A story
From Algolit
Contents
We could start a start-up for start-uppy start-up texts
Performance lecture on 16-3-16 in Witte de With, Class of '16
Email: "In the context of the exhibition Para|Fictions at Witte de With (WdW) Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the WdW Class of '16 – the collaborative student co-programming team of Witte de With – would like to invite you to contribute to our first event. The event will be centered around the contamination and slippages between artistic and entrepreneurial language. In Para|Fictions : Foreword, artists Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff intensify the abstractions of notions such as community, participation, space and radical future by focusing on the language as the object and product of entrepreneurial startups. The event will zero in on the textuality of this kind of language and will attempt to expose its mechanisms of creating and constructing a collective lived fantasy. We invite you to reflect on the above themes, and also, in the spirit of the Algolit workgroup, we would like you to present your project and attempt to deconstruct a text that will be provided to you by the second collaborator of the event (possibly an academic lecturer about entrepreneurial/corporate language) in order to unpack its extensive use of affective language. Upon agreeing to your participation, we can discuss further and agree together on the exact format of the event and the level of interactivity with the audience and with the other contributor/lecturer."
How did algolit start?
- initiative by Constant
- Brussels, November 2005 : Constant member Pierre Dejaeger VJ9 invites literary author and member of Oulipo Jacques Jouet
http://constantvzw.org/site/Verbindingen-Jonctions-9.html?lang=en http://oulipo.net
- Brussels, July 2010: Active Archives Kitchen Table Workshop - Nicolas Malevé proposes to write a Python script for the Oulipian recipe 'Littérature définitionelle'
http://activearchives.org/wiki/Kitchen_table_workshop http://oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/litterature-definitionnelle
- Brussels, October 2012 : Catherine Lenoble & An Mertens invite F/LOSS media artists interested in literature, Olivier Heinry & Nicolas Malevé, for a 3-day workshop. Algolit is born.
Algorithmic Reading
- Adapting the reading glasses
adapting_the_reading_glasses.py: preprocessing file: strip white spaces, lowercase, capitalize
- Reading is counting
-> Counting all words
LibreOffice: count amount of words + compare
-> Stylometry
- counting_the_frequency_of_words.py: frequency with stopwords
- counting_the_frequency_of_words_grand_cru.py: frequency without stopwords - create sorted frequency dictionary
→ reading a text without stopwords can be fun, more for sound poetry
- counting_as_a_canonical_literary_reviewer.py: nltk function: variety of words
-> Machine Learning Techniques
calculating sentiment analysis, Constant Worksession Cqrrelations, Brussels, deBuren, Jan 2015
Oulipo Writing
Until 2014 we would spend 1 day of the algolit meetings scripting 1 of the Oulipo recipes: chimère, contrainte du prisonnier, s+7
- L'abécédaire: sorting sentences
http://oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/abecedaire
LibreOffice: sort -> this creates the abecedaire of Oulipo
→ invited us to study the algorithms as such by playing them out:
→ Quicksort (Nantes + Recyclart + Bilbao) – Nicolas
→ Markov chain (Désert Numérique, Transmediale) – Brendan, Catherine
→ Minimal edit Distance (Cqrrelations, Bilbao) – Adva
- Littérature définitionelle // Python2
http://oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/litterature-definitionnelle
litterature_definitionelle.py: take 4 random sentences of a text & expand NN by its definition
- Invent your own recipe
A famous one & very easy to apply, copied from the book 'Think Python':
novel_starring_you.py: change name of character: make yourself hero / swap names of these 2 stories
- Merge two different texts based on keywords
script inspired by 'The Death of the Authors, 1941 - a generative novel', published in 2012 by Constant http://publicdomainday.constantvzw.org/#1941
remixing.py
Algoliterary Figures of Speech
From Aristotle to today
- Expanding the text
tautology.py // Python2
A tautology - from the Greek word ταυτολογία, tautos (the same) and logos (word) - stresses a specific word by adding another word that has the same or a similar meaning.
- Combining reading & writing
whenever_in_the_mood.py // Python 2
this script can easily be rewritten using web related data, like the weather forecast, the stockmarket scores etc
Everything is text
Experiments from the last Algolit sessions are combined by Manetta & Gijs
- topic modeling
- rewrite with film