2x6

by Nick Montfort (Translator), Serge Bouchardon (Translator), Andrew Campana (Translator)

Poetry. Translation Studies. 2x6 consists of short "stanzories" stanzas that are also stories, each one relating an encounter between two people. Appearing in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Polish, the stanzories are generated by a similar underlying process, even as they do not correspond to one another the way a translation typically does to a source text. These sixfold verses are generated by six short computer programs, the code of which is also presented in full. These simple programs can endlessly churn out combinatorial lines that challenge to reader to determine to whom "she" and "he," and "him" and "her," refer, as well as which is the more powerful one, which the underdog. As John Cayley writes, "Gender is the chief generative obstacle here making more than two times six distributed across the natural grammars of these micro- dramas, with their psychosocial, vocational, and hierarchical narrative vectors."

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2016

About the author

Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at MIT. He is the author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities; the coauthor of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10; and the coeditor of The New Media Reader (all published by the MIT Press).