• Giles, Harry Josephine. “Some Strategies of Bot Poetics.” Harry Josephine Giles, 6 Apr. 2016.

 

@thewaybot is more a conceptual poem on the idea of liking: it is always incomplete, always reaching for new meanings.

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The totality of the bot is thus a complete exploration of its own aesthetic space, and it derives its poetic power from the power of those pre-written aesthetics – but its individual tweets are still beyond the ability of its author to fully predict; that is, its aesthetic space is big enough that it will continue to surprise.

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• Morris, John. “How to Write Poems with a Computer EditSign.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 6, no. 1, 1967, pp. 17–20.

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-- the collaboration between human and machine, Aesthetics of randomness and unpredictability is the most poetic and surprising part of computer poems. 

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• Whalen, Zach. “The Many Authors of The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex: Authorship, Agency, and Appropriation.” Journal of Creative Writing Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2019, p. 45.

 

As Leah Henrickson argues, this tendency to attribute agency or authority to non-human actors is a way of giving power to the computer by allowing it to enter into a system of linguistic discourse where to speak (or to write) accords with the way we (humans) rely on conventions as a way to facilitate intersubjective identification. Just as any speech act connects us with a speaker through some measure of interpretation, assumption, and inference, we may also find ourselves making the same assumptions of a computer when, “If users ascribe beliefs and desires to a system, and act accordingly, the system therefore becomes a social agent when it completes its assigned tasks because the computer has been given power by the user” (Henrickson “Tool vs. Agent” 188). ???

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--more like a collaboration? as the machine also has its creativity of randomness, it is not just about executing.

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This pattern gave us the raw material for some good conversations about the nature of authorship -- is the student, as the one who selected the words, the author of their poem, or is it I who wrote the basic algorithm and syntax?

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