DOI: 10.65266/WKHY2709
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Bibliographical Information: Policastro, Gilda. “The Development of I/O Techniques in Literature: From Nanni Balestrini’s Autocoder to K. Silem Mohammad’s Flarf and the Advent of Chatbot Poetics.” Annali d’italianistica 43 (2025): 247-61.
Abstract: In the new millennium, the concept of authorship in poetry undergoes significant transformations due to the pervasive influence of information technology and new media. These widely accessible tools challenge traditional notions of authorial intention and individual creativity among both creators and consumers. In Italian poetry, Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark I (1961), a text programmed—rather than “written“—by the poet in collaboration with IBM engineers, serves as a key precedent. Utilizing the Autocoder system, Balestrini generated a text through the machine’s algorithmic aggregation of strings that defied conventional inspiration and authorial control rooted in Romantic poetics. Contemporary practices see authorship evolving into an “event-based” concept, defined by the discovery and manipulation of language within the vast, undifferentiated internet. This shift aligns with the principles of googlism, as theorized by K. Silem Mohammad, where authorship intertwines with digital indexing, searching, and postproduction. This is how collective authorship gives rise to an ego that chooses, orders, and therefore composes, albeit replacing inspiration with search or found.
Key Words: machine, procedure, poetry, neural networks, googlism, creativity, subjectivity, bot training.
