‘I don't tend to see the digital and physical as an absolute binary’ – Writer in Residence, Sean Russell spoke to digital artist Dr. Richard Carter about art, poetry, electric literature, algorithms and the importance of creating something physical at the end.

“The book is the point,” said Richard. “The book is actually what they’re leading up to first and foremost. I mean yes many of these pieces could be done in digital format and I have explored these on a couple of occasions, but I've never really been very satisfied with it. I'm creating a mode of writing, a digitally generated mode of writing which I want to then appear in a codex format, I want it to be something you can hold in your hand and think about and perceive.”

In early February Dr. Richard A Carter, a lecturer in digital media at Roehampton University and a digital artist, spoke at the British Library about his work generating text with algorithms. He presented two works – Waveform and Swipe.

Waveform uses a drone, with a camera attached, to use algorithms to draw a line where the water ends, and the shore begins. This image is then translated into something resembling poetry; short, terse works of four lines generated by that combination of drone, camera, and code.

Swipe, uses predictive text and code to create a ‘swipe’ for each word, a glyph based on Google’s glide keyboard. By generating a swipe for each word – the movement a finger would make on the phone – and turning this into calligraphy. Richard is able to hint at another form of writing.

The works are fascinating and raise many questions. Why take something so inherently digital and present it in a physical book? Is it really poetry that the algorithms produce, is it art? And what do algorithms mean for the future of the written word?

“I don't tend to see the digital and physical as an absolute binary,” he said. “Because the digital is physical in so many ways. The nice thing about the book is it gives me an opportunity to really display that code at the same level as the outputs that its making whereas for most digital art, the code that enables it, is buried behind in the black box which is then projecting whatever we are seeing on the screen.”

He said that in creating books, he was trying to create a digital art that was as simple and elegant as what one would see on a canvas or in the pages of a “traditional” book. It was about bringing simplicity back to digital art, an artform which usually has a whole large infrastructure to go along with it.

Here he displays a shortened version of the code followed by the outcomes of the code. You are not bogged down in endless scrolling and more than anything it takes away the mystery of digital art and lays its working clear. How many digital artworks have I seen? How few have I wondered “what’s behind this?”

By bringing simplicity back Richard hopes to then make people think about the technology more closely. By taking something new and putting it in a traditional format we are forced to consider it properly.

But is it art?

“I've always had a fascination with literature and poetry in all its forms,” said Richard. “But I've also always had a long-standing interest in experimental literature and poetry; avant-garde, concrete poetry, visual poetry and these texts that push at the boundaries of what we understand writing to be, and how we display and present writing.”

This combined with a love of storytelling in video games and what could be created through this digital medium which perhaps was beyond that of the traditional book. Richard was able to put the two together with electronic literature.

Whether what the code generates is poetry or art does not really matter. It is part of far bigger question. Richard’s work is about creating another tool, something else to explore and push the boundaries of what we think about art, books, and writing.

“With waveform, it's not necessarily meant to be 'this is the new poetry of the 21st century' instead this is an experimental writing practice that is producing text that might remind us to a degree of how poetry works. There are other stories that we can tell here, other ways of seeing and thinking and that algorithms and digital technologies can play their own part, we're taking these tools and using them for our own ends.”

In some ways Richard’s work mirrors our present relationship to writing and hints of the future. Much of the writing we do in our day-to-day lives is predicted by algorithms. Phones guess the next words, email apps suggest us sentences. But we only consider what this means when put into a totally different context, taken out of the phone, the computer, and put into something like a book.

This was the technique used to create the sentence that runs through Swipe. Richard did not create an algorithm to generate the text here, instead he took advantage of what already existed on his phone, just tapping the Google-suggested word over and over again.

The sentence created was then turned into the corresponding glyphs which are presented in the book. This random form of text generation displays once again Richard’s interest in the human and non-human agency and how they interact. Whilst these words may appear random, they are based on algorithms which learned from how he writes. Did Richard see himself in that sentence that was created for him by his own phone?

“I don't know whether the ‘future will be a great weekend’ but nevertheless it felt right somehow that it was saying these things; it definitely carried that echo of me and the way I write.”

It’s less clear how these algorithms will affect the way we write to one another. Certainly text messages have affected our communication. Take the earlier days of mobile phones when a whole new language was developed for speed of communication “How R U?” Then as smart phones arrived, full words returned, and emojis were added. The technology we use undoubtedly affects our language use.

“The Google Gmail application on your phone now gives you pre-made sentences. I don't use them because they seem so brutally short, sort of vaguely: ‘yeah, sure, whatever’ and it’s like ‘no, I want to get something of me across in my writing, I don't want to just let the phone give like a three word answer because it feels rude somehow.”

Will algorithms affect our language? Undoubtedly. Will they change longform writing, personal emails, letters, novels, poetry? Less likely.

Richard’s work is about exploration, not necessarily answers. Whether the words in Waveform are poetry, or whether the glyphs in Swipe are art is not what is important. What is important is the exploration of the questions raised by these books. What we can do with this technology to find new ways to tell stories, new ways to write. Just because something starts digitally, doesn’t mean it has to end digitally. By making books Richard makes us consider them beyond just an image on a screen, we see into the “black box”, we are forced to compare them with other forms of art, to poetry; and that is the whole point – to experiment. Just because something isn’t written by a human doesn’t mean we don’t need to consider it, and the process behind it. These are new ways of thinking about writing and storytelling.

You can view more of Richard’s work, and purchase copies of his books here. And follow him on Twitter here.

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