Ars combinatoria, Ramón Llull, Leibniz: reminder / rememorigo

This is a reminder that my documentation of this subject matter is to be found in a variety of places in addition to this blog. Esperanto versions of this text follow the English-language text.

Jen rememorigilo pri mia dokumentado de ĉi tiu temaro diversloke interrete. Vi trovos la Esperantajn teksterojn post la anglalingvaj.

My blog Studies in a Dying Culture exists in two incarnations. I customarily refer only to individual posts or the first in a series in the older version, from the newer version or my various bibliographies and web guides, individual web pages, and newer blog posts. I have not posted relevant entries for some time in the current version. The relevant categories, in any case, are:

ars combinatoria
artificial languages
Jorge Luis Borges
Leibniz

You will also notice a number of entries on Marcelo Dascal. There are also stray references to Esperanto on that blog.

Mia anglalingva blogo Studies in a Dying Culture ekzistas en malnova, statika versio kaj aktuala dinamika formato. Ĝenerale oni trovos referencojn al individuaj afiŝoj aŭ al komenca afiŝo en serio en la malnova blogo. En la aktuala referencu la kategoriojn listitajn supre. Notu ankaŭ la afiŝojn pri filozofo Marcelo Dascal kaj kelkajn pri Esperanto.

My main bibliographies, web guides, and other main pages of relevance are / Jen miaj precipaj gvidiloj, bibliografiaj, kaj alispecaj retpaĝoj:

• Philosophical and Universal Languages, 1600-1800, and Related Themes: Selected Bibliography
• Leibniz & Ideology: Selected Bibliography
• Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Study Materials on the Web
• Hegel on Ars Combinatoria & Characteristica Universalis
• Hermann Hesse, Esperanto, Klera Utopio, Universala Lingvo / Intellectual Utopia, Universal Language (bibliography) 

Also of relevance are these / Jen rilataj retpaĝoj:

• Esperanto & Interlinguistics Study Guide / Retgvidilo pri Esperanto & Interlingvistiko
• Philosophical Style: Selected Bibliography
• Definition of ’Pataphysics by Alfred Jarry
• Exotica, Curiosa, Crankery, Hoaxes, Cultural & Intellectual Arcana: Selected Web Guide & Bibliography
• Annotated Bibliography on Language and Thought

Ars combinatoria, speculative computing, & creativity

Lately, and for some time, I've been writing about some loosely related topics drawing in the history of interlinguistics, ars combinatoria, steampunk, 'pataphysics, Oulipo, alternative history . . . In the past I've covered the mathematical, logical, scientific strain of thought that comes out of this, from Leibniz and his contemporaries on. I've also covered the literary/artistic side, but this time I want to focus on very interesting work combining the formal sciences, particularly computing theory, and the creative literary and other arts. Speculative computing is one of the buzzwords to attend to. The most interesting links in this area are referenced below.

Alfred Jarry's 'Pataphysics and its descendant Oulipo form a significant part of the story of creative applications of combinatorics in literature. Otherwise, the most oft repeated, cited, and influential thinkers and writers are Ramón Llull, Hermann Hesse, and Jorge Luis Borges.

REFERENCES:

Ars Combinatoria: Or, Hegel’s Logic as Chronotope for the Digital Age by Christopher Vitale, 22 Nov 2009

Ars Combinatoria: Mystical Systems, Procedural Art, and the Computer by Janet Zweig

Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment (1999) by William Curtis Seaman
An Eternal Engine by Wayne Clements [on Llull, Swift, Borges, & computer-generated writing]

“Ludic Algorithms” [PDF] by Bethany Nowviskie

July 2010 draft [DOCX format]
Comments by Bill Turkel
Imaginary Solution #1: Dr. Kremlin’s Disc
Playing With Technology in History, April 29-30, 2010, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada. Abstracts with links to papers

Playing History

Speculative Computing: Instruments For Interpretive Scholarship by Bethany Paige Nowviskie
PhD dissertation, Department of English, University of Virginia, May 2004
(Progenitors: Ramon Llull, Hermann Hesse, Peter Suber’s Nomic; nods to Swift & Leibniz)

"Text" and "Network", Reconsidered (2007)
by Florian Cramer

Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (2005)
by Florian Cramer

'Pataphysics & ars combinatoria

The combination of these two concepts just occurred to me. Why now, or why not earlier? Why now? Here's my guess. First, there was my recent reading of Borges' "The Aleph". Then there was reading about Novalis' Romantic Encyclopedia. All of this recapitulates in some way the earlier history from Raymond Lull to Leibniz, but in each epoch the ars combinatoria play a different role. Now, divorced from "serious" purposes, it becomes a device of self-conscious art for making a point without taking the enterprise literally, i.e. for what it purports to be. The ars combinatoria has historically become playful with the delineation between reality and the artifice of imagination. It finally popped into my head to combine one aspect of avant-garde literature with another.

'Pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, a playful notion concocted by Alfred Jarry. Once science itself has been solidified and differentiated from myth, poetry, and the symbolic use of language, we not only have the possibility of creating symbolist poetry in a secularized environment, and avant-garde play with language and myth (to culminate in Joyce), but play with science and other systems of thought, eventually surrealism and surrationalism (Gaston Bachelard) and Borges, and Oulipo, and now virtuality of all sorts, but first Jarry. Once it occurred to me that Jarry might be engaged in combinatorial play, I connected 'pataphysics to ars combinatoria. Has anyone else made that connection? (Or Jarry himself? I don't recall Jarry's own work.) Well, Oulipo, which is founded on combinatoric play, is a descendent of 'pataphysics, so a connection is obviously there.

Here's what I've found, mostly classifiable under the rubric of avant-garde arts.

Speculative Computing: Instruments for Interpretive Scholarship (2004) by Bethany Paige Nowviskie

Oulipo packet (several works by noted authors: Calvino, Queneau, Motte, Mathews, et al)

Deformography: the poetics of cybridised architecture (2005) by Neil Spiller

The Clinamanic Medusa, with a hole for its face causes the first order aesthetics of form finding to coagulate into stone and seduces the viewer into a world of vicissitudes and attitudes of chance, of joy, of sweet and sweaty embrace of an ars combinatoria, so dear to Jarry, Roussel and Ramon Lull. Here ‘Pataphysics joins with the mathematic of Oulipo to construct an all too few example of Ouarpo - a miniature architecture of potential.

Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment (1999) by William Curtis Seaman

The Aesthetics of Paradoxism (2nd ed., 2002) by Titu Popescu, translated from Romanian by P. Georgelin, F. Smarandache, and L. Popescu

[+Kanexfaucher + Matinastamatakis + Johnmoorewilliams+] [Lysicology /. See also @ Scribd.com.

kinema ikon

Miscellanies (2008) by Raymond Belluga

At some point I think these exercises become pointless and excessively self-indulgent, but this is what happens when society, not just art, becomes more abstract. Now, in the Internet age, we become fully conscious or completely disoriented.