Shared authorship in digital literature: notes on "Fantasia breve, a palavra-espuma"

Abstract

In digital literature, projects that transgress more conventional notions of materiality and authorship arising from printed literature are increasingly more common, especially those that deny the typical association of one book – one theme – one author. Among other important works of lusophone digital literature, we herein analyze Fantasia Breve, a Palavra-Espuma, an automatic poetry generator designed by Rui Torres, programmed by Nuno Ferreira, based on poems by Ana Hatherly. About this project, we are interested in investigating the complex co-authorial dynamic between the aforementioned creators and the reader, who is also responsible for what is read, given that the poems of Fantasia Breve disappear very quickly from the screen, imposing on the reader the need to decide which portions of the text to read and which to ignore. We thereby observe how the creator, the programmer, the poet and the reader contribute differently and at diverse times of production/execution/reception to the construction of meanings in the poems automatically and randomly generated by the software. We also highlight the concepts of hyper-reading, combinatorics, non-creative writing and remixing as analytical operators, and we try to situate Fantasia Breve, a Palavra-Espuma in the Lusitanian literary series in relation to other combinatorial-procedural poetic experiments, especially the Iberian Mannerist and Baroque poetry, and Portuguese experimental poetry from the 20th century.