When Literature and Technology Fail to Align

What is peculiar to interdisciplinary projects that bring together literature and digital tools? Technological instability, I would suggest. This immediately raises issues concerning fruition and accessibility. But is this instability a failure? Not quite, I believe. This perpetual threat of falling out of synch – or worse, failing to ever harmonise – allows for a constantly renewed discussion of intermediality. Let me briefly present two instances of this difficult techno-literary alignment so better to understand its potential.

Between 1973 and 1977, Italo Calvino worked on creating a computer-generated novel based on his L’incendio della casa abominevole, a short story about a computer programmer tasked with solving a series of twelve crimes that led to the burning of the house in which the four tenants died. Calvino contacted two computer scientists, Paul Braffort from the Oulipo, the Parisian literary group of writers and mathematicians, and William Skyvington from IBM, and asked them to write an algorithm capable of producing all the possible combinations between the four characters and the twelve criminal acts[1]. He planned to choose the the most satisfying narrations for his novel. The project was unsuccessful as the programmers were unable to give Calvino what he envisioned. Moreover, Skyvington accused him of not understanding how computers worked and therefore asking for the impossible. Literature and technology failed to align; but is this a statement about Calvino’s incompetence or of his visionary mind? If we consider, for instance, what the Artificial Intelligence text generator recently designed by the research institute OpenAI is able to accomplish – namely to produce well-written and believable pieces of literature – it seems like Calvino’s thought experiment was in fact alerting authors about what was coming.

The second instance of failure is more recent. In 2017, the publishing house Rubettino released an unusual edition of Gianni Toti’s video-poems first published in the 1980s. Originally meant to be broadcast on television and by now barely accessible, the video-poems were made available by Rubettino through a free augmented reality App: the users scan the cards provided in the edition and watch the video animations of Toti’s poems on their phone. This commendable remediation project raises nevertheless two problematic issues. First, it changes the nature of the artistic experience: Toti’s video-poems were meant to pop-up unexpectedly on TV screens and challenge its commercial and dull aesthetics. Transported onto a smartphone, the videos lose their contextual meaning and serendipitous nature. Secondly, and more significantly, the augmented reality App has already stopped working, as its developers stopped updating the software, rendering the videos inaccessible.

We have two instances of failed alignment: Calvino did not quite understand the real potential of the computer programming applied to literature, and the technological update of Toti’s video-poems did not survive for long; it also appeared to betray the author’s original intention. However, they both succeed in showing intermediality as a practice more than a product, an opera aperta in constant dialogue with past and future: Calvino anticipated creative issues posed today by AI text generators; the augmented reality edition prompts us to consider the specificity of TV as a medium, therefore inviting us to reflect on the past. Their value is not in harmonising literary and electronic language, but rather in problematising the boundaries between the two and questioning the limits of media representation. I dare say that is when literature and technology do not align that the most stimulating issues are raised.

[1] Cfr. Susie Cronin (2017). ‘Cybernetic Collaborations, Literature Machines and Italo Calvino’s L’incendio della casa abominevole,’ The Italianist, 37:1, 69-85.

From William Skyvington, ‘Machina sapiens: essai sur l’intelligence artificielle’ (1976)