Conceptual Computing and Digital Writing

Abstract

In 1952 computer scientist Christopher Strachey wrote a parodical love letter generator. This system, the prototype of all computational conceptual writing – the almost completely secret prototype – was up and running not only before conceptual writing was formulated but even before conceptual art had arrived. The program predates the earliest work that is consistently identified as part of the (yet unnamed) conceptual art movement, Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing. It was not created by someone who identified or was identified as a writer, or as an artist, and it seems to have been seen as more the server-room equivalent of a parlor game than as a part of the tradition of literary arts. Only recently have programmers and scholars provided versions of the generator that appear in an installation and Web contexts and discussed in depth the literary aspects of the system. All of this makes Strachey’s program not only the first in its category but also quite typical of the scattered, marginal, often overlooked projects that have explored the computer’s ability to write conceptually over the last sixty years.