Seven Perspectives on 'the Augmented Imagination Project'

2. Cutting up Newspapers

The idea of utilising algorithmically generated words as the material of poetic composition is closely related to the 'cut-up technique' as practised by Tzara, Burroughs, etc. Recall Tzara's recipe for a dadaist poem:

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are - an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

This was in the dada manifesto of feeble love in 1920. Earlier, Pablo Picasso had had a similar idea at a gathering at the studio of the painter Juan Gris in 1917. As Vicente Huidobro recounts,

Pablo Picasso…began to talk about a machine which one could fill with phrases and words cut out of newspapers which would spill out at random, and could be arranged into poems, after inserting coins in the machine, as one does with cigarette dispensers in bars.

Though Tzara doesn't use the word 'machine', his procedure is actually more machinic than Picasso's; for where Picasso assumes an element of traditional creativity in 'arranging' the words 'into poems', Tzara's instructions allow no room for such rearrangement ('copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag'). In fact Tzara's recipe specifies an abstract machine with precisely defined inputs, outputs and allowable operations used to turn the former into the latter.

If Tzara thus anticipates computer-generated stochastic poetry (including the Augmented Imagination project considered as a work of art in its own right), Picasso anticipates computer-assisted poetry: the use of a machine or computer to provide raw materials for poetry - words - that can then be selected and combined by means of the creative imagination.

Why do both Tzara and Picasso take newspapers as the input to their machines? In the early years of the twentieth century, newspapers represented for many intellectuals the inexorable decay of writing and language as such - they were "the nether regions" of literature, according to Karl Kraus. The use of newspaper cuttings in poetry and art (they had already been used in the cubist collages of Braque and Picasso) was an appropriate means to subvert the traditional artistic values these intellectuals represented. This explanation fits neatly with the interpretation (e.g. by Peter Bürger) of Dada and similar movements as avant-gardes for whom the critique of existing artistic culture and institutions was of paramout importance. However, another - indeed, related - explanation is that newspapers represented a sort of neutrality, a lowest common denominator of language, so that the use of these repositories of common words to provide raw materials for poetry would represent the attempt to intentionally lower the tone of poetry: to bring it down to earth from the elitist and artificial linguistic heavens of poetic tradition. At the same time, by cutting up and rearranging such common words into 'infinitely original' texts, Tzara and Picasso are effectively proposing to use newspaper as kindling, to set the common tongue ablaze with the apocalyptic fire of the poetic image.

The question of the choice of the raw materials by Tzara and Picasso parallels the question of the word array used as input by actual computer programs such as the Augmented Imagination Project, which currently uses a list of the 5,000 most common words (by frequency of usage) in the english language. The possibilities for such inputs are endless: whole dictionaries, classic literary or other traditional texts, thematic collections of words obtained from websites such as wikipedia. But the use of a list of only common words serves some of the same functions as the use of newspapers did for Tzara and Picasso.