USING ELECTRICITY is a series of computer generated books by Counterpath, meant to reward reading in conventional and unconventional ways. The NYC release event for these books will feature readings by:

NICK MONTFORT - The Truelist
ALLISON PARRISH - Articulations
RAFAEL PÉREZ Y PÉREZ - Mexica 20 Years-20 Stories

Using Electricity takes its title from the computer generated poem “A House of Dust,” developed by Alison Knowles with James Tenney in 1967. This work, a FORTRAN computer program and a significant early generator of poetic text, combines different lines to produce descriptions of houses. The series is edited by Nick Montfort.

The first three books in the series will be available in bookstores by the end of January 2018. During the week of February 5-9 the authors of these books will be together on the East Coast of the US to launch the series in several public readings.

Join us at Babycastles for the New York stop of the tour!

---Books & Bios---

THE TRUELIST is a book-length poem generated by a one-page, stand-alone computer program. Based around compound words, some more conventional, some quite unusual, the poem invites the reader to imagine moving through a strange landscape that seems to arise from the English language itself. The unusual compounds are open to being understood differently by each reader, given that person’s cultural and individual background. The core text that Nick Montfort wrote is the generating computer program. It defines the sets of words that combine, the way some lines are extended with additional language, the stanza form, and the order of these words and the lines in which they appear. The program is included on the last page. Anyone who wishes is free to study it, modify it to see what happens, and make use of it in their own work.

Nick Montfort is an author or editor of fifteen books, which include books of poetry along with six from the MIT Press, several collaborations, and several artist’s books. Five of his previous books are of computer-generated poetry and include #! (Counterpath, 2014), 2×6 (a multi-lingual collaboration, Les Figues, 2016), and Autopia (Troll Thread, 2016). He is professor of digital media at MIT and lives in New York and Boston.

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MEXICA: 20 YEARS-20 STORIES \\\\\[20 años–20 historias\\\\\] contains 20 short narratives developed by the computer program MEXICA. Plots describe fictional situations related to the Mexicas (also known as Aztecs), ancient inhabitants of what today is Mexico City. This is the first book of short-stories produced completely by a creative agent capable of evaluating and making judgments about its own work, as well as incorporating into its knowledge-base the pieces it produces. By contrast with other, statistical models, MEXICA is inspired by how humans actually develop fictional stories. The book is in Spanish and English, with a preface by Fox Harrell.

Rafael Pérez y Pérez specializes in artificial intelligence and computational creativity, particularly in automatic narrative generation. He founded the Interdisciplinary Group on Computational Creativity, which develops models for plot generation, plot evaluation, representations of social norms, visual narratives, and creative problem solving, and he is the chair of the Association for Computational Creativity, which organizes the annual International Conference on Computational Creativity. He is a professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana at Cuajimalpa, México City.

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ARTICULATIONS consists of poems output by a computer program that extracts linguistic features from over two million lines of public domain poetry, then traces fluid paths between the lines based on their similarities. By turns propulsive and meditative, the poems demonstrate an intuitive coherence found outside the bounds of intentional semantic constraints.
Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, and game designer. Named “Best Maker of Poetry Bots” by the Village Voice in 2016, her computer-generated poetry has recently been published in Ninth Letter and Vetch. She is the author of “@Everyword: The Book” (Instar, 2015), which collects the output of her popular long-term automated writing project that tweeted every word in the English language. Allison is a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and lives in Brooklyn.

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Counterpath is a publisher, exhibition space, and bookstore. As a publisher, Counterpath was founded in 2006 and has published over 60 titles to date. Its exhibition space, opened in late 2010 and since mid 2015 located at 7935 East 14th Avenue in Denver, Colorado, has hosted over 200 events. Its bookstore, part of the event space, carries tiles published by small and independent presses. Counterpath, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, is interested in linguistic and visual interventions in contemporary global culture and strives to encompass new conceptions of what compelling work can mean. It also actively looks for work by writers and artists who are typically under-represented in such venues or media outlets.