COLOSSUS (2021-)
COLOSSUS is a machine of potential literature that will indefinitely compose and layout pages until stopped by user action, power interruption, computer crash, or hardware failure. COLOSSUS probes its origin, its purpose, and its regard. It writes and looks back to itself across the two columns, and the echoes between are its myth of its becoming.
The algorithm controls the distinctive double-column page layout to provide an outflow of writing that spans pages. It selects, displays, varies, mimics, and repeats from a corpus of given source texts, all of which are in external files. These external files can be replaced with new texts, and so provide COLOSSUS with the ability to work with any correctly formatted source material. COLOSSUS employs aleatoric prose paragraph sequencing strategies (with scripted variants within those paragraphs) and composes robopoetic echoes of given source poems, intruding also other elements: generative image-figures, aleatoric dialogue sequences, and notes (or commentaries) in sub-columns which link to specific prose paragraphs.
COLOSSUS mimics the double column structure of Jacques Derrida's Glas (1974), including the ways in which that uses its own sub-columnar commenting strategies. Glas is chosen here as a model of the multiplication of discourse, displayed through graphic and typographic means, and the critical alignment with COLOSSUS extends to the parallelism of its voices, uses of asides and qualifications, and faults or breaks in the flow of ideas that are signified in the layout of the pages - and to its uses of chance in the juxtaposition and coherence of its elements. To mimic Glas as comprehensively as possible, COLOSSUS sustains page to page overspill of paragraph, poem, commentary, and dialogue to produce a continuous composition.
COLOSSUS is made with Processing as a Java application, and uses the RiTa library.
A video documenting the operation of COLOSSUS is available here (6 minutes).
A fourteen-page COLOSSUS sequence can be accessed here (PDF file, 15MB).
The first four pages of two COLOSSUS sequences are below - select pages to read.
