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Ars combinatoria: mystical systems, procedural art, and the computer
Art Journal, Fall, 1997 by Janet Zweig
There are several on-line versions of Cent mille milliards de poemes; some of them randomly permute the lines of the poem each time the sites are visited.(38) Queneau's book seems to stand as a prototype for many contemporary artists who use the computer as a text-generating device or as a means to make hypertextual work.
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Several contemporary poets have constructed poems by taking a source text or an original text and rearranging the words according to a particular procedure. These include Jackson Mac Low, Joan Retallack, Ron Silliman, Eugen Gomringer, and Louis Zukofsky. Poetry is an arena where this activity has moved easily to the computer. Alison Knowles used a computer in 1968 to make a simple incantatory poem titled "A house of dust."(39) Mac Low and the French group A.L.A.M.O., which grew out of Oulipo, have also used the computer to generate permutational poetry. The poet Charles O. Hartman has made a number of sophisticated text-generating programs, making the fine distinction between text generators that begin with a vocabulary but no source text and then invent new text according to rules, and text generators that start with a source text and permute or combine elements from that text to create new ones.(40)
The writers mentioned above, following the models of Oulipo and John Cage, have each written or used a program that exploits the computer's capacity to make random selections or to generate text according to certain rules. Other writers have gone in a different direction, exploring the possibilities of hypertextual fiction, poetry, and websites. Hartman discusses the difference between these two approaches by describing the former as a way of using the computer as a generative machine that collaborates with the writer to produce poetry and the latter as a new way of presenting poetry.(41) A different distinction could be made in a discussion of where the work of art resides, whether the artwork is the machine (i.e., the procedure or program) or the material that the machine generates. Writers who use hypertext and text generation together, such as Jim Rosenberg, Eduardo Kac, the French group L.A.I.R.E., and other "new media poets," focus on the visual potential of the computer's display, following in the tradition of concrete poetry, but adding the elements of time and motion in the reconfigurings of text on the screen. An aspect of this new poetry is the shift in importance it makes from the art "object" to the procedure that generates it.(42) In the same way, Ramon Llull's "Art" seems to reside more in his combinatorial wheels than in the individual "truths" they can generate.
Often, fans of hypertext will claim the aforementioned early systems of thought, such as the Sefer Yezirah, Kabbalah, and Llull as their precursors. For example, the cover of the book Hypermedia and Literary Studies bears a beautiful Renaissance combinatorial diagram.(43) Some hypertext works, however, do not succeed as well as others within this tradition of "creative magic" because their interactivity consists merely of a reordering of discrete pages and paragraphs. The narrative or plot changes somewhat, but not qualitatively, since the overall meaning and style usually remain unchanged. This is also true of our interactions on the Web, which are simply page reorderings determined by the reader. In language, every utterance is a permutation of the letters of the alphabet, or of the speakers vocabulary of words, inventing new meaning. When permuting letters or even entire words, one alters content semantically, not just syntactically as in most hyperfiction. So when the "chunks" of material are quite large, like paragraphs or pages, this semantic shift is not as striking. But conversely, when permuting with repetitions the Os and s of binary code or the four tiny building blocks of DNA, the possibilities of generative variation are infinite.
