A new issue of hyperrhiz came out recently, collecting a few papers and projects from the 2008 ELO Conference Visionary Landscapes. Daniel Howe and I have an article in the issue addressing questions of digital pedagogy and providing an analysis of digital writing workshops based on principles of generative literature–largely in relation to Daniel’s RiTa library for Processing. The article: “The Aesthetics of Generative Literature: Lessons from a Digital Writing Workshop.”
Abstract:
This paper explores a range of issues related to the pedagogy and practice of generative writing in programmable media. We begin with a brief description of the RiTa toolkit – a set of computational tools designed to facilitate the practice of generative writing. We then describe our experiences using these tools in a series of digital writing workshops at Brown University in 2007-2008. We discuss and theoretically examine a set of core issues raised by workshop participants — distributed authorship, the aesthetics of surprise, materiality, push-back, layering, and others — and attempt to situate them within the larger discourse of generative art and writing practice.
