“Literature has always been a remarkably adaptable art form. It's at home on the lips of the storyteller or the actor. It happily dons the accoutrements of song. Even the printed page may spawn extraverbal hybrids such as visual poetry, calligraphy, and illustrated books. Now the range extends still further. The computer--that remarkable melting pot of all communication--has become another medium for expressing the incomparable beauty and power of the word”

Robert Kendall and Poets & Writers, 1995

Electronic literature, or e-lit, doesn't have a simple definition.

It stands as a critical, creative and literary investigation into the relationship between literary and computer language (ELO, 20)

Electronic literature involves a quest for new forms of expression and languages, looking for a creative dialogue between literature and the languages of digital mediums. Ebooks, for example, are not considered electronic literature, but simply a transposition, a translation, between media, lacking a true dialogue between them. Rather than being marked by digitality, e-literature is actively formed by it (Hayles, 2008).

This fascinating intersection of computation and creativity dates back to the early days of computing. The first recognised e-lit work, Christopher Strachey's Love Letters (1952), is one of the earliest examples of computational art ever made. Programmed for the Manchester Mark I computer, this pioneering algorithmic experiment, then artwork, demonstrated how machine could participate in creative expression.

[an example of a love poem, by M.U.C, Strachey]

[the Manchester Mark I]

Early examples of e-lit were typically scientific in nature. Their inventors, like Strachey in this case, did not aspire to be recognised as writers, but rather wanted to experiment with new challenges for computers to prove the validity of the Turing test, the imitation game.

Algorithmic Literature and the Avant-garde

After Love Letters, computers continued to evolve. Between the 1950s and 1970s, scientists showed an explosion of interest in these experiments with pseudo-electronic literature, still primarily focused on technical processes rather than literary value.

After the 1970s, the focus shifted toward increasingly creative applications of algorithms in art, this brought an incredible flourishing of interest in electronic art and its increasingly complex and conceptual uses.

At the time, artists and engineers were certainly not concerned with archiving their work for future preservation — they could not fully anticipate technological developments. This has created several problems that we encounter decades later about the safeguarding of these projects.

Of the many works I will discuss, few have been thoroughly archived—whether through preserved code, reinterpretations in other languages, photographs, or dedicated archives. As this zine was created primarily in an extraordinary burst of energy in preparation for Public Moment II, this research remains a draft.

What immediately becomes apparent is the lack of detailed information about many of these projects, now lost in the foliage of time. For this reason, finding detailed information from sources beyond the main electronic literature archives has been difficult. These archives remain too few and typically focus on electronic art production in specific countries, neglecting the rest of the world.

One characteristic that immediately stands out in this part of art history is the fascination with chance. Randomness was seen as a method to challenge and revolutionize literature, language, and the old conservative canons of artistic production. Random processes generated chance encounters between words, combinations, the unexpected, chaos.

Balestrini writes in "Language and Opposition": "From here emerges the idea of poetry... closer to the articulation of emotion and thought in language, still a confused and bubbling expression, bearing the signs of detachment from the mental state, of fusion not completely achieved with the verbal state... And finally, it will no longer be thought and emotion transmitted through language, but language itself generating a new and unrepeatable meaning”.

Stochastische Texte, Theo Lutz, 1959

One of the first computer generators of poetry was made in 1959 by the mathematician Theo Lutz. His poems were published in the magazine Augenblick, continuing the tradition started by Strachey to publish poetry and the program involved to make them, in a magazine.

Lutz extracted nouns, adjectives, conjunctions and pronouns from Franz Kafka’s novel The castle, using them as source material for his poem.

Lutz extracted nouns, adjectives, conjunctions, and pronouns from Franz Kafka's novel The Castle, using them as source material for his poems. The combination of these words made it possible to create over four million different sentences. To create this program, Lutz used the programming language FORTRAN and a Zuse Z22 computer.

Nanni Balestrini and Alberto Nobis, Tape Mark poems, 1961

Part of the neo-avant-garde movement, Balestrini was an experimental writer, artist, and politically engaged poet. The original code to generate the poems dates from 1961 but is unfortunately unavailable today. Balestrini took fragments from three different books: Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, Michihito Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary, and Paul Goldwin's The Mystery of the Elevator.

