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Abstract

The de-scripting process has resulted from a challenge to create alternative forms of electronic writing at a Moo environment. It utilizes the computer as co-author in the process of recreating words. A software configured as a virtual "broken typewriter" produces alternatives to letter sequences. This mathematically-oriented process de-scribes written languages, through computerized semi-random letter substitutions causing intentional mispellings. The machine response generates a new electronic writing form. The objective is to create new terms for poetical, literary, aesthetic, political, linguistic, theoretical or scientific purposes and to conceive computer processes able to renew language codes. The process undermines the idea that languages must be protected by institutions from possible changes. Language is seen, otherwise, as a living entity, reflecting social forces and technologies.

Keywords

electronic writing theory, virtual typewriters, computer-based languages, semi-random processes, neologisms, chaotic languages.

Article

“For the God will annul the present combination of letters that form the words of our present Torah and will compose the letters into other words, which will form new sentences, speaking of other things.”

Gerschom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. (1)

De-scripting resulted from a challenge to create alternative forms of electronic writing at a Moo environment. This mathematically-oriented writing process was conceived to de-script texts, phrases and words, creating semi-randomic re-combinations of letters.

The process exploits the computer as a generative machine, a co-author in the production of words and texts. A software configured as a virtual typewriter in a Moo space rewrites written material producing a series of word alternatives. The virtual typewriter can be adjusted to react to specific needs, to specific purposes in the creative process, providing distinguished semi-random responses in the form of letter recombination.

In this experiment, English is being chaoticized through a process of computerized semi-random letter substitutions causing intentional mispellings in standard words. The process aims to undermine the idea that languages are entities to be protected by educational and governmental institutions from possible changes. Thus, it intends to utilize English in a generative mode, to enlarge it, to open it up to new technological possibilities and modes of thought.

As a poet, I rejoice in mixing languages, creating words, recombining suffixes and prefixes to re-institute meanings. I believe that sounds of previously unheard words ressonate in our mind in search of meaning.

However, the incidents that provided a first metaphor for inventing the virtual typewriters resulted from interaction with American friends and not from writing poetry although without a previous poetic experience I may have never perceived them as creative opportunities.

During my stay in several American universities, my “faulty” English has actually provided me with very enlightened experiences regarding language. “I feel margisaked because I am not a sperker of the Ynglish langbage ...” (2)

Being misundertood by people that nonetheless enjoyed my company and often regarded me as a joker or as a playful performance artist coalesced into a productive concept.

In Iowa City, 1977, I was translating the name of a church in Brazil as: “Our Lady of the Pains.” A friend, however, interpreted my saying: “Our Lady of the Pants,” an almost sacrilegous assertion that I would never dare to utter.

In 1995, at the College Art Association meeting in San Antonio, Texas, an American teacher asked me what was going on in Brazil. When I told him that the country was going through a hidden civil battle, he understood I was applying George Battaile's theories to apprehend the complex Brazilian situation.

Thinking humourously about those cross-cultural incidents, I came to the conclusion that whenever I say something, Americans would understand something different, and something that was much more interesting.

I realized that such misunderstanding could be a model for creative thinking. From there emerged the concept of a “virtual faulty typewriter," which provided an analogy for an incipient electronic writing theory. The “virtual faulty typewriter” would trick the typist, by printing letters he had not typed instead of the ones he had actually typed. The interference upon the automatized hands and fingers of the typing writers reaches straight into their minds, since some say that when typing they are "thinking" with their fingers.

The history of the typewriter is inextricably linked to incidentality as the invention of the QWERTYUIOP keyboard demonstrates: “Scholes, the inventor, had had, for his first prototype, opted for an alphabetic disposition of characters in the keyboard; after being confronted with the jamming of the letter keys, he had redesigned his keyboard, combining the least common letters with those most frequently employed. The professionals of Remington had included a last change, repositioning the R, so that the salesmen of the company could, during demonstrations, easily write the name of the machine: TYPE WRITER, (an incomplete anagram of QWERTYUIOP).” (3)

The actualization of a virtual “broken typewriter” required a software that would induce errors in the typing process. Following this suggestion a “generic typewriter” was programmed and became available as a virtual object at Mooville, a Moo space at the University of Florida, Gainesville. The Moo is a text-based virtual reality constructor that allows for scriptural navigation, interactive role playing, conferecing, and dispersed authorship.

