Notes
Submitted by publisher.
Publisher Note
Wendit Tnce Inf is a handmade, letterpress-printed book compiling asemic prose poems that were generated pixel by pixel by a suite of generative adversarial networks (GANs) trained by the author, poet Allison Parrish.
Working at the level of words or characters, GANs can produce poetry that is indistinguishable from examples written by humans. But this doesn’t interest Parrish, who has instead trained her models at the pixel level. In this setting, the technology is not capable of reproducing English text, and in attempting to do so it generates words composed of peculiar letterforms that are eerily beautiful. The romanization Wendit Tnce Inf is the result of subjecting an image of the book’s title page to a model for optical character recognition.
In an author’s note included in the book, Parrish outlines her process (and aims):
"A GAN is a kind of machine-learning model that learns to produce images that resemble, but are not identical to, the images in a training dataset.
"To create a new poem, my program first samples word images from the latent spaces of several GANs that I trained (from scratch) on distinct datasets of bitmap images of English words: lowercase words, words with trailing punctuation, words with an initial capital letter, and words in a second typeface. Essentially, the sampling generates new words pixel by pixel. My program then places these words on the page, one after another, line by line, mimicking the process of typesetting English prose.
"The goal is to produce visual forms that call attention to the conventional appearances and operations of text: forms that afford 'reading,' while remaining unreadable."
Aleator Press has constructed this edition by hand, with an abundance of care. It’s letterpress-printed (from photopolymer plates) in hand-sewn softcover wrappers with French flaps, enclosing a text block with natural deckle edges.
There are 56 copies of Wendit Tnce Inf, corresponding to the number of possible outcomes of a simultaneous roll of three indistinguishable dice. Each copy is hand-stamped with one of these unique dice rolls, and as such, the edition is enumerated using a non-positional senary notation.
Source
Publisher | |
---|---|
Release Place | Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America |
Edition | 1st original edition |
Release Date | May 2022 |
Credits |
Author:
Designer:
Printer:
Binder:
Special Assistance:
Artist:
|
Printrun | 56 |
Inscription | Stamps |
Original Price | 95.00 USD |
Work | |
---|---|
Subform | Chapbook |
Style/Movement | Computer Poetry |
Genre/Content Form | Computer Poetry, Asemic Writing |
Methods | Artificial Intelligence, Computer-Generated, Gans, Letterpress, Machine Learning |
Language | English |
Work Creation Date | 2022 |
Object | Book |
---|---|
Format | Softcover |
Binding | Saddle Stitched (hand-sewn) |
Dimensions | 4.5 × 7.0 × 0.5 inch |
Individual Sections | 1 |
Interior | |
---|---|
Pages | 28 |
Content | Title page, dedication, and asemic prose poems generated by a suite of machine-learning models and letterpress-printed from polymer plates. Author's note and colophon set in English and letterpress-printed from polymer plates. The colophon of each copy is hand-stamped with a unique roll of three dice. |
Color | 1, black |
Material | Hahnemühle Ingres, 100 gsm |
Technique | Letterpress |
Interior Notes | Printed on the Vandercook No. 3 Proof Press at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA. |
Exterior | |
---|---|
Pages | 4 |
Content | Title on front cover, description on front French flap, brief author and publisher bios on back French flap, and blank back cover. All letterpress-printed from polymer plates. |
Color | 1, black |
Material | Canson Mi-Teintes, 160 gsm (gray) |
Technique | Letterpress, Vandercook No. 3 Proof Press |
Exterior Notes | Printed on the Vandercook No. 3 Proof Press at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA. The covers feature printed French flaps. |
Web references
Publisher Release Page