The project's name derives from the magnetic tapes used to store it on an IBM 7070 computer. The program utilized 322 punch cards that were translated into a set of 1,200 machine code instructions. The computer took approximately six minutes each time to generate new stanzas. The project was featured in the influential 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition. In 2014, Emiliano Russo created a Python implementation of the original algorithm as a contemporary reinterpretation.

[re-interpretation of Balestrini’s project by Emiliano Russo, presented by Roberta Iadevaia at UniCal, “70 anni di stranezze e creature digitali”] [Alison Knowles, The House of Dust. Alison Knowles and James Fuentes, NY]

R. M. Worthy, Auto-Beatnik, 1962

Published in 1962 in Horizon Magazine, the Auto Beatnik is a computer program created by R. M. Worthy. A LGP 30 was used, programmed with 32 grammatical patterns and a vocabulary of 850 words. After feeding the machine more words and structures, it produced many poems including this one:

Roses

Few fingers go like narrow laughs.

An ear won’t keep few fishes,

Who is that rose in that blind house?

And all slim, gracious, blind planes are coming,

They cry badly along a rose,

To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender.

Clair Philippy, Computer Poetry, 1963

The machine of Clair Philippy spoke incredibly fast: "at the rate of 150 words a minute." She published five of her generated poems in the 1963 Electronic Age journal, using a medium-scale, built-for-business RCA 301 Electronic Data Processing System Mainframe Computer to create "blank verse at the rate of 150 words a minute”.

Alison Knowles and James Tenney, A House of Dust, 1967-1968

House of Dust, made by Alison Knowles in 1967, Fluxus artist, is one of the earliest computer generated poetry projects. She used a Siemens 4004, with the help of James Tenney, and then matrix printers to print the output of the program. It’s one of the earliest examples of a project that uses Markov- like processes, while applying it to the arts.

The generator consists of the phrase “a house of” followed by a randomized sequence of 1) a material, 2) a site or situation, a light source, and 3) a category of inhabitants taken from four distinct lists. All variations of the poem together totaled more than 10,000 quatrain possibilities. The generated poem was then translated into a physical structure in 1968, in Chelsea, New York. As a Fluxus art piece, House of Dust plays with possibilities, chances, arbitrariness of language, randomness, performance. The collaboration between the artists and the program shows how words can acquire different meaning thanks to different relationships structures and contexts.

Cybernetic Serendipity, 1968

Held in London, it was the first groundbreaking international exhibition of computer art, aimed to show all aspects of computer aided creative activities that included art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture and animation. 325 were the participants, from all over the world. It was curated by Jasia Reichardt.

The exhibition was concerned with algorithms, devices, computer graphics, oscilloscopes and plotters… One section in particular focuses on the computer’s ability to produce text, essays and poetry, which included Allison Knowles and James Tenney works House of Dust, Marc Adrian, CLRU (Cambridge language Unit’s Margaret Masterman and Robin McKinnon Wood), Nanni Balestrini, Edwin Morgan, Jean A. Baudot, and E. Mendoza works.

Cybernetic Serendipity provided a wonderful opportunity for scientists and artists to merge their research, collaborate, and foster dialogue between spheres that had rarely interacted before.

William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter, The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed, 1984

"A Bizarre and Fantastic Journey into the Mind of a Machine”.

It is a volume of prose and poetry, written by William Chamberlain, writer and programmer.

This volume, except from the introduction, was entirely written by RACTER, programming language for IBM pc. The program could generate grammatically consistent sentences with the help of a pre-coded grammar template. It is an early example of computer generated prose. Even if it was advertised as the "First Book Ever Written by a Computer", that’s not true, while it was one of the first algorithmically authored books, surely one that became readily available for the public consumption. Another point is the fact that the book is completely “unedited”, or at least that is what Chamberlain stated, something that might not be completely true.

A sample piece of prose from the book:

“Happily and sloppily a skipping jackal watches an aloof crow. This is enthralling. Will the jackal eat the crow? I fantasize about the jackal and the crow, about the crow in the expectations of the jackal. You may ponder about this too!” (Racter 92).

