Wendit Tnce Inf

Letterpress prose poems, generated pixel by pixel.

2022
4.5 x 7 inches
28 pages
Edition of 56

Printing: Letterpress
Binding: Hand-sewn

PDF to appear

Wendit Tnce Inf is a handmade, letterpress-printed book compiling asemic prose poems that were generated pixel by pixel by a suite of generative adversarial networks (GANs) trained by the author, poet Allison Parrish.

Working at the level of words or characters, GANs can produce poetry that is indistinguishable from examples written by humans. But this doesn’t interest Parrish, who has instead trained her models at the pixel level. In this setting, the technology is not capable of reproducing English text, and in attempting to do so it generates words composed of peculiar letterforms that are eerily beautiful. The romanization Wendit Tnce Inf is the result of subjecting an image of the book’s title page to a model for optical character recognition.

In an author’s note included in the book, Parrish outlines her process (and aims):

A GAN is a kind of machine-learning model that learns to produce images that resemble, but are not identical to, the images in a training dataset.

To create a new poem, my program first samples word images from the latent spaces of several GANs that I trained (from scratch) on distinct datasets of bitmap images of English words: lowercase words, words with trailing punctuation, words with an initial capital letter, and words in a second typeface. Essentially, the sampling generates new words pixel by pixel. My program then places these words on the page, one after another, line by line, mimicking the process of typesetting English prose.

The goal is to produce visual forms that call attention to the conventional appearances and operations of text: forms that afford “reading,” while remaining unreadable.

Aleator Press has constructed this edition by hand, with an abundance of care. It’s letterpress-printed (from polymer plates) on fine paper with natural deckle edges, and bound in hand-sewn softcover wrappers with printed French flaps.

There are 56 copies of Wendit Tnce Inf, corresponding to the number of possible outcomes of a simultaneous roll of three indistinguishable dice. Each copy is hand-stamped with one of these unique dice rolls, and as such, the edition is enumerated using a non-positional senary notation.

Allison Parrish is a poet and programmer and an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University. Named “Best Maker of Poetry Bots” by the Village Voice in 2016, her zine of computer-generated poems Compasses received an honorary mention in the 2021 Prix Ars Electronica. Parrish is the co-creator of the board game Rewordable (Clarkson Potter, 2017) and author of several books, including @Everyword: The Book (Instar, 2015) and Articulations (Counterpath, 2018). Her poetry has recently appeared in BOMB Magazine and Strange Horizons. Hailing from West Bountiful, Utah, she lives in Brooklyn.