[ recap ]

Last week we looked at Pixar's stories and Walt Disney's creative strategy.

[ thoughts ]

A book published in France this week leaves its hundredth poem for the reader to write.

Gallimard published Cent (mille milliards de) poèmes: Une recréation raisonnée, by Oulipo, the French experimental literature group.

The project recreates an experiment by Raymond Queneau. In 1961, he published Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), a book containing ten sonnets whose lines were printed on separate strips of paper.

Each sonnet had fourteen lines, and Queneau arranged their grammar and rhyme so that any line could be exchanged for the corresponding line in another sonnet.

A reader could choose the first line from one poem, the second from another, and continue until all fourteen had been assembled.

Allowing 45 seconds to read a poem, another 15 to change the strips, eight hours a day and 200 days a year, it would take more than a billion years to read 100 trillion combinations.

Queneau founded Oulipo in 1960 with mathematician François Le Lionnais. Short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), the group began investigating how self-imposed writing rules, known as Oulipo constraints, could produce new literary forms.

One of its earliest methods was S+7, introduced by Jean Lescure in 1961. Take an existing passage and replace every noun with the seventh noun that follows it in a dictionary. The sentence structure remains largely recognisable, but its objects change according to the dictionary rather than the writer's immediate preferences.

[ creativity ]

A year before Oulipo was founded, the artist Brion Gysin was cutting paper over a tabletop protected by sheets of newspaper. His blade passed through the newspapers beneath, leaving fragments of text that he began moving around, amused by the unexpected combinations.

Gysin developed the idea into what became known as the cut-up method: take an existing passage, divide it into sections and rearrange the pieces to create another text.

He introduced the technique to the American writer William S. Burroughs, who went on to use cut-ups in his experimental fiction, including The Soft Machine and Nova Express.

David Bowie began experimenting with cut-ups in the 1970s, rearranging pieces of newspapers, diaries and his own writing to find unfamiliar combinations of words.

In the mid-1990s, working with programmer Ty Roberts, Bowie developed the Verbasizer, software that could rearrange sentences.

In Michael Apted's 1997 documentary Inspirations, Bowie demonstrates the program. He types sentences into rows and asks the software to randomise them, selecting words from different rows and columns.

The computer produces combinations, which Bowie describes as a kaleidoscope of meanings.

Two decades before the Verbasizer, Bowie had been experimenting with another kind of creative device alongside Brian Eno.

In 1975, Eno and Peter Schmidt published Oblique Strategies, a collection of cards with short instructions when making something.

Eno explained their origins in a 1978 interview with Glenn O'Brien.

During recording sessions, he noticed how deadlines and studio pressure encouraged familiar solutions, even when they weren't helping. He began placing handwritten reminders around the studio.

While recording Bowie's 1977 album "Heroes", Eno and Bowie used the creative method on Sense of Doubt.

Eno was trying to create a continuous musical texture while Bowie was deliberately introducing contrasts.

[ making ]

This is the fifty-second edition of Artificial Milieu, marking one year since I started publishing.

For two years, I shared clips about creativity and technology through @contemporary.blueprint. I saved the videos and transcripts, building an archive of more than 500 interviews, observations and conversations with people making things.

That project continues through Artificial Milieu.

I wanted to make something useful, so I began developing Ways of Making, a collection of creative approaches drawn from the experiences and working methods of people I shared.

The "complete" Ways of Making collection is available now, free for Artificial Milieu subscribers, as a thank-you for reading and supporting the publication over the past year.

[ WAYS OF MAKING ]

If you get a chance to it, I'd really appreciate an honest review. What did you find useful? What could be better?

You can reply directly to this email with your thoughts, however brief. Your feedback would help enormously as I continue developing the project.

[ sign off ]

That brings the first year to a close.

For those who've joined along the way, I'm Steve Sharp. I write Artificial Milieu and develop projects exploring how people see, think and make things, particularly as technology changes the tools and possibilities available to us.

Over the past year, I've kept returning to how technology changes the way we make things. As tools make it easier to produce images, writing and other creative work, I've become increasingly interested in the creative process and what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we see and what we choose to make.

Morning Brew is sponsoring this week, and I'd appreciate if you check them out via the link below (I get paid per click). I'm already a subscriber so I genuinely recommend them.

Thanks for reading and supporting Artificial Milieu over the past year.

Stay the one doing the seeing.