Ambient Fiction: Facebook and the End of Literature

"With the rise of the web, writing has met its photography". - Kenneth Goldsmith

Generated 12/01/12

[1] Unbound

Software has produced text and poetry since the early days of the digital computer, from the Manchester Love Letters to Bryon Gysin's I Am That I Am, computerised by Ian Somerville and performed for the BBC in 1960 as part of The Permutated Poems of Bryon Gysin. Years later, Gysin lamented that he was beaten to the BBC's lowest ever audience approval rating only by WH Auden.

Now, Narrative Science produce software to write news stories. At present these are simple reports based upon data and statistics - stock market updates or sports events. It's not difficult to imagine the software taking the raw data of our social media and producing storylines and summaries from that. The inputs are more than simply the content's messages. The time, speed of reply and interaction networks provide clues to a message's importance and intensity. The computer might be able to draw out stories we weren't aware of.

BS Johnson spent his life wrestling with the problem of real life versus fiction: "I would like to make an audience... think about WHY they demand a story from films but not from life"

Johnson's novel The Unfortunates consists of 27 unbound chapters. The first and last are indicated, but the others can be read in any order. The novel was Johnson's attempt at coming to terms with the loss of his friend Tony Tillinghast. [2] Chill Out

The KLF's 1990 album Chill Out is the sound of an imaginary train journey across America. It's a 44-minute live take recorded in the KLF's Trancentral Studio. The noises of trains, radio stations, lonesome pedal steel guitar, sermons, vocals and gentle synthesisers combine to produce stunning effects.

The mix was produced live from fragments and recordings collected by Jimmy Cauty and Alex Paterson of The Orb. The equipment was primitive and any mistake meant starting the mix from the beginning. The recording took two days. Cauty describes using "the bare necessities of musical survival".

Good music enhances and alters one's environment. When travelling on overnight trains, curled up in a bunk, surrounded by strangers, I sometimes put Chill Out on my headphones. It makes me feel a little lonelier than before, but it is a more connected loneliness.

The liner notes contain a warning: "Don't bother trying to listen to this LP if you have neither first switched off the lights and then laid your body to rest on the floor. Hopefully then the trip will be complete".

Who wouldn't want to write a novel that demands to be read in the dark with eyes closed? All Art Aspires to the Condition of Music.

[3] Facebook as a Novel

Jonathan Lethem described Facebook as "a kind of vast fiction, a tapestry-novel that we're all writing together". Social media is a Mass Observation project on a colossal scale. The Internet captures the mundane triumphs and tragedies of everyday life, the beauty in fleeting moments. Everyone can participate in this social media meta-novel. Millions of people take on the role of writers. They are caught up in narratives, characters in the ultimate metafiction.

Applications are emerging that will draw out narrative from the ever- rolling streams of social media, two early examples being Storify and Facebook's Timelines. By linking transient posts and giving them context, they offer the possibility for 'works' of social media. It won't be long before intelligent software agents begin to assemble these stories as well as any human can. Andy Warhol wrote: "A good reason to be famous, though, is so you can read all the big magazines and know everybody in all the stories. Page after page, it's just all people you've met. I love that kind of reading experience and that's the best reason to be famous".

That feeling Warhol had, page after page of stories about people you've met, is becoming available to everyone. Like Coca-Cola, fame is being democratised.

[4] The World is a Book

The writer Jacques Derrida compared the Internet to "the ubiquitous Book finally reconstituted, the book of God, the great book of nature, finally achieved..."

The metaphor of the world as a written text is closely linked with Christianity. In Genesis, the word of God was the very origin of the universe. Francis Bacon went further, claiming that God had written two books, the scriptures and the world. For Bacon, the world was intended as a key to the scriptures.

Our world is an unfurling text, with our lives generating new pages and paragraphs. Our every action leaves a mark in a database. I imagine an impossible book containing all the electronic records of my life.

I think of Revelations, where "If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire". To truly die would require my name to be completely unwritten. I imagine that digital book of my life, and how much work would be needed to erase every trace of it. How difficult it would be for that erasure itself to go unrecorded.

The poet Stéphene Mallarmé: "The world exists to end up in a book".

[5] Invisible Literature

JG Ballard speaks:

"I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures - scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers - part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination. I never read my own fiction." (1992)

"Chemistry & Industry ... was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It's the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it went straight into the wastepaper basket, but en route I was filtering it like some sort of sea creature sailing with jaws open through a great sea of delicious plankton. I was filtering all this extraordinary material." (1990)

"The Black Box consists of cockpit voice-recorder transcripts (not all involving fatal crashes), and is a remarkable tribute to the courage and stoicism of professional flight crews. My copy of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages I stole from the Beverly Hilton Hotel three years ago; it has been a fund of extraordinary material, as surrealist in its way as Dali's autobiography." (1992)

[6] Bad Signal

In a 2005 post to his Bad Signal mailing list, Warren Ellis wrote: "Imagine there was such a thing as Ambient Fiction. There are very probably lots of examples around. Works you can dip into and out of, like treatises and long non-fiction works, and still draw complete little micro-experiences from, as you do in ambient music. A flow, or combination of flows, of word and picture that constitutes an ideational visual soundtrack, if you like".

