Nick Montfort, Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul: The Deletionist

Title:

The Deletionist

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Exhibiting Artist(s):

Nick Montfort -

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Amaranth Borsuk -

University of Washington Bothell
Jesper Juul -

Royal Danish Academy

Symposium:

ISEA2015: 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art

Venue(s):

Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Vancouver, Canada

Creation Year:

2013

Medium:

Net poetry

Artist Statement:

The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text, discovering a network of poems called “the Worl” within the World Wide Web. The Deletionist, based on the work of book artists and erasure poets, takes the form of a JavaScript bookmarklet. It can automatically create erasures from any Web pages the reader visits. Similar methods have been used to erase all text and to turn webpages into Katamari Damacy environments or Space Invaders levels, to make a game of destroying language. Between such extremes and the everyday Web, The Deletionist finds a space of texts that amplify, subvert, and uncover new sounds and meanings in their sources. Neither an artificial intelligence nor a poetry generating system in any standard sense, The Deletionist has a repertoire for uncovering patterns and revealing poetics at play within our most extensive textual network.