New Novel Machines: Nanowatt and World Clock

Critical Writing
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Abstract (in English): 

My Winchester’s Nightmare: A Novel Machine (1999) was developed to bring the interactor’s input and the system’s output together into a texture like that of novelistic prose. Almost fifteen years later, after an electronic literature practice mainly related to poetry, I have developed two new “novel machines.” Rather than being works of interactive fiction, one is a demoscene production (specifically, a single-loading VIC-20 demo) and the other a novel generator.

These two productions, one collaborative, one individual, offer an opportunity to discuss how my own and other highly computational electronic literature relates to the novel Nanowatt is a 3.5 KB assembly-language program for a 1981 computer that can display only 22 characters on a line. This demo was completed and first shown publicly at Récursion, a demoparty in Montréal, on November 30, 2013. I developed the concept and programmed the demo working with French and Beckett expert Patsy Baudoin and with Michael Martin, who wrote the music and programmed the music system, Soundnaif Nanowatt is not simply inspired by Samuel Beckett’s second novel,Watt; it, like Jorge Luis Borges’s famous author Pierre Menard, produces a long passage from Watt (and from the French translation of Watt) verbatim. In this way, it is a stand-alone computational artifact analogous to the more network- and search-based How It Is in Common Tongues, by John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe.

World Clock, both the novel and the novel-generating program, was created
for Darius Kazemi’s NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) and posted/released on November 30, 2013. It draws on “The Chronogram for 1998” by Harry Mathews and the short prose work “One Human Minute” (collected in the book of the same name) by Stanislaw Lem. Building on my generator Lede and similar programs, it portrays 1440 actions, all of them instances of reading, each being undertaken throughout the world at a different minute of one day. Compared to Winchester’s Nightmare and earlier electronic literature that is explicitly related to the novel, such as Robert Pinsky’s Mindwheel (“An Electronic
Novel”), Nanowattz and World Clock are less interactive (actually, non-interactive) while connecting computation and language in new ways. They are not wellunderstood as traditional texts, rather than cybertexts; nor are they complex textual surfaces (hypertexts) or systems based on the retrieval of remote data. Both manipulate text at a finer level of granularity than does Winchester’s Nightmare, even if the result of this textual engagement is deterministic, as in Nanowatt, or without high-level variation, as in World Clock. I will discuss these aspects, considering to what extent novel-like computational literature in general is becoming less interactive and more fine-grained in its engagement with language.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Contents (Creative Works):

Work title Author
Nanowatt Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin
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Record posted by: 
Alvaro Seica