Failure Forgotten

All art is grounded in failure.

Pondering the various theories of 20th-century avant garde we've covered in class, I realized that most hold no water philosophically. I used to think this was a problem. I now realize this is their success. Though they're meant to justify a particular artistic approach, they always fail as such. Futurism, for example, seems fairly traditional 100 years later. Marinetti's manifestos draw on long rhetorical traditions while attempting to disavow all tradition. This is O.K. It doesn't mean there's no artistic value in his manifestos.

Coming to this week's topic of computer-generated poetry, I noticed the utter failure to remove the human element. Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner's Sentences (found poems produced by running an 1870s elementary school textbook through two computer programs, TRAVESTY and DIASTEXT) involve considerable human work, as they recognize in their afterword:

(1) we discerned Found Poetry in the Thayer School sentences. Then (2) we judged their vocabulary so strange (in 1988) yet so centered (in circa 1870) that a selection made by TRAVESTY could be rich with potential. And (3) we saw in DIASTEXT a capability for approximating magisterial Form. Finally, (4) taking a liberty granted even the most be-Mused poet, we entitled the fifteen sections, obeying what decorum seemed most apt.

To this I'd like to add that lightly edit the text and write an afterword explaining what they've done. The result is a series of mediocre poems.

More interesting and entertaining to me is apostrophe by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry. It is a series of statements that begin with "you are," the first section being an original work, the second being a series of "you are" statements generated by putting the original statements through a program that finds "you are" statements on the Web. A random selection from apostrophe's second section reads as follows:

you are a man, you have no guest right here 。you are a curious one 。"You are a reincarnated soul of many past lives," Vivian was relaying with astonishment 。you are a junior or senior in high school and this movie was made for you so run and check it out 。you are a true romantic, you believe in the power of love and you are willing to take a leap of faith so this movie is for you 。you are an insomniac and you like cool, dark places so go see this movie

The result is a fascinating series of seemingly connected statements about the reader. Kennedy and Wershler-Henry claim that apostrophe "perform[s] a digital détournement that liberates language from one context in order to tease out other entanglements." Clearly, a commentary on the Web. However, while it does critique the language of the Internet, it simultaneously fails in this task, reinscribing the ideology of the Internet in the poem simply by using its language and elevating it to the level of art.

Furthermore, they note in their introduction that apostrophe "makes no claims to procedural purity," which they rightly realize as being beside the point. To me, text-manipulating programs are useful tools in the creative process and nothing more - incapable of succeeding in pure or philosophical grounds.

Another example of failure being the grounds of art can be found in digital poems (yes, I'll call 'em that) created by using Translation Party, a site which takes any English phrase you enter and uses Google Translate to translate it back & forth between English & Japanese until the same translation is repeated twice, finding equilibrium. In this work, the failure of computer translation is fundamental to the creative process. Here's an example, taken from John Pasden's blog at Sinosplice on August 8, 2009.

Machine translation here creates a lineated bilingual poem that can only be fully understood with the help of a human translator (be it another person or yourself). Any attempt to understand a phrase in the language you don't understand via machine translation or phrasebook will only repeat the problem. Yet the creation of the poem requires machine translation (and more specifically, a failed machine translation).

Furthermore, the semantic meaning of the poem contrasts the dark absolutism of the starting phrase with the vain hope of the ending phrase, suggesting the naivete of those who hope to restore healthy relations between the two countries. And note that this (false) hope is only introduced through English translation, i.e. the intervention of democratic Anglophone governments.

But wait! There's more! Because of the rapidly changing nature of Google Translate, which relies on its catalog of websites as well as user suggestions for better translations, you will introduce new translations derived from the same translations, given enough time. For example, here's a digital poem I made yesterday using Translation Party and the exact same phrase as John Pasden.



(I apologize for the low quality. My techno-knowledge does not reach much beyond everyday use.) In this version, instead of attempting to resolve China & Japan's diplomatic difficulties through naive optimism, we simply reach a translation of the original statement into the present. The poem hangs its head in resolution. The conclusion follows logically from the premise; it does not attempt to contradict it.

And this, readers, is the true potential of failure.

*Note: The title of this blog post is a reference to my high school friends' emo-core band. It later evolved into the pop-rock stylings of The Peter Marsh Group, of which I was a member. Don't worry if you failed to catch the reference.