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Rex Murphy (surely one of the best ironic columnists around) has a column in The Globe and Mail on Ouellet’s stamp is cancelled which starts with the inscription on the Central Post Office building in New York which we all know the start of: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” What is interesting is that this is an adaptation of Herodotus and Rex reminds us that communications technologies often present themselves as heroic and honourable when they are launched. Surface mail today seems outdated and far from the heroic braving of the elements.
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Hermopoetics is the art of automatic (computer-generated) text generation, whether for interpretative or poetic purposes. Hermopoetics is the intersection of humanities informatics and creative digital practices.

There is a convergence of humanities informatics and robotic poetry. Humanities informatics sets out to develop computer assisted aides to interpretation – whether algorithms that prove things about texts or tools like concordances that provide new views on texts. Robotic poetics is the development of processes that generate poetry, or new fictional texts. As these two trajectories overlap we are seeing a middle line which I will call “hermopoetics”.

There are three principles to hermopoetics:

1. MachineText. Any text generated from another (or not) is a further text in a relationship to others described by the processes of generation. There is no a-priori difference between an interpretative text and an creative one.

1.1 We can call the new text a “chimera” as it is typically a monster created through the breaking down (analysis) of input and building up (synthesis) of a hybrid for output under the control of the intervenor.

1.2 There is no such thing as a completely new text, there are only interventions of various complexity that get treated as unities and which have a history of production, edition, and consumption. These unities can have relationships of explicit interpretation to another unity or they can have relationships of poetic general to other works, code, and input.

1.3 It is difficult to know where text stops and machine starts. There are exhibits, experiences, interpretations and reflections. One interrupts another. MachineText is the matter of hermopoetics.

2. Multimodal Machines. Data is without a priviledged poetic form. Data has a material instantiation, but is logically multimodal – capable of being rendered in different human sensory modes.

2.1 Just rendering data to an output device for human consumption is a translation, interpretation and generation. The computer is therefore a hermopoetic machine interpreting and creating in its most basic operations towards us.

2.2 Code is text and text is code. The control of the machine described in code is itself a hermopoetic text. This code is part of the discourse field from which all new text comes and can in turn be translated and interpreted as text.

2.3 There is no priviledged process once we question the difference between creative and interpretative practices. Every process needs to be tried and justified, if at all. There is no essential difference between processes of generation, translation, reflection and interpretation, except in discourse about those processes. For that matter there is no failed process, error, interruption, bug, or crash except unless interpreted as such.

3. Excess MachineText. We now have an excess of text, code, and processing which we have to deal with creatively and responsibly.

3.1 With the Internet we now have a critical mass of machine readable, and computer accessible text from which to generate new works. The availability of excess text, growing faster than we or machines can assimilate, erases the difference between hermeneutics and poetics, between reinterpreting and creating anew.

3.2 Likewise we now have an excess of code, not that code is different from text. And likewise the excess erases the difference between writing, marking up, and programming – practices that have traditionally followed different roles.

3.3 We also have an excess of processing that is likewise growing faster than we can imagine uses for. There is therefore also an erasure of difference between machine processing and human practice.

3.4 Text is therefore not text unless interpreted that way. Code is not code unless rendered as code. Processing is neither a human and computer practice. All we have is the choice to work through and between machines. These are ethical choices – choices about how to live, create and interpret the world.

All work is no longer either art or research except when represented that way through exhibition or publication. We are no longer artists or researchers, but research creators – hermap(hr)odites. Hermopoetics is the deliberate practice of machine-assisted interruption. We interrupt the processes to deliberate and interrupt deliberation to create. The availability of excess text and processing, and the multimodal character of that excess, leave us with a freedom of choice through which to think. The reflective and communal experimentation with those choices is hermopoetics.
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