If
I believe professor Alain Vuillemin I was twelve
years old when France began to pay attention to
computer based poetry. In 1959, in France, Raymond
Queneau and François Le Lionnais created the
"Séminaire de Littérature
Expérimental " (Experimental Seminar of
Literature), which became shortly after his
creation in 1960, the well known "OULIPO". Oulipo
was interested in the secret possibilities of these
"new machines for information treatment". (In
between, Theo Lutz had in Stuttgart produced the
very first electronic poetry, "stochastichte text"
in
Augenblick). But nothing concrete rolled
out the huge machine.
We must wait
until1964 to see the first electronic poems written
in French in Montreal by the French Canadian
engineer Jean Baudot "La machine à
écrire mise en marche et programmée
par Jean A. Baudot". More than ten years later, the
first exhibition of automatic produced poems took
place in 1975 during the "Europalia " event in
Brussels. In July 1981 the professors Paul Braffort
and Jacques Roubaud created the literary group
ALAMO: "Atelier de Littérature
assistée par la Mathématique et les
Ordinateurs" (Literature Workshop aided by
Mathematics and Computers). The definition
contained in the name says enough about the
artistic ambitions. The use of electronics cannot
reach further than helping to find unknown and
unthinkable combinations of words. According to
Philippe Bootz (e-mail 28 02 02), the first
automatic generator of poetry was "Poèmes
d'Amour" by Jean-Pierre Balpe, in 1980 and Bootz'
first programmed combinatory poems, on
mini-computer (not micro), are from 1979 (Bootz
dixit). In 1985, during the exhibition
"Immatériaux" in the Georges Pompidou's
Centre, the audience was invited to create and
print computer generated poems. The funny is that
the numerous printed productions have been
archived, but not the generators themselves. All
those poetical experimentations are in a way not
yet fully electronic. Written text on paper remains
the most important aspect of creation. The input is
computerized, but not the output.
The ALAMO group
went on by creating text generating programs for
DOS, such as the language APL that made possible to
easily manipulate text objects as vectors or fonts.
We met some members of the ALAMO group during the
first Conference for e-literatures in Paris in
1994. I have been surprised by their agressivity
against the emerging computer based poetry. For
them, nothing new could be done out of the paper
publication. There was obviously a break between
the authors who saw the computer as a tool and the
ones who are considering the machine as an
autonomous medium.