Generally, all the output produced by Racter is nonsensical, yet creatively surreal.

Procedural poetry

The birth of procedural poetry, defined as poetry generated from a source text using specific processes, has been around for quite some time. Tristan Tzara wrote the first instructions on how to make a Dada poem in 1920. The possibilities for procedural methods are limitless.

The best part of procedural poetry is how it challenges our relationship to literary works. While procedural poetry can be considered a subgroup of algorithmic poetry, I wanted to highlight it as a distinct approach that challenges conventional understanding of authorship, where computational methods are used in combination with the author's experience, allowing for more human intention and intervention.

Oulipo, 1960

It is a literary movement, founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. It explores the use of constraints as a creative tool, applying mathematical structures, formal rules, and algorithmic processes to generate new literary outputs.

Notable Oulipo writers include Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, Jean Lescure, and Anne Garreta. The influence of the movement extends into experimental digital literature. Oulipo is included here because its rule-based approach aligns with computational creativity, and many of its techniques can be considered algorithmic and procedural.

Jackson Mac Low, PFT-3 Poems, 1969

Over the span of 6 years, the Fluxus artist composed 22 Light Poems. These poems were all created using algorithmic methods. He assembled 280 names of different kinds of light, associating each with a letter from his wife's name and a playing card. He then used those cards to select the words to use. His method was hybrid: he combined human and machine processes, algorithms and imagination.

Nick Montfort, Taroko Gorge, 2009

A procedurally generated javascript poem, endlessly reshaping a nature inspired text.

David Jahve Johnson, ReRites, 2017

Projects like David Jhave Johnston's ReRites demonstrate the creative potential of this liminal space. By exploring the intersection of human and machine creativity, such works suggest a future where poetry might exist in productive tension between human and artificial creation, neither fully one nor the other. This hybrid space offers new possibilities for poetic expression while challenging traditional assumptions about creativity (Erslev, 2023).

ReRites is a machine-human hybrid project, begun by the artist in 2017, a literary work that uses neural networks models to generate poetry, then edited by the author, housed in twelve volumes.

Compasses and A Gutenberg Poetry Corpus, Allison Parrish, 2019

Allison Parrish is a poet and programmer.

For Compasses she trained a machine learning model to group together words based on how they are spelled and how they sound together. She then printed the outputs in chapbooks. For A Gutenberg Poetry Corpus she uses the massive corpus of the public domain books of Project Gutenberg, then she made a poetry generator out of it.

[A Gutenberg Poetry Corpus, Allison Parrish] [screenshot from Nick Montfort, Taroko Gorge]

Kinetic and Video Poetry

Kinetic poetry and video poetry are two forms of digital literature that merge poetic expression with movement and multimedia elements, expanding poetry beyond static text.

Kinetic poetry refers to poems where words, letters, moves on the screen. It is the evolution of concrete poetry and it is influenced by the advancement of computer graphics. Kinetic poetry uses animation, motion and interactive elements, to let the reader immerse into the poem.

Video poetry has many names, it is also known as video-visual poetry, poetronica, poetry video, media poetry, cin-e poetry. While video poetry is usually computer generated, video poetry incorporates ready made footage, and editing.

Könyves Tamás, poet, artist, teacher, is considered the pioneer of the genre, with his "Sympathies of War" as one of the first works of video poetry, made in 1978. Sympathies of war was a performance recorded on video camera by Richard Elson at the Galerie Vehicule Art in Montreal.

Marc Adrain, Text I - II, 1963

Adrian is one of the pioneers of film structuralism and is considered one of the forerunners of kinetic poetry. He worked with unconventional syntax structures, permutation, and movement. His films Text I and Text II resulted from the development of randomly generated mathematical series, with the help of Jürgen Kriz who programmed the project in FORTRAN for an IBM 1620. Text I was created from the storage program of the IBM, with words chosen that have the same meaning and spelling in both German and English. Text II is a permutation project.

