''ReRites'' (also known as ''RERITES, ReadingRites, Big Data Poetry'') is a literary work of "Human + A.I. poetry" by David Jhave Johnston that used neural network models trained to generate poetry which the author then edited. ReRites won the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature in 2022.

About the project

The ''ReRites'' project began as a daily rite of writing with a neural network, expanded into a series of performances from which video documentation has been published online, and concluded with a set of 12 books and an accompanying book of essays published by Anteism Books in 2019. In ''Electronic Literature'',

Scott Rettberg Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen Bergen (), historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipality in Vestland county on the west coast of Norway. , its population is roughly 285, ...

describes the early phases of the project in 2016, when it bore the preliminary name ''Big Data Poetry''. Jhave (the artist name that David Jhave Johnston goes by) describes the process of writing ''ReRites'' as a rite: "Every morning for 2 hours (normally 6:30–8:30am) I get up and edit the poetic output of a neural net. Deleting, weaving, conjugating, lineating, cohering. Re-writing. Re-wiring authorship: hybrid augmented enhanced evolutionary". There is video documentation of the writing process. The human editing of the neural network's output is fundamental to this project, and Jhave gives examples of both unedited text extracts and his edited versions in publications about the project. Kyle Booten describes ReRites as "simultaneously dusty and outrageously verdant, monotonously sublime and speckled with beautiful and rare specimens".

Performances

''ReRites'' was first shared with an audience through a series of performances where audience members and poets would participate in reading the automatically generated texts, which appeared on screen so fast that human readers could barely keep up. This has been described as allowing participants to "re-discover .the peculiar pleasures of being embodied", or, in Jhave's own words, as a space where human participants were "playing their wits and voices against an evocative infinite deep-learning muse". The first performance was at Brown University's Interrupt Festival in 2019. It has been performed many times since, including at the Barbican Centre in London and Anteism Books.

Print Publications

For a single year Jhave published one book of poetry from the ''ReRites'' project each month. These twelve volumes are accompanied by a book of essays, all published by Anteism Books. The accompanying essays provide critical responses to the project from poets and scholars including Allison Parrish,

Johanna Drucker Johanna Drucker (born May 30, 1952) is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aest ...

, Kyle Booten, Stephanie Strickland, John Cayley, Lai-Tze Fan,

Nick Montfort Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center fo ...

, Mairéad Byrne, and Chris Funkhouser. Allison Parrish notes elsewhere that these

paratext In literary interpretation, paratext is material that surrounds a published main text (e.g., the story, non-fiction description, poems, etc.) supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. These added elements form a frame for the ma ...

s to ''ReRites'' serve a legitimising function for a genre of poetry that is not yet institutionally acknowledged.

Technical details

Starting in 2016 under the name ''Big Data Poetry'', Jhave generated poems using, in his own words, "neural network code (..) adapted from three corporate github-hosted machine-learning libraries:

TensorFlow TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learning ...

(Google),

PyTorch PyTorch is a machine learning framework based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella. It is free and op ...

(Facebook), and AWSD (SalesForce)". He explains that the "models were trained on a customised corpus of 600,000 lines of poetry ranging from the romantic epoch to the 20th century avant garde". Jhave maintains a GitHub repository with some of the code supporting ReRites.

Reception

''ReRites'' is described by John Cayley as "one of the most thorough and beautiful" poetic responses to machine learning. The work's influence on the field of electronic literature was acknowledged in 2022, when the work won the

Electronic Literature Organization The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of ...

's Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature. The jury described ''ReRites'' as particularly poignant in the time of the pandemic, as it was "a documentation of the performance of the private ritual of writing and the obsessive-compulsive need for writers to communicate — even when no one else is reading". The question of authorship and voice in ''ReRites'' has been raised by several critics. Although generated poetry is an established genre in electronic literature, Cayley notes that unlike the combinatory poems created by authors like

, where the author explicitly defines which words and phrases will be recombined, ''ReRites'' has "not been directed by literary preconceptions inscribed in the program itself, but only by patterns and rhythms pre-existing in the corpora". In an essay for the Australian journal ''TEXT'', David Thomas Henry Wright asks how to understand authorship and authority in ''ReRites:'' "Who or what is the authority of the work? The original data fed into the machine, that is not currently retrievable or discernible from the final works? The code that was taken and adapted for his purposes? Or Jhave, the human editor?''"'' Wright concludes that Jhave is the only actor with any intentionality and therefore the authority of the work. The centrality of the human editor is also emphasised by other scholars. While ''ReRites'' uses 21st century neural networks, it has been compared to earlier literary traditions. Poet Victoria Stanton, who read at one of the ''ReRites'' performances, has compared ''ReRites'' to

found poetry Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus ...

, while David Thomas Henry Wright compares it to the

Oulipo Oulipo (, short for french: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: ''"workshop of potential literature"'', stylized ''OuLiPo'') is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works ...

movement and

Mark Amerika Mark Amerika (born 1960, Miami, Florida) is an American artist, theorist, novelist and professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado. He is a graduate of the Literary Arts program at Brown University, where he received his MFA ...

to the

cut-up technique The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and populariz ...

. Scholars also position ''ReRites'' firmly within the long tradition of generative poetry both in electronic literature and print, stretching from the

I Ching The ''I Ching'' or ''Yi Jing'' (, ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zh ...

, Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes and Nabokov's

Pale Fire ''Pale Fire'' is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic col ...

to computer-generated poems like

Christopher Strachey Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al., ...

's Love Letter Generator (1952) and more contemporary examples.{{Cite journal , last1=Husárová , first1=Zuzana , last2=Piorecký , first2=Karel , date=2022 , title=reception of literature generated by artificial neural networks , url=https://www.sav.sk/journals/uploads/04061552WLS1_2022_husarova-piorecky.pdf , journal=World Literature Studies , volume=14 , pages=44–60 , doi=10.31577/WLS.2022.14.1.4, s2cid=248305840 Jhave describes the process of working with the output from the neural network as "carving". In his book ''My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence'',

writes that the "method of carving the digital outputs provided by the language model as part of a collaborative remix jam session with GPT-2, where the language artist and the language model play off each other’s unexpected outputs as if caught in a live postproduction set, is one I share with electronic literature composer David Jhave Johnston, whose AI poetry experiments precede my own investigations."

References

2010s electronic literature works New media 21st-century poetry Canadian poetry Applications of artificial intelligence Natural language processing Generative literature