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• CV ou présentation détaillée du ou des candidats (éventuellement avec description des travaux précédents)
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La date limite de réception des dossiers est fixée au 1er juillet 2014.
Les dossiers doivent impérativement être envoyés par mail, avec  coordonnées téléphoniques, pièces jointes et liens éventuels, à  l’adresse suivante : numerique2014 [at] villa-lamarelle.fr
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La Flèche d'Or revisitée
Revisiting The Arrow of Gold

Short (summary)
As writers in the digital age we combine textual and software practices to consitute new writing and reading experiences. 

We put this focus into practise earlier this year with the launch of a literary remix research project. We create computer scripts that can generate a new version of a novel in less than a second. We call these scripts 'digital agents', because they act each time we launch them and are able to create an infinite number of original versions of the same novel. Moreover, their acts allow us to gain insight into the mechanics of contemporary algorithmic procedures that influence our mediated perception of the world. 

The initial series of scripts are remixing Little Brother, a science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow. This summer we will continue with another series of digital agents that allow for contemporary readings of George Orwell's 1984. 

During our residency in Marseille we would like to launch a new series based on Joseph Conrad's La Flèche d'Or. Our goal is to develop a set of ten digital agents using constraint systems from the Oulipo. Each character will correspond to the nature of the novel and our experience as foreigners in the city of Marseille. The residency would allow us to find time and means for a deeper insight in the Oulipo-practises on the one hand, and on the other, allow us to find an authentic form for our series that is accessible to a larger audience. Until now, we have largely presented our work to fellow software and literary practitioners.
We are especially eager to exploit the form of liquid books that are available through POD, where each sample is a unique version. 


Artistic Presentation (content, genre, form, collaboration…)

* George Conrad's La Flèche d'Or 
1/ integrating the context of Marseille
Joseph Conrad was sent by his uncle to Marseille in 1874 at the age of 16. He stayed there for four years, serving on French marine ships. His novel The Arrow of Gold is set in places around the city: le café de la Colonne Trajane, near Vieux-Port, la rue Sylvabelle that became rue des Consuls in the novel, le café Bodoul, la Maison Dorée, la pension de Thérèse Chodzko. The text offers us a framework to explore the city which we only know as tourists and a context for the creation of digital agents.

2/ polyglot modernist
Joseph Conrad spoke Polish and French when he arrived in Marseille, and he began writing in English early , even if he did not master the language until later in his career . This flexibility for integrating different languages in his daily practise is a common aspect of our work. The fact that he was a modernist before his time strengthens the metaphor of using Oulipo-agents in order to 'translate' them to software, and our approach, to research liquid literary practises in order to expose the effects of technically mediated text on our lives. 
For this project we will be working with both the English text and the French translation. Joseph Conrad's works , including the original english text of The Arrow of Gold , are available in electronic form in the public domain collection of gutenberg.org. As we were sucessful in getting official permission to use Orwell's 1984 for datamining, we believe Gallimard will grant us the same permission to use Conrad's French translation. 

* The Oulipo-heritage
In October 2012, with in the framework of Constant in Brussels , A n Mertens gather ed a small group of artists whose work combines software and literature. Some define themselves as programmers, others as writers or performing artists, but in the cross of code and writing, we found each other.
Very quickly, we discovered that we all felt a strong afinity to Oulipo and for the work of its founders. We decided to organise our meetings following their tradition and found a name for our research group: Algolit ( http://www.constantvzw.org/site/Algolit,2004.html)
At least twice a year , we gather for 3 or 4 days to discuss our latest work and to put at least one of the Oulipo constraints into practise. It is clear that their formal approach to literature is especially interesting when applied as a computational technique . There is an intuition, up on which follows a series of formulas that constrain the condition s for the birth of a new text, the nature which remains hidden until the system is executed. The formulation of a set of conditions can be compared to compiling a diver se set of possibilities with which we explore unknown territories. Where the Oulipiens of the 60s and 70s felt frustrated because of the lack of access to technology that could deal with their mathematical formulas, we now have all the tools we can dream of: fast computers, thorough documentation of Oulipo-practises, manuals for programming languages and platforms for sharing our work with various audience s .
There by we honor our radical writer predecessors by 'translating' some of their concepts to contemporary literary practises.


* Accessible outcome(s) 

“MRCS YLLW,” H SD VR TH P N FRDY MRNNG
http://www.paramoulipist.be/?p=1480

1?m 4 s3n10r 4t C3s4r Ch4v3z h1gh 1n S4n Fr4nc1sc0?s sunny M1ss10n  d1str1ct, 4nd th4t m4k3s m3 0n3 0f th3 m0st surv31ll3d p30pl3 1n th3  w0rld. My n4m3 1s M4rcus Y4ll0w, but b4ck wh3n th1s st0ry st4rts, 1 w4s  g01ng by w1n5t0n. Pr0n0unc3d “W1nst0n.”
http://www.paramoulipist.be/?p=1426

