Front Cover, image source: Publisher

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: Allison Parrish
Printer: James Ryan
Binder: James Ryan,
Special Assistance: Conor McGrann
Artist: Allison Parrish
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
Format Softcover
Binding Saddle Stitched (hand-sewn)
Dimensions 4.5 × 7.0 × 0.5 inch
Individual Sections 1
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.
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.

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