Constant interview 

1.* 
In “The Death Of The Authors, 1941 Edition” you wrote a generative  software to produce a (freely downloadable) novel based on texts by  Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Von Arnim,  Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bergson (all of them died in 1941), pointing  out how copyright is blocking a lot more than just unlimited  reproduction. Do you think it’d be possible to stretch this concept  including tiny bits of authors that are still under copyright? And do  you think that it’s already possible to generate (and let society  “accept”) credible apocrypha establishing a sort of new genre? 

The Death Of The Authors is a celebration of the demise of the authors in the eye of copyright. The literal decomposition of her body of work renews the soil into a fertile humus for further work. The project is not so much about credibility, but an experiment with the affordances of this macabre liberation, seventy year after the author's death, crafted by copyright law. 
Of course we dream of working in similar ways with works from contemporary authors but current copyright-laws confine us to late 19th and early 20th century works. Nevertheless, the entire literary tradition is built upon references to 'master's voices', using tiny details, stylistic and structural copying, references to names, places, concepts. Whether this practise is done consciously or not, we can state that any creation is co-dependent on many others. The process of creating an artwork is as a stream that can possibly take in everything that it comes across.
When looking at copyright law, there are two possibilities that would allow including bits of authors that are still under copyright. The first one is the parody or pastiche, an original new artwork that is humouristic by nature - who is able to judge this - and does not induce any confusion with the parodied work. And there is the citation right for reviews, polemics, educational or scientific activities. Here the source has to be mentioned unless 'this turns out to be impossible'.
The Death of the Authors is not a commercial series. It is a research artwork that is not for sale. With likeminded fans of automatic writing machines we have been fantasising about a publication that would put the ultimate 'n-gram' to the test of copyright. When would one stop recognizing a fragment of a text? What if we would try to put together a new novel using only a maximum sequence of three or four words out of existing works? The result might be close to something one could call an 'algorithmic stream of consciousness'.

Language is a virus.


2.* 
If you’d mention one limit of this project would you say it’s the  number of authors/texts to be processed, or the level of consistency in  maintaining a unifying style? And which are the main technical problems  to be addressed? Do you think that following the project’s trajectory  you’d be able to accomplish some standard definition of “sample” and  “remix” for text/print, as we already had since a long time for music  and video? 

The project started with a text-remix, but has branched out into a cinematic slideshow, and the construction of a chatbot opera including the remixing of images, sound and text. As an answer to your question we limit ourselves here to issues related to text/print.
There are many limits. The number of authors/texts to be processed is not one of them. This is, once the works is available as a plain textformat, not as a pdf or scan. Hence, accessibility of the works is a major limit. It is not because an author's work is part of the public domain that it is 'around' and 'usable' for this kind of project. 
Because most digitally available works are often the canonical ones and/or works in English language, one of the goals of the Death of the Authors series is to try to focus on at least one Belgian author each year. The Royal Library of Belgium is our main source for all works by Belgian authors, because a copy of each book that is published in Belgium is kept here and can be scanned freely (by hand!), and run through Tesseract or any other OCR software. Anyone who has done this, knows that there is still a large amount of work to be done on the OCR-ed version of a text.
Therefore Gutenberg remains a beautiful and highly rewarded project, with a huge applause for the thousands of volunteers who keep on proofreading the material. Another goal of The Death Of The Author's series is also to support and promote this kind of platforms, like Gutenberg, archive.org, Wikipedia.
In terms of consistency there is only one unifying style: authors meet because they share the year in which they died. This is a rather lugubrious practise. And it creates very unusual encounters. Take for example the works that enter in the public domain from 1st January 2016, we're confronted with the dramatic encounter between Anne Frank and Hitler...
With regard to a 'standard definition' of a sample in text, it seems we're remixing all the time throughout the day, in each email or text message we type. A word, an expression, a saying, a new word... We are what we hear, we reproduce what is around. And that makes our languages so organically dynamic. When it comes to remixing text, it seems that the most interesting threads are to be found in creating the right metaphores, where the form of the algorithm suits the content and vice versa. Ideally, you would be able to read the algorithm and the output as the two sides of a same coin.

Prototypes.
3.* 
So called “bots” (popular software text-based processes) beyond  producing meaningful texts, are committed to enable the perception of a  convincing identity (like the ones operating on Twitter, for example).  Two years after “The Death Of The Authors” you produced “Botopera”, a  working chatbot-room featuring Fats Waller, Nikola Tesla, Beatrix Potter and  Sergei Rachmaninov. Do you think that this kind of virtual “personality”  can be close to the writer’s style that we’d like to find in a fiction  book?

