From Page to Screen - WRAP: Warwick Research Archive Portal ...

imitation, but even more importantly those which experiment with random techniques
are more radical about the shift from author to reader in that they let the machine take
over at least some of the author's functions, attempt to cut out direct authorial intention
and provide output text which leaves the 'sense-making' only to the reader.
Probably the most relevant distinction between the two formats is that writers of
hypertext fiction regard their work very much as literature, albeit of a new form and in a
new medium, - re-defining the boundaries ofthe term, yet never questioning the category
as such. Computer-generated texts go more to the heart of the "What is literature?"
question, and especially of the debate about "What are the possibilities for literature in a
digital age?"
A project such as the (utterly unutilitarian) UTILITY program 'published' in VOID 3 57 ,
which displays in speechbubbles text randomly selected of the computer's hard disk,
makes use of computer technology in the way it combines graphics with text and selects
fragments of text randomly to create very cleverly new, surprising and ever-changing
context for the text pieces and can be seen as a piece of digital kinetic poetry. Yet it is
I/OfD available free at: :http://bak.spc.org/iod/
Chapter S- pag 203