Long after reading this post I've continued to think about ambient fiction. Does it exist already? Or maybe it is a type of reading: "a string of moments and conversations and sequences that CAN add to a whole, but don't necessarily HAVE to".

In 2011, Warren Ellis published a small book called Spirit Tracks on his website. Ellis said that the book was about everything he was interested during a particular period of his life. It is rich with ideas like Corpse Flightpaths, Stooky Bill and Haunted Beef. Each section is a tiny idea, satisfying in itself. "You want to be able to ignore it, or drift away from it, but also to be able to focus on it, to study and enjoy it." [7] Manifesto

According to Donna Tartt, "The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, travelling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone"

Ambient literature makes us feel less alone.

John Gardner: "To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on... The true artist is never so lost in his imaginary world that he forgets the real world, where teenagers have a chemical propensity toward anguish, people between their thirties and forties have a tendency to get divorced, and people in their seventies have a tendency toward loneliness, poverty, self-pity and sometimes anger. The true artist chooses never to be a bad physician"

Literature is too important to be left exclusively to human writers. If computers can do a better job, we should let them.

[8] Personal Mood Regulation

The term 'ambient literature' was coined in Paul Roquet's paper, Ambient Literature and the Aesthetics of Calm: Mood Regulation in Contemporary Japanese Fiction, published in 2008 in the Journal of Japanese Studies.

Roquet describes a period in the 1990s where 'healing goods' became popular in Japan. He describes this as part of a movement "toward using media as tools of personal mood regulation" in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Sarin attacks on the Tokyo Underground. Japanese literature responded to a "mood-regulating culture" with what Roquet called ambient literature which, like ambient music, was "an artistic response to the demand for transposable calm". The paper states two major aims for the genre: "to generate calming moods and to provide a space to think relatively free from outside affective manipulation". Roquet suggests this genre is informed by certain Western writers, giving Richard Brautigan as an example. Ambient Literature "avoids spectacle and drama, producing a sensation of drift rather than event. The time of ambient literature follows the tempo and repetition of banal modern life".

Later in the paper, Roquet discusses how the physical object of the book is important in ambient literature. "The small format of most Japanese novels - especially paperbacks - makes them ideal companions... during the long train commutes ... allowing the incubatory attitude within the text to seep out into the space surrounding the book."

[9] The Condition of Muzak

Ambient music, as a genre, was created and named by Brian Eno. While antecedents exist, it was Eno's work that identified them as belonging to the same group. The liner notes of Ambient 1: Music for Airports proclaim that ambient music "must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting".

While ambient music could be "actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored, depending on the choice of the listener", Eno was careful to distinguish it from Muzak, music explicitly intended as background. Such work was explicitly commercial, designed to subliminally improve the efficiency of factory workers or make customers more receptive.

Some might argue that all music tends towards background. Portable music players are designed so the user can do other things while listening. Workers listen to music on headphones at work. The idea of listening to music as an activity in itself is disappearing. We need songs written for this new world, music that does not suffer from being ignored.

And we need novels written for a world where people read before bed. Novels for tired commuters, something to rest their minds. Something that doesn't make demands but satisfies them. [10] Robo Poetics

Kenneth Goldsmith's textbook Uncreative Writing places experimental digital texts within the context of earlier avant-garde work. It also points to developments that take writing beyond something merely human.

Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment created a poem written in a bacterium's DNA, intended to "outlive the eventual destruction of the Earth itself". The bacterium used is incredibly resistant, able to survive large doses of radiation, meaning the poem should survive even a nuclear holocaust.

Bök is examining other types of non-human poetry. Computer programs are constantly communicating with each other over the Internet, inspiring Bök to develop robo-poetics, literature written by software to be read by other pieces of software. Bök states that "the involvement of an author in the production of literature has henceforth become discretionary" and suggests that this is a solution for the decline in human audiences for poetry.

Text is already being consumed and created by software. Programs read human writing and use it as the basis for ever-more realistic spam. The output is tested against spam filters, evolving better, more life- like spam. Writer Charlie Stross has suggested that this is a bizarre version of the Turing Test, heading towards the Spamularity, "a meta- sphere of discourse dominated by parasitic viral payloads pretending to be meat".

James Burt is a computer programmer. He is currently studying for a PhD which centres on Jacques Derrida's theories on communication and Internet. He can be found on twitter as @orbific.