May 2010
7 posts
The birth of an art project
requires technical expertise, equipment, artistic vision, and the energy to carry out the project. It is the last of these that we so often forget, but Millie Niss was well-aware of these requirements – especially when she was well enough to be inspired, but too ill to bring her ideas to fruition.
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As Regina Pinto launches her “Beware of the RaGhost,” triggered by Millie Niss’s Erewhon...
And finally,
a few words about the color scheme Millie adopted for the Erewhon 2.0 Tumbler site. It was striking, the colors so intense in contrast to the pastels of Sporkworld. I wished I had asked her how she came up with those color combinations. This Spring, I think I have found the answer. Although Millie’s physical condition kept her indoors most of the time, she enjoyed the house and its...
October 2009
20 posts
Challenge 1 (call for participation)
As per the guidelines in the previous post, we are soliciting submissions in any media that are, even tangentially, related to themes addressed in this blog. However, wide open calls are often harder to submit to than calls with stringent constraints on what can be submitted. (Textual constraints are a major part of the Oulipo literary movement, and were also used in writing the original NFE...
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Submit to Erewhon 2.0 Blog →
Click on “submit” link in the left column or email erewhon2@tumblr.com to Submit to the Erewhon 2.0 Blog.
There are no official guidelines but the Editors of Erewhon have sole discretion as to whether to publish your submission. We are interested in anything relating to themes addressed in the original News from Erewhon or in the Erewhon 2.0 Blog.
If you need to explain why your...
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The Electronic Muse
The Electronic Muse (Millie Niss) from Oulipoems
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News from Erewhon vs. Computer-Generated Text
In News from Erewhon, we used techniques of free-association and constraints to try to mine the human unconscious so as to generate unusual texts. These techniques come from the Surrealists and are in some ways exactly the opposite idea from computer-generated text. The French Surrealists, as well as some Romantics and Parnassians, were almost in awe of the power of human imagination and would go...
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Computer-generated text based on NFE 1.0 texts
I used a free web page (see below) to generate text based on the full set of News from Erewhon 1.0 texts.
Method: The texts were combined into a single text file, with line breaks removed except between paragraphs. Titles were removed as their syntax and capital letters distort the results. Apostrophes were removed so that contractions (such as “isnt”) would be treated like regular...
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Markov Text Synthesizer →
This web page (made by an anonymous person who implemented a perl program from a well-known book) generates random text based on text you give it, using a Markov Chain algorithm. Put simply, it analyzes the text you give it to see what words most often follow what other words, and then uses the probabilities to randomly choose words, starting with the first word of your input text.
The...
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Merchandising R & D
Erewhon paraphernalia will be available soon, ranging from the ordinary (chapbooks) to the ridiculous. If anyone has experience with selling handmade or custom printed items online, we’d love some feedback.
I have heard good things about Etsy.com as a marketplace for homemade items, but they charge just to list (the fee is very minimal, however) and I’d prefer a service that charges...
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Butler's Erewhon, full free text on Project... →
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The Original Original Erewhon
By the way, the original Erewhon is not News from Erewhon 1.0 but rather the Victorian dystopian satire Erewhon, or Over the Range by Samuel Butler (1871). The title is “Nowhere” spelled backwards, with two letters reversed to make a more pronounceable word.
Here is a passage from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon which Millie finds very striking considering her experiences in...
Erewhon 2.0 is now Officially Open to the Public!
Scared of Web 2.0!
I have spent most of the past 24 hours preparing the online launch of Erewhon 2.0. specifically, the launch of this blog which has links to everything else. A major Web 2.0 idea is to use other people’s sites, both commercial and non-profit to spread one’s work on the web.
This blog is a prime example: Instead of designing all my own individual web pages from scratch (as I do on the...
Web 2.0 & Erewhon 2.0 →
The above link is to the handout from our &Now presentation, which introduces Erewhon 2.0 by analogy with Web 2.0. The handout tries to demystify some of the hoopla that has attached itself to the phrase “Web 2.0.” If you are a pure literary person who has not heard of Web 2.0, the following short explanation from the handout should suffice:
Web 2.0 is the much hyped...
From Oulipo to Erewhon
Oulipoems, by Millie Niss and Martha Deed →
Oulipoems is a collection of interactive electronic poetry machines, inspired by the Oulipo. A version of Oulipoems was published by the Electronic Literature Organization as part of volume 1 of their Electronic Literature Collection. However, the version on Sporkworld has additional features which were not possible on a stand-alone DVD (one of the media in which the ELC is published).
The ELO...
Keywords and Images for the first Erewhon text
Each set of texts in News from Erewhon made use of a list of keywords in a specified order. Here are the words for the first set of texts:
humiliating unrelenting train strike rums cabinet windows lacerated enlivening blame blaze cement poet gravity
Lipogramme (no 'e' version) of États d'Ame d'une... →
Millie Niss adapted her first text by rewriting it without using the letter ‘e’, a practice promoted by the Oulipo writers. The link above is to a PDF with both the original text and the e-less version. Here is the new text by itself:
Work stopping again, and it’s trains, aargh, said Mylinda, as if Paris traffic isn’t stop-and-go always? It is so awkward to look at angry union...
From "News from Erewhon" to "Erewhon 2.0"
The original News from Erewhon “Flash Fiction” web installation, published in the Iowa Review Web, was based on 8 sets of two texts, one in each set by each author (Niss, Deed) Each set of text uses a list of keywords (words or phrases drawn randomly from a variety of sources) in a fixed order There are also 7 headlines — sentences made from combining a word from each...