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<h1>Algoliterary Publishing House</h1>
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<p>This project by <a href="https://www.anaisberck.be/">Anaïs Berck</a> proposes to explore the notion of a publishing house in which the authors are algorithms, presented with their contexts and codes; and in which the content of the books seeds with trees and nature. By putting the tree and its representations at the center of their works, and by welcoming algorithms not at the service of extracting resources or value towards a commercial objective, but for making kin with nature, these intelligences create narratives which speak about trees and also challenge colonial views of classification, methods of standardization, and might speak critically about the effects of dominant cultures. While doing so, they put trees at the center of the creation, and therefore decenter the perspective of the human being.</p>
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<p>The project looks into formal narratives generated by algorithms, question the form of the book as an object and authorial product, explore the concept of a ‘decolonial publishing house’ and experiment with the influence of ‘forest baths’ on the writing of code and the communication with trees.</p>
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</main>
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<aside>
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<details>
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<summary>
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<h2>Levenshtein Distance</h2>
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<dl>
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<dt>Algorithm</dt>
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<dd>Levenshtein Distance</dd>
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<dt>Trees</dt>
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<dd>eucaliptus + found species in Spanish on the internet</dd>
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<dt>Humans</dt>
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<dd>Gijs de Heij, An Mertens</dd>
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<dt>Language</dt>
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<dd>Spanish</dd>
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<dt>Published</dt>
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<dd>2021</dd>
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<dt>License</dt>
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<dd><a href="https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/unbound/cc4r">Collective Conditions for (re-)use (CC4r), June 2021</a></dd>
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</dl>
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</summary>
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<p class="read-online-link"><a href="http://anaisberck.tabakalera.eus/">Read the book online ⤤</a></p>
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<p>'The author of this book is the Levenhstein Distance algorithm, the subject is the eucalyptus tree in "Fama y eucalipto", an excerpt from Historias de Cronopios y de Famas by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Cort%C3%A1zar">Julio Cortázar</a>, published in 1962 by Editorial Minotauro. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance">Levenshtein distance</a>, edit distance or word distance is an algorithm that operates in spell checkers. It is the minimum number of operations required to transform one word into another. An operation can be an insertion, deletion or substitution of a character. The algorithm was an invention of Russian scientist Vladimir Levenshtein in 1965.'</p>
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<dl>
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<dt>URL</dt>
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<dd><a href="http://anaisberck.tabakalera.eus/">http://anaisberck.tabakalera.eus/</a></dd>
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<dt>Repository</dt>
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<dd><a href="https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/anais_berck/levenshtein-distance-lee-a-cortazar">https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/anais_berck/levenshtein-distance-lee-a-cortazar</a></dd>
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<dt>With the support of</dt>
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<dd>This book is a creation for <a href="https://www.tabakalera.eus/es/agora-cemento-codigo">ÁGORA / CEMENT / CÓDIGO</a>, an online exhibition curated by Lekutan (https://www.tabakalera.eus/es/lekutan), within the programme of Komisario Berriak supported by <a href="https://www.tabakalera.eus">Tabakalera</a> in Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain.</dd>
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<dt>Thanks to</dt>
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<dd>Andrea Estankona, Jaime Munárriz, Esther Berdión</dd>
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</dl>
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</details>
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<details>
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<summary>
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<h2>Paseo por arboles de madrid</h2>
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<dl>
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<dt>Algorithm</dt>
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<dd>Markov Chain</dd>
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<dt>Trees</dt>
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<dd>collection of trees in the neighbourhood of Barrio de Las Letras in Madrid, retrieved from <a href="http://www-2.munimadrid.es/DGPVE_WUAUA/welcome.do">Un Alcorque, un Arbol</a></dd>
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<dt>Humans</dt>
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<dd>Jaime Munárriz, Luis Morell, An Mertens, Eva Marina Gracia, Gijs de Heij, Ana Isabel Garrido Mártinez, Alfredo Calosci, Daniel Arribas Hedo</dd>
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<dt>Language</dt>
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<dd>Spanish</dd>
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<dt>Published</dt>
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<dd>In development</dd>
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<dt>License</dt>
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<dd><a href="https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/unbound/cc4r">Collective Conditions for (re-)use (CC4r), June 2021</a></dd>
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</dl>
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</summary>
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<p class="read-online-link"><a href="">Read the book online ⤤</a></p>
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<p>In this book, the Markov Chain algorithm simultaneously generates a poem and a walk along trees in the neighbourhood Las Letras in the centre of Madrid. Despite the impression that there are few trees in the neighbourhood, the algorithm counts 460 of them.</p>
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<p>Markov Chain was designed in 1906 by Andrey Markov, a Russian mathematician who died in 1992. This algorithm is at the basis of many softwares that generate spam. It is used for systems that describe a series of events that are interdependent. What happens depends only on the previous step. That is why Markov Chains are also called "memoryless".</p>
