https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse

Could be used as the germ in the production of a fictional neobook...

https://www.am-cb.net/projets/acqua-alta-popup-book

How might one use quirky algorithms in interestingly destructive or even generative ways to combinatorially create new things?

How fitting that the amanuensis in a short story written with the help of artificial intelligence has done the opposite of what the author intended!

Just as using a text for writing generative annotations (having a conversation with a text) is a useful exercise for writers and thinkers, creative writers can stand to have similar textual creativity prompts.

Compare Wordcraft affordances with tools like Nabokov's card index (zettelkasten) method, Twyla Tharp's boxes, MadLibs, cadavre exquis, et al.

The key is to have some sort of creativity catalyst so that one isn't working in a vacuum or facing the dreaded blank page.

Author's note by Robin Sloan<br /> November 2022

"I see what you did there" as a genre of writing is interesting for its cleverness, but many authors will prefer readers to love their work instead of admiring their cleverness in one part.

http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/...

A random generator using Deepak Chopra tweets.

Reminiscent of https://hypothes.is/a/bzlr9l06Ee23w7voPzbY5g

https://www.granarybooks.com/pages/books/GB_176/aram-saroyan/the-letter-book?soldItem=true

Aram Saroyan decomposed a 1968 letter to his father into 195 recto pages containing fragments of the original.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>taurusnoises</span> in (2) Oblique Strategies, a custom zettelkasten for creativity : antinet (<time class='dt-published'>12/14/2022 13:07:14</time>)</cite></small>

https://meso.tzyl.nl/2022/12/04/a-two-month-experiment/

https://www.methexis.ai/join-the-collaboration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

So much to unpack here.

Similar to experiments I've seen by Henry James Korn (esp. The Pontoon Manifesto), John Irwin, etc.

Similarities to means of forcing Llullan combinatorial creativity, but in alternate form.

Brian Eno's experiments in generative music mirror some of the ideas of generative and experimental fiction which had been in the zeitgeist and developing for a while.

Certainly the fictional ideas were influential to the zeitgeist here, but the technology for doing these sorts of things in the musical realm lagged the ability to do them in the word realm.

We're just starting to see some of these sorts of experimental things in the film space and with artificial intelligence they're becoming much easier to do in all of these media spaces.

In some of the film spaces, they exist, but may tend to be short in nature, in part given the technology and processing power required.

see also: Deepfake TikTok of Keanu Reeves which I've recently run across (algorithmically) on Instagram: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/unreal-keanu-reeves-ai-deepfake/

Had anyone been working on generative art? Marcel Duchamp, et al? Some children's toys can mechanically create generative art which can be subtly modified by the children using axes of color, form, etc. Etch-a-sketch, kaleidoscopes, doodling robots (eg: https://www.amazon.com/4M-Doodling-Robot-Packaging-Vary/dp/B002EWWW9O).

Given your talents, if you've not explored some of the experimental fiction side of things (like Mark Bernstein's hypertext fiction http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Fiction.html, Robin Sloan's fish http://www.robinsloan.com/fish/ or Writing with the Machine https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/, or a variety of others https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22experimental+fiction%22), perhaps it may be fun and allow you to use some of your technology based-background at the same time?

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/

Related work leading up to this video: https://vimeo.com/232545219

Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/

I've been thinking about this sort of thing off and on myself.

I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I'd love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton's idea of reading based on social distance.

I'm struck by the seemingly related idea of @peterhagen's LindyLearn platform and annotations: https://annotations.lindylearn.io/new/ which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring '83 provide some of this?

I'm also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver's /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the "board" of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring '83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers' frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain "sense of quiet" into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.

The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one's high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!

Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring '83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don't already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties?

It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn't worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?

It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its "Cambrian explosion"?

I've been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random "Markov monkey" change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?

This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?

For more on these related ideas, see: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22spring+%2783%22

http://www.robinsloan.com/fish/

I'd seen this before, but never read it as it was iOS only...

u/sscheper in writing your book, have you thought about the following alternative publishing idea which I'm transcribing from a random though I put on a card this morning?

I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a traditional linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index at the end so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it?

It could be done roughly like Edward Powys Mathers' Cain's Jawbone or Henry Korn's Pontoon Manifesto? Perhaps numbered consecutively to make it easier to bring back into that format, but also done with your zk numbering so that people could order it and use it that way too? This way you get the book as well as a meta artifact of what the book is about as an example of how to do such a thing for yourself. Maybe even make a contest for a better ordering for the book than the one you published it in ?

Link to: - https://hyp.is/6IBzkPfeEeyo9Suq-ZmCKg/www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/

http://boffosockobooks.com/books/authors/henry-james-korn/the-pontoon-manifesto/

link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/peuV1MBBEeyz03uCkPkBqA

Marcel Duchamp announced his project the Green Box in 1934 as an edition of 320 copies of a box of 94 items. Most of the items were supposed "facsimiles" as described by Duchamp, of notes he wrote from 1911 to 1915.

How is or isn't this like a zettelkasten or card index, admittedly a small collection?

Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura. Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments. Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't.

Link to the idea behind Cain’s Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers which had a different conceit, but a similar publishing form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Perec

Georges Perec (born George Peretz) (French: [peʁɛk, pɛʁɛk];[1] 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust, and many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.

Mary Douglas has a fascinating looking text on ring composition, a literary style which puts the meaning of the text in the middle and frames it with the beginning and end which are in parallel.

Texts like the Bible, Homer, and even Tristram Shandy might be looked at from a different perspective with this lens.

Suggested to me by Ann Bergin within the context of The Extended Mind

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/653534/cains-jawbone-book-puzzle

Link this to Henry James Korn's experimental novel/cards in the early 1970s and late 1990s hypertext fiction.

This idea of playing hopscotch#%22Table_of_Instructions%22_and_structure) through a text reminds me of some mathematics texts I've come across where the author draws out a diagram of potential readings and which portions are prerequisites so that professors using the book might pick and choose chapters to skip in their presentations.

Also reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from childhood too.

cross reference: [[John Barth]], [[Henry James Korn]] and [[experimental fiction]], and [[hypertext]]

I'm not 100% sure I understand where this may go, but it sounds like a fun thing with which to experiment.