[Marc Adrian, Text I ] [Não!, Eduardo Kac, 1982, Schematic representation of the poem]

Alan Sondheim’s, 4320, 1971

Sondheim is an artist, theorist, and musician who experimented extensively with 3D and was curious about the relationship between graphics and language. His video 4320 documents users' experiences with 3D and was a quite unique research at the time, exploring the intersection of cyberspace, language, and the human body, blending the virtual with reality.

Eduardo Kac, Não!, 1982

The project was presented on an electronic LED signboard at the Centro Cultural Cândido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro. "Não!" (No!) is a poem structured into text blocks that move through intervals. The screen goes blank between each block of letters, creating a rhythm that produces a dynamic visual experience, asking the reader to build semantic connections between the fragmented words. Kac continued to be interested in digital poetry, experimenting with hypertexts, holography, and projections while investigating typography in digital contexts.

B. P. Nichol, First Screening: Computer Poems, 1984

bpNichol was a multifaceted artist who explored the boundaries between image, text, sound, and poetry. He worked on some of the first computer-animated poems, and "First Screening" is one of these projects. It is a project made of a dozen kinetic poems programmed in Apple BASIC, then recreated in HyperCard by J. B. Hohm, and then again in javascript.

E.M. de Melo e Castro, Signagens, 1989

"Signagens" is a series of video poems where the author integrates text with computer generated imagery and elements. It is one of the main pieces of art from the emerging Portuguese experimental poetry movement of the time and a prime example of how video became an accepted poetic tool in experimental arts circles, opening up new possibilities beyond static words on paper. E.M. de Melo e Castro is also one of the pioneers of visual poetry.

Text Adventures

I would like to give a little bit of space to text-adventure games.

Text adventures, also known as interactive fiction (IF), represent the first modern genre of electronic literature, emerging between the 1970s and 80s as a fusion of storytelling and computational interactivity. The genre was pioneered by Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), a game created by Will Crowther and later expanded by Don Woods, which laid the foundation for interactive storytelling. Their legacy is evident in nowadays game development, as well as in modern interactive fiction and hypertext narratives. Text adventures laid out the foundations of digital literature, in the simple yet powerful mechanics of text-based exploration.

Zork, 1977-1980

It was developed by a group of MIT students (later, Infocom), one of the most influential early text adventures, that introduced a more complex parser, allowing greater and more sophisticated player interactions. A commercial success.

Avventura nel castello, Enrico Colombini, 1982

Colombini got to know Adventure, the classic text adventure game, almost by accident. This event brought him to decide on making his own adventure text based game, but in italian.

With his wife, Chiara Tovena, embarked in an amazing adventure on writing their own game, self-publishing for Apple II early in 1982 under the name Dinosoft at a local shop in Pescia.

[screenshot of Zork] [ handmade artisanal package of Avventura nel castello, if that’s not experimental publishing!!] [opening, remake of the game, Federico Volpini, 2021]

Hypertext literature

The term hypertext was born in the 1960s, coined by Theodore Nelson, an information technology pioneer, philosopher, and sociologist. It describes "non-sequential writing — text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen."

Hypertext literature follows the same path, being a non-sequential form of branching literature. One of the first pieces of hypertext literature was "afternoon, a story," by Michael Joyce. With this new current, the form and structure are called into question. The reader acquires new agency, new power within the story. In this new perspective of literature, every person has a different experience of it.

[from “afternoon, a story”, by Michael Joyce] [Victory Garden, a hypertext fiction by Stuart Moulthrop (Eastgate Systems)]

Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden, 1991

It was written in Storyspace, first software program specifically built to create, edit and read hypertext fiction. Victory Garden in one of the first hypertext novels that was actually published, by Eastgate System. Set in the Gulf war, the story focus on Emily Runbird, and the interactions she has with people around her. The story contains 933 nodes, over 2.800 links. There is no end to the story. The project is now part of the Washington State University at Vancouver's Electronic Literature Laboratory and The NEXT Museum, Library, and Preservation Space.

Other examples of hypertext literature pieces:

My body — a Wunderkammer and Patchwork Girl, by Shelley Jackson, from 1997, that includes sounds, in semi autobiographical exploration of the body through text and woodcut images.

