Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2014

‘Wordpharmacy’ is a concrete poetical work, which playfully equates the structure of language with pharmaceutical products. It consists of ten medicine boxes, each representing one of the ten word-groups. Each box contains a leaflet that functions as an instructional poem, guiding the reader’s ingestion of the given word group. The leaflets are published here.

Who am I? Where do I come from? What is my purpose in Life and what happens when I die? For centuries people have tried to come up with answers regarding the fundamental questions of life. Then the Internet was invented and these questions have finally been answered – by users. The book The Fundamental Questions captures these questions in an inspiring record of epic proportions where every individual verse becomes a mantra of a mind-expanding collective thought. It reminds us, that one single answer is never the answer. Thousands of user profiles from the web were parsed, matched according to four questions and sorted in an alphabetical order.

This article discusses the Action Score Generator (ASG), an online writing machine that randomly arranges words into six-word-length performance scores. The generator belongs to a lineage of language-based artworks and practices that relinquish authorial control to the viewer. Exploring the methods of Event Scores developed by George Brecht the ASG is a website that distributes an infinite number of scores as both instructions and poetry. This is articulated in relation to Christopher Strachey’s ‘Love Letter Generator’ and other permutational and computational writing programmes that use randomness and code to produce writing in modular forms.