Remerks EM: 
Always nice to read about Constant history, thanks! :) 

"The specific choice for F/LOSS tools, F/LOSS licenses, and feminist methods of collaboration make these experiments stand in different ways to what has been described over the years as the characteristics of e-literature." In the text you situate and describe those F/Loss tools and licenses but I couldn't find a clarifying example or explanation on what you meant by feminist methods, or maybe not explicitly enough

r-w-x; maybe just add (re-read, re-write, execute)? it's not obvious for everyone and comes much later in the text

I wonder what is the function of the paragraph on Nick Montfort; is it to signal a disinterest for the particular practice you were busy with? I think it might not clear to readers what is the problem there; maybe instead of fully quoting him maybe you can explain the difference in those generations mentioned and how you (and Algolit) related to it? 

Remark Mrmr:
Thanks for the path across Constant i-lit projects.. A few notes.

r-w-x

* maybe a line or a footnote to mention the relation between entering the public domain and the death of the authors - the 70 years rule, could be useful for readers unfamiliar?

* also r-w-x maybe deserves a footnote? not to be too explanatory, but to share a bit of the language work constant does of taking to-from technical languages..

general tensions (vs)

I think through the text there is three times an opposition that for us feels obvious but it is not explicit in the text, so a reader could just not get:
    
* In the first text it is in the title (floss vs proprietary), and already a bit explicit but in the text there could be just a bridge on how it was clear constant would relate to neighbouring e-lit practices yet 'with an attitude'..

* cqrrelations Clips, the difference there is between the exploration of the poetic possibilities, and the probability of extraction and targeting that machine learning and language toolkits.. again I find it very subtle, while we lived it very intensily in the session :)

* with nick monfort, again there is his quote but it might not be super obvious, even though it is for us, the difference from his position, or rather why the difference. Not the place / space to make a fully structured critique, but maybe argue even if briefly why we do not agree on platforms as "the place" for e-/i-literature, that the potential for text is limited by their business and filter models, etc.. 


Remarks PW:
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I like the parcours that you descibe through constant, following lines of literature. The article reads like a sort of small biography of several projects you have been involved in that deal with machines and literature, which is nice to read and it gives a lot of info and links, which is great. I enjoyed a lot reading it :-)
A few thoughts, they're all kind of remarks on details, nothing structural, but maybe they help.


-> -> if you write "make these experiments stand in different ways to what has been described over the years as the characteristics of e-literature." then I am curious what these characteristics are, on a conceptual, or esthetical, literary level, more then the technical description that follows in the second paragraph. For me, writing up/ summarizing how Constant practice is making a difference could make a really nice conclusion to the article.




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Machines as literary companions
An Mertens

Constant has a long tradition of installations, worksessions and publications in which machines collaborate as literary companions, giving a unique form and sometimes also a unique content to the experience of reading, writing and rewriting. The specific choice for F/LOSS tools, F/LOSS licenses, and feminist methods of collaboration make these experiments stand in different ways to what has been described over the years as the characteristics of e-literature. This articles tries to illustrate this, by selecting a few activities in the Constant galaxy as examples.

Proprietary vs F/LOSS

In January 2007 N. Katherine Hayles publishes a paper on ‘Electronic Literature: what is it’ (https://www.eliterature.org/pad/elp.html). In this paper she states a.o.: ‘Readers with only a slight familiarity with the field [of electronic literature], however, will probably identify it first with hypertext fiction characterized by linking structures, such as Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story (Note 3), Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (Note 4), and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (Note 5). These works are written in Storyspace, the hypertext authoring program first created by Michael Joyce, Jay David Bolter, and John B. Smith and then licensed to Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems, who has improved, extended, and maintained it. So important was this software, especially to the early development of the field, that works created in it have come to be known as the Storyspace school. […] Along with Macintosh's Hypercard, it was the program of choice for many major writers of electronic literature in the late 1980's and 1990's.’ Next, she mentions a lot of works that she describes as genres of e-literature. Most are creations from the US. At that time, as I had started a trajectory on 'Writing in the era of digital infrastructures' I looked at a series of these works, but could feel very little sparkle. Unfortunately a lot of these links are now broken, but you can find back a large selection in the Electronic Literature Collection (https://collection.eliterature.org/).

