Chats
These appended chats provide a set of transactions with publicly available transformers, chiefly addressing the 22 paragraphs from Part 1 of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is, that are identified as ‘The Image’ (see essay and click ‘Images’ to the left). Brief comments and analysis are indented and set in italics (as for this paragraph). There are three different procedural engagements with ‘The Image’ referenced at this site but the one that has its processes most easily (and extensively) accessible is ‘“l’Image” in How It Is.’ For comparative purposes the reader may think of this project as a generative transformer prompted by the French text of Beckett’s “l’Image” in a request for text ‘in the style of Beckett’s How It Is’ and containing – as a matter of arbitrary OuLiPian constraint – the literal (or letteral) text of the French. The final author-edited (by separate quasi-manual procedure) ‘response’ is available on this site.
The coded processes that generated the ‘response’ can be investigated on an Observable code notebook site. This project (ultimately amounting to much more than this one outcome) is still under development and will be made more code-critically readable over time. Please revisit if you are interested. This is, I suppose, a relatively complex project – I call it Comment’tis – but, as a digital language artist, I stand by the outcomes and I also assert that, ultimately, they are heuristic; they could be deployed in other contexts; they interrogate Beckett and his style with greater potential; and they offer theoretically interesting engagements with poetics broadly, and ideas surrounding the ‘paragram’ in particular.