These Waves of Girls, by Caitlin Fisher, explores the narrator’s queer identity through three time periods.
“I Have Said Nothing” by J. Yellowlees Douglas. This piece explores the concept of death.

Penetration by Robert Kendall, focusing on a father and a daughter, an example of hypertext poetry

When it comes to poetry, we have indeed many examples of hypertext poetry.

Jim Rosenberg, Intergrams and Diagrams, 1988

It is an hypertext poem, published in the first issue of The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, a magazine launched by Eastgate to publish short hypertexts and poems by their users. It is the best example of how poetry can thrive in cyberspace, shaping itself in a non-linear way. It was published on a floppy disk, written in HyperCard.

Jim Rosemberg was focused on non-linear poetic forms, and worked on many polylinear poems, called Word Net. He then evolved his method to Diagram Poems.

“The motivation for deploying an “external” diagrammatic syntax came from a desire to translate into poetry a concept that composers were using with what seemed to me like complete ease: tone clusters. Hearing the term ‘tone cluster’ triggered a virtual explosion in my head: I simply had to do word clusters!”

From A Brief History of Intergrams, on inframergence.org, Jim Rosenberg

[Diagram 3.7, from Diagram Series 3, 1979] [Intergram 11, from Intergrams (1988 - 1992)]

Rod Willmot, Everglade, 1989

It is a long hypertext poem, each of its nodes containing a stanza, It was written in Orpheus, a DOS based environment created by Willmot. It was published by Hyperion SoftWord.

Deena Larse, Marle Springs, 1993

It is a collection of hypertext poetry about the inhabitants of a 19th-century community. It was written in HyperCard and published by Eastgate Systems in 1993. The project invites the reader to explore a collection of poems while discovering a ghost town. The poems, like the lives of so many 19th century women, are anonymous, written at the margins. Margins that are central to the exploration, because it is there that the reader is invited to write.

[Marble Springs, a hypertext poetry collection by Deena Larsen

(Eastgate Systems)] [screenshot from Howling Dogs, Porpentine]

While being quite popular from the 80’ to the new millennium, hypertext literature started its gradual downfall because of its non-linearity. Non-linearity is not for everyone, and the fast becoming obsolete of the language that these hypertext experiences used didn’t help at all.

Right now hypertext literature, including games, are not yet dead.

Twine, is an open source tool developed to make interactive hypertext fiction, in the form of web pages. It was created in 2009. It is browser based, and written in html and javascript, supporting css too. It could be considered a game engine, ans surely a tool that revived the genre of hypertext from the 2010 on. Many notable works could be included in the twine hypertext literature list, I will list just a couple of them that I enjoyed the most.

Twine è diventato, anche grazie a quelle degli stessi artisti, come Anna Entropy, strumento di attivismo.

Howling Dogs, Porpentine, 2012

It was even included in the Whitney Biennal? Incredible.

Porpentine wrote the game in a week. It is an abstract, surreal experience, “a commentary on trauma”, a poem that uses repetitive cycles of actions, while the setting deteriorates over the course of the game.

[Howling Dogs structure, Porpentine, Twine]

You are Jeff Bezos, Kris Lorischild, 2018

It is a satirical text adventure game. The player wakes up as Jeff Bezos, and needs to spend all his fortune.

[screenshot from the game on itch.io]

From Strachey love letters to today’s immersive experiences, the evolution of electronic literature reveals how fascinating the technical innovation and artistic vision. What began as a way to experiment, to test computing capabilities, was gradually transformed into deliberate exploration of structures, language and meaning into the cyberspace, into the digital space.

As technology evolved so did form, from simple algorithmic generated text to much more complex hypertext and interactive narratives.

Still, the preservation of these works remains an important challenge. Many incredible project from 1950-1980s exist now only in fragmented documentation or have already been lost. This highlights how important contemporary archiving practices and efforts are.

Despite the seemingly immaterial nature, these e-lit projects need conservation.

In today’s artistic space, electronic literature didn’t stop evolving, its expansion opened up new territories through social networks, games, and artificial intelligence.

Our understanding of what literature and art are will continue to transform.