Rubrique Technologie / Tech Section

Abstract

I argue, through a concrete example of collaborative artistic work that I helped to develop, that computational literary art offers important new ways to investigate the culturally significant properties of language, aspects of text generation, medium specificity, and conventions of a genre of writing. In particular, I have personally learned about all of these in developing a bilingual text generator with Patsy Baudoin, one that takes three forms. Rubrique: Technologies / Tech Section (RT/TS for short) automatically produces short French and English news items that imagine some of the ways technology will impact us in the near future. RT/TS has three manifestations, as (1) a website, (2) an installation, and (3) a book, the last of which is still in the final editorial stages. It uses two text generation methods to produce these items: Classical template-based generation and a large language model (LLM). We elaborated the project, doing further poetic and software development, as we devised each of these manifestations. Different languages, generation technologies, media, and genres could be used in other projects that are (at a high level) conceptually and formally similar; this could address different cultural concerns. Thanks to our artworks being free/libre/open source software (FLOSS), others can study and modify the work at the level of code and function.