A few months later, at the beginning of March 2007 in the centre of Brussels, people walk in and out of the international bookshop Passaporta. Some are regular customers, others are visitors to the Brussels Bravvo Festival. They follow a route of artistic installations in the city. They walk through the bookshop, ignoring the piles of books on tables and shelves that try to attract their attention. At the back of the bookshop, there is a staircase that leads to a basement room. That's where they want to be for ‘Transcommunautaire Karaoke Transcommunautaire’, an installation of Constant. Downstairs, they find a computer screen displaying text. Each word spoken by a different voice. The text is sometimes French, sometimes Dutch, alternating between an excerpt from Susane Lilar's French-language novel Une enfance gantoise (1976); and Paul Van Ostaijen's poem 'Belgian Sunday' (1928). Another computer invites the visitor to read a word from both texts. The word is isolated. It is not always clear which language it refers to. Sometimes there is confusion. Some words and also the numbers belong to multiple languages, and so they are pronounced in the mother tongue of the visitor behind the microphone. The computer records without judgement. The official bilingualism of Brussels and its informal multilingualisms get a unique resonance in this installation, thanks to the mediation of the computer for whom the meaning of a word or how it is pronounced are inaccessible criteria. 
Michael Murtaugh made a virtual remake of the installation (https://constantvzw.org/archives/brxlbravo/). You can also see pictures of the event (http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Transcommunautaire-Karaoke-Transcommunautair)
I had only recently joined Constant by then. ‘Transcommunautaire Karaoke Transcommunautaire’ was the first installation that showed me the difference between how machines can be used as tools - for word processing, video conferences, etc - and how they can act as literary companions and give a unique aesthetic experience. The machine read, wrote, and performed; and each activity showed a different layer of the complex theme of multilingualism in Brussels, the dominance of the French language today being reflected in the text of Susan Lilar, who testifies of the same dominance during the first half of the 20th century; the confusions of speech that are common in Brussels and part of its cultural identity. Was this literature? Clearly. Was this digital literature? Certainly. Was this a collective process? Undoubtedly. Did this show the narrative potential of machines? Oh yes.

r-w-x

On 1st of January 2012 Constant celebrated for the first time the Day of the Public Domain (https://constantvzw.org/site/Happy-New-Year-Happy-Public-Domain-Day.html). That year, the copyright expired on the oeuvre of famous authors like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Von Arnim, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bergson. This meant the works could be re-used in new works of art, they could be changed and re-published. It inspired Femke Snelting and myself to create a new work based on the work of these celebrated authors. It was the start of the Death of the Authors series (https://publicdomainday.constantvzw.org/). 
‘The Death of the Authors, 1941’ is a generative novel made with Python and nltk, based on texts by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Von Arnim, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bergson. Every time you launch the script, a different novel is created. As a hommage to the life and demise of authors whose bodies merged with earth in 1941, each version takes you through four seasons that are composed of thematically selected sentences from their liberated texts. Every unique version allows for a sensorial reading, in which each chapter collects sentences from two different novels with words that relate to different sensations. Spring for example is linked to words as birth, butterfly, flower, energy, breakthrough, sprawl, toddler, grow; whereas winter focusses on words like death, ice, cold, illness, death, ruin, decay, medicine, pus, infection, virus… For readers who know the oeuvre of the authors, the reading allows for an extra element of excitement, as it becomes a game to recognize the sentences. 

Later that year, in October 2012 together with Constant member Nicolas Malevé we met the artists and members of Ping Catherine Lenoble and Olivier Heinry. All four, we are interested in F/LOSS practises and literature. All four we had a look at the activities of the Electronic Literature Foundation and raised similar questions. The r-w-x attitude that feels so natural in how Constant and Ping approach artworks, remains absent in the e-lit collection. The potential manual of the work is hidden in softwares like Flash and Quicktime, and behind proprietary licenses. We take the time to share our thoughts. What if one could insert another layer of reading in digital literary works, by making the code available to the readers, but also by turning the code itself into a literary writing piece, naming the variables in a poetic way, writing the comments as literary footnotes? What if one would show the process of the machine at work? What if a digital narrative work takes on collective authorship, issued by all the participants who intervened in the creative process? 
We decided to meet during four days in Brussels as a way to look at machines as literary companions in a specifically F/LOSS environment. At the end of the four days, we created the word i-literature – as opposed to e-literature - an agenda, a mailinglist and a name for a new artistic research group that would explore practises of free texts and code. Algolit (http://www.algolit.net/) was born. 
The first year we functioned as a closed collective. Where the notion of literature was quite clear to all four of us, the concept of ‘algo-’ referring to algorithm in the title was much more obscure. Nicolas Malevé proposed to look closely at the Quicksort algorithm and physically execute it. Later this exercise resulted in the application of Oulipo’s constraint ‘L’Abécédaire’, a recipe for the physical performance of the algorithm using a verse composed by words in alphabetical order. The interest for a narrative perspective of the algorithm became an essential drive inside the Algolit practises.

