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robot writing
The connection between Rumour (a literary zine publisher), and WORLDPOOL (a node in an arts/communications technology network), was elaborated in a species of theoretical fiction. A precursor to cyber-critique, this writing by artists was steeped in discourse from other fields : structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, physics, artificial intelligence books and bulletins from the Architecture Machine Group at MIT. The texts combined theory, fandom, sex fantasy and do-it-yourself pragmatic instructions. The network was speculative, playing itself out across a shifting surface of performance art venues, alternative art publications, street postering projects, mail exchanges and grainy facsimile and slow-scan video transmissions. For example, Model for a Prose Algorithm was an early manifesto on the potential character of interactive art fiction :
" Connections are contingent, interchangeable - like the Perverse Telephone Network (A sub-network sending and receiving interactive pornography using new audio, video, and facsimile transceivers and the existing telephone system)...
Inserts, challenges, breakdown - a text without pre-determined sequence must prepare itself for all of these, for how can we determine this text's completion? At this point, the model of the network applies - impossible to locate, it's coordinates are very shifty. The text is immediately implemented in any given transmission; more than vulnerable to transgressions, it seems composed by them at every point. Effective and effectable, it is a fictive effect."
- Judith Doyle, "Model for a Prose Algorithm",
Only Paper Today, Vol. 6, No. 8, 1979.
This "robot writing" - techno-theoretical fiction and performance scripts by women in the late-seventies - subverted technological metaphors. It stroked the sexual body of the robot, posited sado-masochistic surveillance games, attempted to inhabit signals and break them down like a mutant noise virus. Adele Freedman's 1979 description, like most popular press about this art, is a hopelessly confused mess, contrasting the ludicrous spectacle of performance for the slow-scan camera with a load of techno-mumbo-jumbo :
"On International Women's Day, using the telefacsimile transceiver lent them by Xerox, Doyle and friends hooked up by image with artists in Boulder, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pender Island, New York and Buffalo.
Two hundred Toronto networkers looked on as Doyle performed her interpretation of the life of a secretary - at one point she hurled her typewriter into the air - and sent facsimiles of her 12-frame performance to six different locations by picking up the telephone connected to a robot, which turns sound signals into 8-second video scans."
Adele Freedman, "Overlapping key to house of glass",
The Globe and Mail, June 16, 1979
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