for editing.
My subject matter is partly the presence of code itself. And equally its absence. Technology is changing everything by becoming a part of everything. The greatest disruption since the industrial revolution is easily hidden within its everyday roles. It’s not just this ubiquity that makes it hard to see. Our cognitive biases make violent world events seem more significant than changes to our domestic and working lives. Furthermore, the demand for specialist knowledge brackets technology off into a niche.
My recent books have taken up discussions about fake news. Both are fictional first-person accounts by public figures. Everything is created from collections of base texts, some factual, some fictional. Donald Trump has been reconfigured as an AI president setting out his/its Gothic manifesto. Madonna, the queen of self reinvention, is reinvented in an autobiography that’s computer-generated and edited by a third party (myself). Both books play hide and seek with truth.
There’s more about these books and their production on my blog:
http://combinatorealism.wordpress.com/
There’s also links and posts relevant to computer-generated writing.ver menos
Livros de J A Lee
The Unauthorised Madonna Autobiography: Test Samples Ghostwritten with Artificial Intelligence