Above are two extracts from the remixed novels in the series of Doctorow's Little Brother. The original novel tells the story of teenage hackers in San Francisco , who resist to u njust anti- terrorism p olicing through by using encrypti on, local networking and creative civil disobedience . The first message is an interpretation of the original text as sms messages, the other is a translation to l33t, a form of typographic hacker chat language .  
The literary and aesthetic values of these remixes are nested in the tradition of literary experiments of the twentieth century, that found their origins in Mallarmé's Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard. Words are no longer primarily transparant content carriers, and sometimes their material quality takes over completely, like a.o. in Ezra Pound's Cantor, where barely decipherable words are comprised of dozens of languages jammed together, or like the thunderclaps in James Joyce's Finnigan's Wake. 
This long tradition of experiments gives us the faith that our fascination for these texts as new contemporary rhythmical, visual, metaphorical and structural experiences might be shared by more people than our inner circle of collaegues. Close readings, aloud or in silence, constitute different acts of decoding, decyphering and decrypting. 

The question that remains to be solved, is how readers will deal with the infinity of production of this kind of novels. That is the challenge we want to take on with the idea of the liquid book. Each time the reader downloads the book, the digital agent will generate a new version of the content and change the series-number on the cover. As such, every download click will be an act of creation for the reader and for the writer. This unconventional gesture has the potential to introduce the work to a much wider audience.
Therefore, we would like to find a partner with an existing audience that is open for experiments. A publishing platform such as Lulu offers that possiblity, but maybe the partner of La Marelle, Le Bec en l'Air, would be more interest ing as they bring an audience and existing relationships . At the same time, we would like to organise a close d reading session with our expert colle a gues from Algolit at the end of the residency. We will publish the results of our meeting as part of our Algolit radio sessions, that begin this summe r .


Technical Presentation (dispositif, maîtrise ou non des outils numérique, matériel disponible, collaboration technique, développement envisagé…)

The project will utilize several software "pipelines" to mediate the source text as well as format various forms of output for publication. Programming will be done using Python and Bash, scripting languages popular for their capabilities for text processing. These languages will then be augmented with several open source libraries for statistics, information retrieval and natural language processing. The results of each experimental script will be stored in intermediate files which can then be transformed into ePub, HTML and PDF by using custom templates for each output medium. By using this pipeline-based production flow, it will be possible to fully automate publishing and create one-of-a-kind artworks.

Selected Software Tools and Libraries:

In addition, the entire artistic development process will be managed using the Git source code management software. Git is a tool developed to coordinate the thousands of diverse contributions to the Linux operating system. Due to its distributed nature and ability to keep track of multiple sets of changes to a set of documents, it has become widely used in contexts outside of conventional programming culture, in fields such as graphic design, collaborative writing and academic research. For this project, it provides a robust technical basis for organizing a hybrid workflow with multiple contributors.

Finally, the source code and all changes as well as modifications to the output will be available for public study. We find it important to adhere to a principle of Free Libre Open Source collaboration. In this sense, we mean that all software sources and output may be copied, redistributed, reused or remixed as long as standards for attribution are followed. This principle of openness in electronic literature allows for a new form of "critical code study".  With this choice, we hope to contribute to software as well as literary culture by publishing both the techniques and the results of our work.


Extra's
Description of previous works… (needs 2 or 3 sentences to describe + links)
30 years after the setting of George Orwell’s 1984, the novel is  frequently referenced in articles on privacy, data protection and the  surveillance society. The novel was written in 1948, speculating on a totalitarian society that would not allow for any possible resistance. 
Do  these references to 1984 make sense? And how can we as writers  integrate some of the uncomfortable effects of the digital revolution in  new forms of prose? That is the question for which this project is a  thinking tool. 
This project was launched on 14-4-14, but put on hold until the Orwell Estate granted the permission to use Orwell's text for big-data-operations. It will be developed during this summer.

Already in 2008 Doctorow published his ‘updated’ version of George Orwell’s 1984. He wrote it as a statement for teenagers, as an invitation to think about the controlling powers of the digital infrastructure, to open the discussion, to act upon it. He published the electronic copy under a  Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which allowed to use it for five revisiting experiments we had originally planned with 1984.


The Death of the Authors is a series of generative narratives based on work by authors in the public domain. The project was initiated by Constant members Femke Snelting and An Mertens in 2013, when they started remixing works of authors who had just entered the public domain.
This series is continued each year in January, when Constant celebrates Public Domain Day in collaboration with CRIDS and The Royal Library of Belgium. By creating a new derivative work every year, Constant hopes to inspire you to make public works electronically available and rediscover them.
http://publicdomainday.constantvzw.org/
on show at
* Print / Error at Espace Virtuelle, Jeu De Paume, Paris, février 2014
http://espacevirtuel.jeudepaume.org/the-death-of-the-authors-1941-edition-2297/
* Expo Variable, GC De Kriekelaar, Bruxelles, juin 2014
http://www.constantvzw.org/site/Variable-expo-De-Kriekelaar,2168.html







CV
http://wintermute.org/brendan/images/2012-10/cv-fall12-short_1.pdf