With the fresh wind of Algolit in our backs, we presented the ‘Death of the Authors - 1941’ on the Public Domain Day in March 2013. Femke Snelting made a fork of the book, called ‘The Couplets’, presented in November 2013 in Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Three generated novels were bound in beautiful covers and are sold as a set in the collection of Books with an Attitude (https://www.books.constantvzw.org/home/death_of_the_authors). In the fall of 2013 the project was selected to be part of the virtual gallery of the exhibition ‘Chercher le Texte’, organised in the framework of the conference of the Electronic Literature Organisation in Paris (https://constantvzw.org/site/Locating-the-text.html). As much as we tried, the work did not make it into the 3rd volume of the Electronic Literature Collection. Nevertheless, it was picked up again in 2014 by Alessandro Ludovico for the exhibition ’Print Error/ Publishing in the digital age’ in the virtual gallery of Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Collective based practises

Tools shape practice, practice shape tools. This was the adagium of the Libre Graphics Meeting in Medialab Prado Madrid in 2013 (https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2013/), organised by Constant’s Libre Graphics Research Unit. Stickers were distributed that carried this slogan. It is remarkable how an object carrying a message can resonate in different time and space dimensions. When Algolit received the question, ‘But what with machine learning?’, it was this slogan that popped up again. We took the invitation into the organisation of the worksession Cqrrelations in Brussels in January 2015. During the second week, that was called ‘The nearest neighbours inherit all qualities from their gold1000 parent’, we explored the machine learning library Pattern for Python, developed by CLIPS at the University of Antwerp. This library allows for datamining, natural language processing, machine learning and visualizations. The idea was to look closely at the tool and explore its poetic possibilities (https://cqrrelations.constantvzw.org/1x2/projects/Week2/README). 
Being in one room with around 20 people during one week looking at the same tool created sparkles of ideas, insights and collaborations. At the end of the week the experiments were presented as part of a panel discussion in CPDP 2015 (https://www.cpdpconferences.org). The different experiments can still be found online at https://cqrrelations.constantvzw.org/1x2/projects/Week2/. After this worksession Algolit continued adopting the same methodology. During the following years, the focus of the Algolit sessions was on a tool at the time. Quite quickly we developed a procedure for 'algoliterary experiments': the tool would be found, understood by going through the code, executing and commenting line after line, next the tool would be applied with a familiar corpus, and in the end a poetic form would be found using the tool and a metaphorically fitting text corpus. 
Two years later, in November 2017, Algolit presented the results of this algoliterary experimentation during the ‘Algoliterary Encounters’ (https://www.algolit.net/index.php?title=Algoliterary_Encounters). A space filled with algoliterary works, using similar machine learning tools, trying to open up the black boxes in different ways or with different approaches, showed the strength of collective work. The exhibition felt more like an anthology of i-literature-using-machine-learning.
 