The virtual "broken typewriter,” as it actually works, can swap, drop and add words; it can also delete characters or overstrike them with others from a preset list. The “typewriter” is controlled by properties so that it can be made to imitate different typing incidents in various frequencies of occurences.

Creative thinking entails a departure from ingrained models. As we become attached to institutions, our behavior, postures, attitudes and language become standardized, restricted to narrower codes and often subjected to mutual surveillance. Although we notice and theorize those processes we are so naturally involved in them that we rarely breakthrough.

We are certainly marked by typographic culture. "The print page, the columns of text, is what naturally comes to mind whe we try to find an image for order," writes Michel Butor. "Of course we can ponder that its interior is unfortunately a complete disorder, or we can be grateful to see a marvelous rage coming out. But if we wait a little longer, this will fade away to be replaced for that image of remarkable regularity: sharp horizontal lines, most of them with the same size, composed of 26 letters from our alphabet, some of them much more frequent than the others, with 10 numerals and some punctuation signs, all of them obeying norms that control the typographic character." (4)

De-scripting calls for a reversal of a repressive attitude towards mistakes in language. It proposes to consider errors as possible indicators of emerging linguistic forms. Thus, discourses that would never possibly or could never have been said, can thus be spoken, written, heard and objectified.

The underlying idea is to bring the signifier to the forefront of the creative process, allowing for formative elements to recombine, generating new words, so that new meaning can be traced. We may gradually learn a language, defined by the intersection of English with “faulty typewriters,” as we experiment this system.

The fact that letters are represented as numbers in the computer's internal memory brings new possibilities for the conception of electronic writing systems because mathematics can be easily applied to combinatory processes with letters, words and phrases.

Derridean deconstruction thus became a very contemporary mode of reading/writing since it implies de-contextualization, implicit in electronic editing: "... a written syntagm can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted ... One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains. No context can entirely enclose it. Nor any code, the code here being both the possibility and impossibility of writing, of its essential iterability (repetition/alterity)." (5) Umberto Eco explains further: "More than 'auscultated', the text must be deconstructed, until fracturing its own expressive texture. Thus the text does not speak any longer of its own 'outside'; it does not even speak of itself; it speaks of our own experience in reading (deconstructively) it." (6)

As I started playing and programming with a virtual typewriter a “theoretical wind” blew in my direction. I thought that either words generated by induced typing mistakes or by computer programs could suggest neologisms that would synthetize new meaning. I have then concluded that in order to increase chances to derive meaning, the “typewriter” would have to be “faulty” in very specific, theoretically-based ways.

According to theory, consonants carry more information than vowels. Consonants, although being more numerous in the alphabet, are less likely to occur in each incidence of a character in written dissertation. The theory correlates meaning to the probabilistic incidence of characters. The first “faulty typewriter” was then programmed to randomly insert consonants arresting any other letter. It would turn the text into a more complex and intriguing one.

This first “faulty” instrument was entitled Theoretical Wind and installed at Landscript, a Moo space designed for language experimentation:

"You have yust arrived at Lyndscrhpt. You may feel dtsnriensed twavelling thwough a highly chaocwc language terditorf. You may see letterscapes you don't readmember, as if you were vbsiting a voreigb letterxand of disbudted meaning. Thohe disgrammaring siqns may aztually lefd into another forf of legterwriting. Landsgript synapses a regmapting of megory, a re percephion that suddenly brinfs the delettfred landscapq into focus, wording neovortik prlcesses to forelround." (7)

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