Paolo Ferrara, Gabriele Foglia (TEAnO)
 

TEAnO (Telematica, Elettronica, Analisi nell'Opificio) was born in Florence, in 1991, at the age of 8, being the direct consequence of years of attempts by a group of computer science professionals to use the digital computers technology to find a sustainable match among creation, generation (or re-creation) and recreation, the three basic keywords underlying the concept of “Littérature potentielle” deployed by Oulipo in France and Oplepo in Italy (see “La Littérature potentielle (Créations Re-créations Récréations) published in France by Gallimard in 1973).

During the last decade, TEAnO has been involving in the generation of “artistic goods” in aesthetic domains such as literature, music, theatre and painting. In all those artefacts in the computer plays a twofold role: it is often a tool to generate the good (e.g. an editor to compose palindrome sonnets of to generate antonymic music) and, sometimes it is the medium that makes the fruition of the good possible (e.g. the generator of passages of definition literature). In that sense such artefacts can actually be considered as “manufactured” goods.

A great part of such creation and re-creation work has been based upon a rather small number of generation constraints borrowed from Oulipo, deeply stressed by the use of the digital computer massive combinatory power: S+n, edge extraction, phonetic manipulation, re-writing of well known masterpieces, random generation of plots, etc. Regardless this apparently simple underlying generation mechanisms, the systematic use of computer based tools, as weel the analysis of the produced results, has been the way to highlight two findings which can significantly affect the practice of computer based generation of aesthetic goods:
? the deep structure of an aesthetic work persists even through the more “desctructive” manipulations, (such as the antonymic transformation of the melody and lyrics of a music work) and become evident as a sort of profound, earliest and distinctive constraint;

? the intensive flux of computer generated “raw” material seems to confirm and to bring to our attention the existence of what Walter Benjamin indicated as the different way in which the nature talk to a camera and to our eye, and Franco Vaccari called “technological unconsciousness”.

Essential references

R. Campagnoli, Y. Hersant, “Oulipo La letteratura potenziale (Creazioni Ri-creazioni Ricreazioni)”, 1985
R. Campagnoli “Oupiliana”, 1995
TEAnO, “Quaderno n. 2 Antologia di letteratura potenziale”, 1996
W. Benjiamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reprodizierbarkeit”, 1936
F. Vaccari, “Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico”, 1994