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<p>To generate the text, Markov Chain analyses the sequence of words in a novel. On this occasion, the reader can choose between a fragment of the novel 'La Madre Naturaleza' by 19th century feminist writer Emilia Pardo Bazán; or a fragment of the novel 'Miau' by 19th century Madrid writer Benito Pérez Gáldos, who died exactly 100 years ago at the time of writing.</p>
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<p>The new text is composed of meaningful words (nouns, verbs, adjectives), each of which is linked to a specific tree. The path you take from tree to tree is translated in the poem by the small words in the book. The poem and thus the route are generated in pieces, so that you can read a line of the poem to each tree. The last tree is then lucky enough to hear the whole poem.</p>
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<dl>
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<dt>URL</dt>
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<dd><a href="TBD">TBD</a></dd>
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<dt>Repository</dt>
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<dd><a href="https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/anais_berck/paseo-por-arboles-de-madrid">https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/anais_berck/paseo-por-arboles-de-madrid</a></dd>
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<dt>With the support of</dt>
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<dd>This book was created as part of the residency of Anaïs Berck in Medialab Prado in Madrid, granted by Medialab Prado and the Government of Flanders as part of their 'Digital Culture Residency' program. The creation happened in company of collaborators of Medialab Prado, who assisted to various workshops; one on Algoliterary Authors developing the concept and the code; a second one on Weasyprint as a lay-out tool for the programming language Python.</dd>
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</dl>
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</details>
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<details>
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<summary>
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<h2>Grafting a tree</h2>
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<dl>
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<dt>Algorithm</dt>
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<dd>Oulipo constraint 'Littérature définitionnelle'</dd>
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<dt>Trees</dt>
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<dd>collection of quotes about trees taken from <a href="https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/inspirational-quotes-about-trees">onetreeplanted.org</a></dd>
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<dt>Humans</dt>
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<dd>Gijs de Heij, An Mertens</dd>
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<dt>Language</dt>
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<dd>Spanish</dd>
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<dt>Published</dt>
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<dd>In development</dd>
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<dt>License</dt>
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<dd><a href="https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/unbound/cc4r">Collective Conditions for (re-)use (CC4r), June 2021</a></dd>
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</dl>
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</summary>
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<p class="read-online-link"><a href="">Read the book online ⤤</a></p>
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<p>Imagine books as transformed trees. Some live only for a year, others for ten years, some stay alive during centuries. What would a graft of one of those trees look like? 'Grafting trees' takes quotes about trees from existing works. Depending on the circumstances, these grafts grow fast or slow. In this work each graft is defined by its gardener, who is present with a short biography scraped from Wikipedia. The reader chooses the amount of seasons the graft will grow(?). The growth is indicated in bold/italics. A random noun (?) is picked and defined as a 'bud' from which a new branch grows by replacing the word by its definition in Wordnet.</p>
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<p>Wordnet is a combination of a dictionary and a thesaurus that can be read by machines. According to Wikipedia it was created in the Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University starting in 1985. The project was initially funded by the US Office of Naval Research and later also by other US government agencies including DARPA, the National Science Foundation, the Disruptive Technology Office (formerly the Advanced Research and Development Activity), and REFLEX.</p>
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<p>'Grafting trees' uses Part-of-Speech* to define all nouns in a specific sentence. Random nouns (?) are then replaced by their definition in Wordnet. This allows the sentence to grow autonomously and infinitely. </p>
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<p>The recipe of 'Grafting trees' was inspired by Oulipo's constraint of 'Littérature définitionnelle', invented by Marcel Benabou in 1966: in a given phrase, one replaces every significant element (noun, adjective, verb, adverb) by one of its definitions in a given dictionary; one reiterates the operation on the newly received phrase, and again. </p>
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<p>*Parts-of-Speech is a category of words: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, and sometimes numeral, article, or determiner. NLTK, or the Natural Language Toolkit allows to parse a sentence into words. Next, it includes an pretrained algorithm that can determine the part-of-speech of each word in that sentence. </p>
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<dl>
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<dt>URL</dt>
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<dd><a href="TBD">TBD</a></dd>
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<dt>Repository</dt>
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<dd><a href="https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/anais_berck/grafting_trees">https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/anais_berck/grafting_trees</a></dd>
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<dt>With the support of</dt>
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<dd>This book was first shown as an installation in the exhibition Data Workers in Mundaneum, financed by Communauté Wallonie-Bruxelles/Arts Numériques; it was then published by Andreas Bülhoff as a pdf as part of the online magazine about digital literature <a href="https://sync.abue.io/">sync (nr 37)</a>. In October 2020 the French version of the installation was part of the exhibition 'Littérature et Numérique' in La Maison du Livre in Brussels.</dd>
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</dl>
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</details>
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</aside>
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</body>
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</html>
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