When Umberto Eco published his seminal essay Opera aperta [The Open Work] in 1962, a number of experiments across literature and computer machines had set the ground of what we call today “electronic literature”. In 1952, Christopher Strachey had designed a literary computing text generator, Love letters (1952) which selected words from a list sorted by parts of speech, first creating an address, then five randomly chosen sentences, and finally a salutation of “Yours – (adv.)” M.U.C. (i.e. Manchester University Computer). The experiment revolved around the repetition of a rhetorical formula, namely the love letter, which, in this case, produced a parodistic effect due to the random combination of words. A few years later, in 1959, Theodore Lutz developed Stochastic Texts [Stochastische Texte] on a Zuse Z22 computer – a program that produced random short sentences based on a corpus of chapter titles and subjects from Franz Kafka’s The Castle. In 1960, the English poet and painter Brion Gysin, expelled from the Surrealists and close friend of some Beat w
riters, created the first “permutation poem” I am that I am with a Honeywell computer. This poem was performed as part of a series of sound poems on BBC radio, so that different stresses and inflections contributed to the perception and potential significance of each verse. Last but not least, in 1961 the Italian poet and writer Nanni Balestrini created the first computer poem, Tape Mark I using an IBM 7070, followed by another remarkable experiment in 1966, the novel Tristano (1966).
By intercepting the spirit of his time, Eco’s Opera aperta looked at the work of art as an “open system of interactions”. What Eco meant by “opera aperta” was: a) a collaboration between the author and other agencies, whether these are readers, performers, viewers, audiences, or indeed machines; b) a potential convergence of different arts and media; and, significantly, c) the uncertainty involved in the value of randomness – what in information theory was called “entropy”. At the time, computer technologies were not adequate to meet fully Eco’s ambitious goals for artistic creativity. The human brain was still much better at processing the human experience through written language, taking inspiration from the literary and artistic tradition, and reconfiguring it in original and meaningful stories or poetic images for the present. In his well-known intervention Cybernetics and Ghosts (1967), Calvino questioned whether a machine would ever be capable of replacing the poet and the author, ultimately reassuring his readers that literature is not ‘merely the permutation of a restricted number of elements and functions. Certainly, it is not.
In the age of deep learning, big data, speech recognition and quantum computing, AI is rapidly evolving into something different from the mere permutation of limited components. The vast amount of digitalised literary works, audiobooks, and data on readers’ habits and preferences, as well as the advanced connectivity of 5G and the incredible speed offered by the latest generation of quantum computers (such as the IBM System Q One) constitute a valuable resource for the future of literature. In recent years, AI has not only assisted readers’ consumption of literature with a number of new devices and platforms which can also recommend content tailored to a specific user – see, for example, Audible, Kindle, and, of course, Amazon. AI has also lent itself to exploring new possibilities in terms of content, interactive design, and software development patterns. One of the latest inventions is spoken interfaces, such as Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google now, which have paved the way for new interactive forms of storytelling, as demonstrated in the BBC project Talking with Machines. One of the most recent experiments, developed in collaboration with Rosina Sound, is the BBC program The Inspection Chamber, a comedy/science fiction story in which listeners get to be part of the story when it streams through your Amazon Echo or Google Home and cues you to insert your very own lines into the story. Although it has some similarities with the choose-your-own-adventure tales, The Inspection Chamber instead ultimately emulates the immersive experiences of video games – these being one of the most popular hybrid genres blending fiction, cinema and digital platforms. This is just a first step toward the achievements that AI is expected to reach in the creative economy. According to a survey of over 350 experts published in 2017, by 2049 AI is expected to write a novel or short story that will make it to the New York Times best-seller list.