The chatbots had nicknames related to the names of the authors they would represent: Bots Waller, NICKTesla, Beatrix Botter and Rachmanibot. The opera consisted of four acts. In each act, the bots had different behaviours. Not all of them were text based, of course. Bots Waller and Rachmanibot would play original and remixed music, NICKTesla would show and play around with images of his patents. But when their interaction was text based, people would engage with them as if they were 'real' personalities. 
In Act 1/The Ouverture the chatbots would react on questions from the audience, by selecting words from the questions and looking on their personal Wikipedia-page for sentences containing the same word. A small script rewrote the sentences from 3rd to 1st person. An artificial voice, costumized for each bot, would read the sentence aloud. It set the atmosphere for the next acts, in which they would play their works solo and remix them in duets. 
Beatrix Botter who was only textbased, had one behaviour that would create reactions based on personal projections or recognition, as one can have when reading fiction. She would grammatically analyse any sentence, question or remark and rewrite them using similar parts-of-speech from her own tales. Of course she made a lot of mistakes. Out of ten answers, nine might have read as dadaist poetry, but the one moment in which she would hit what one visitor called 'the level of truth' was very powerful.
'Where is love?' asked that one visitor.
'It has left,' Beatrix answered.
The person's partner had recently left indeed...

4.* 
Constant is closely affiliated and has substantially supported the Open Source Publishing (OSP) project, fostering the use of Free Software  tools for graphic design. What kind of dialogue were you able to  establish with designers and publishers and with what type of outcomes?  Why it has recently become an independent organism? 

OSP was started by Constant in 2006 as a modest attempt to see if it would be possible to do design with Free Software. The experiment grew out of a desire to look up-close at the relation between tools and practice, and at that point Free Software for graphics was at an unstable but exciting moment. Research, experiment -> LGRU. OSP has outgrown Constant, moved into professional design practice and needed the breathing space to define its own mission, parallel and complementary to Constant.
-> note on the 'formatting' of proprietary tools
-> in dialogue with printers: what is a pdf? can a book not have page numbers/different covers for each copy etc
-> research/experiment vs execution for third parties

5.* 
OSP has also established the “OSP-foundry”, a collection of “Libre  Fonts” designed by OSP together with other type collaborators. Do you  think that fonts can be considered as specific media? And what’s their  specific role in the current pervasive flood of information? 

Fonts are conceptual objects: discrete, atomic and omnipresent. They call into question the relevance of individual authorship and allow for a close examination of the entanglements between technology, history and application. 
Stroke fonts as a new paradigm of digital writing. W3C. 
The Alphabet.

6.* 
Libre Graphics, stemming from the same kind of international  communities, has periodical meetings and a printed publication,  addressing all kinds of graphic-related software issues in a broader  perspective, compared to OSP, trying to establish free cultural  solutions and open standards in a pure hacktivist tradition. Do you  think that this can accomplished on a massive scale despite the current  oligopoly of a few giant corporations, or even establishing niches of  resistance would be a success? 

There is a slow but persistent move towards an interest in a broader toolset. Art and design schools. 
Most interesting in it defining digital tools not according to massive adoption. 
Software comes out of the closet as a dialogue partner in the creative process. 
Felt/shared urgency to build intelligence, dialogue around it.

7.* 
In your opinion, does software have the role to reinvent content  structure in print, establishing new paradigms, or just to support  sophisticated productions, helping setting new formats (including  automatic content or editing, for example) ? 

New ideas of publishing become imaginable through considering software, weaving together ideas of digital and physical materialities. 
Algorithmic editing can be interesting when they are taken into account as partners in the wider assembly of artistic/literary production.
HTML to print.

8.* 
Speaking of formats, the e-book hasn’t reached a universal standard  yet, despite major publishing industry efforts. Lost in between pdf,  ePub and proprietary formats, which produce quite different reading  experiences, maybe it can still be considered as an unborn medium. If  you agree, do you think that it’s due a historical design (temporary)  failure, an inadequate technological approach, or there’s simply a  cultural gap still to be filled?

epub as it stands largely defined as a carrier for industrial desires; pdf another industry standard. 
epub more interesting for its potential 'webness' and bleeding between continuous and discontinuous forms or reading and publishing. 
Open standard.

9.* 
Another seminal project you developed, has been to create an  experimental platform inspired by Paul Otlet’s Mondothèque, an ancestor  of the “universal library” concept, realised in 1934 on paper. What kind  of relationship have you developed with the digitalisation process of  printed media? And do you think it’d just be enhanced by powerful search  tools while interconnecting as many digital libraries as possible, or  it’d be important to establish a standard shareable digitasing  (technical and cultural) “paradigm”?

We are interested in seeing the co-influence of digital and physical concepts of reading, writing and publishing, away from a linear understanding of the one fore-seeing the other. In our experiments with Otlet's Le traite de documentation: Le livre sur le livre for example, we are looking at the possible co-existence of classic universalist categorisation practices and abductive technologies such as data- and textmining.

10.* 
In this context, “universal access”, or “free culture” goal should  have as primary task that major collections of text would be freely  accessible online, or would we need more “librarians,” “editors”,  filters that would let us get oriented in the mare magnum of available  knowledge? 

These two situations are not mutually exclusive, but necessitate/produce each other.
 What if we would consider each reader also as a writer and a librarian. 
 Important to understand 'access' beyond 'the right to view'
 Non-exclusivity [term?] of the digital material has potential of acting as an invitation to study  material, distribute it, rework it.