In November 2018 we organised a workshop with part of this material in the framework of the studyday ’Daarom lees ik’ (’Why I read’) organised by Ugent. We were announced that we would have the honour to count on the participation of Nick Montfort, an important author in the Electronic Literature Organisation. Our hope that he would be enthousiast by our approach, faded away, as we found posts by him on the web, such as the one he published in August 2018, A Web Reply to the Post-Web Generation (https://nickm.com/post/2018/08/a-web-reply-to-the-post-web-generation/), in which he states: “One of the aspects of this concept [a third generation of electronic literature] is that the third generation of e-lit writers makes use of existing platforms (Twitter APIs, for instance) rather than developing their own interfaces. … The Web is now at most an option for digital communication of documents, literature, and art. It’s an option that fewer and fewer people are taking. Floppy disks and CD-ROMs also remain options, although they are even less frequently used. The norm today has more to do with app-based connectivity and less with the open Web. When you tweet, and when you read things on Twitter, you don’t need to use the Web; you can use your phone’s Twitter client. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat would be just fine if the Web was taken out behind the shed and never seen again. These are all typically used via apps, with the Web being at most an option for access.”1

[Footnote 1: N. Katherine Hayles mentions the difference between the first and second generation as follows: “With the movement to the Web, the nature of electronic literature changed as well. Whereas early works tended to be blocks of text (traditionally called lexia) (Note 6) with limited graphics, animation, colors and sound, later works make much fuller use of the multi-modal capabilities of the Web…. these distinctions led me to call the early works "first-generation" and the later ones "second-generation," with the break coming around 1995.” (https://www.eliterature.org/pad/elp.html)]

Showing the process

‘Programming languages have supplemented natural languages, suggesting the need for new literacies that include both natural and artificial languages. These languages form a “postmodern tower of Babel,” as he [Kittler] puts it, and this is why: “We simply do not know what our writing does.” Kittler is partly referring to the ways that graphical interfaces dispense with the need for writing and hide the “machine” from its users.’ (Geoff Cox, Speaking Code, 2012, MIT Press, p.36)

When working with machine learning tools, it can be fairly easy to use one line of code to train a model. This one line refers to another library where all the different steps in the process of learning are written out. The practise of using one line is called ‘off-the-shelve’ coding, and it is what most people do. For people interested in working with the machine as a literary companion, the curiosity for the narrative perspective of the algorithm wins it from the oneliner. The opening of the black box allows for this perspective. The process of opening up can be compared to the peeling of a onion, where each layer comprises other layers, until you arrive at the core, in this case that means at pure mathematics. Practitioners of i-literature can be intimidated by this unfolding. During the Algolit meetings we made sure that people could stop the peeling process at any time, and that stopping was as rewarding as continuing.
As a follow-up of the Algoliterary Encounters we decided to organize a larger exhibition in which we would create works that showed different phases in a machine learning process. The exhibition was called ‘Dataworkers’ and took place in the Mundaneum in Mons in March 2019. The algoliterary works were organised in different zones, referring to the different phases of the machines learning process. There were the writers, cleaners, informants, readers, learners and oracles – the trained models. The catalogue of the exhibition, beautifully designed by Manetta Berends can be found here: https://www.algolit.net/index.php?title=File:Data-workers.en.publication.pdf.
The exhibition was only possible thanks to the collective learning and experimenting that took place during the Algolit sessions. Again, the exhibition could be read as iterations on themes inside each of the zones, showing different approaches around similar materials. As with all activities in which machines collaborate as literary companions, the code of the exhibition is published online under an open content license, ready to be re-read, re-written, re-executed. This potential for endless iterations that is part of the F/LOSS culture could invite to long art histories.2 

Footnote 2: The project Iterations, coordinated by Constant, invited artists into this concept: https://iterations.space/

Collection with an Attitude

In 2016 Constant started the collection ‘Books With an Attitude’ (https://www.books.constantvzw.org/). These are books designed with Free and Open Source software and published under open content licenses. This is why they deserve the hallmark ’Book with an Attitude’. Books with an Attitude showcases the publishing activities of Constant, looking into and reflecting upon the specific ways of creation, production and distribution that emerge in the meeting between F/LOSS designers, authors and ’books’. While writing this article, trying to sum up the specific characteristics of i-literature embedded in F/LOSS software and cultures, the idea pops up that it is maybe time to start an I-literature Collection with an Attitude, inviting all practitioners of F/LOSS digital literature to contribute their works including the code being used.

This article only references a few of the machinic activities of Constant. If you want to browse more, you can consult the following wefts https://constantvzw.org/wefts/algolit.en.html, https://constantvzw.org/wefts/algorithms_and_text.en.html
https://constantvzw.org/wefts/constantweb2.test.en.html
https://constantvzw.org/wefts/performingsoftware.en.html