August 1, 2005
Christopher Strachey: The first digital artist?
Christopher Strachey is rightly viewed as a pioneer of modern computing. He’s not usually, however, viewed as the creator of the first work of digital literature. Research toward my submission for DAC, however, has lead me to believe that he was — and that his initial digital literature project was also, quite probably, the first piece of digital art. I’d be quite interested to hear any thoughts (or refutations) from GTxA readers.
To begin with, however, I should explain that when I use the terms “digital literature” and “digital art” I mean something in particular by them.
Of course, a phrase like “digital literature” could refer to finger-oriented literature (fingers are “digits”) or numerically-displayed literature (numbers are “digits”) — but I mean “digital” in relation to computers, specifically as it appears in phrases such as “stored program digital computer.” I mean literary work that requires the digital computation performed by laptops, desktops, servers, cellphones, game consoles, interactive environments, or any of the other computers that surround us. I think that’s what most of us mean.
To take the other term in my initial phrase, “digital literature” could be used in the sense of “the literature” (the body of scholarly work on a topic) or it could be rearranged as “literary digital” (perhaps to distinguish “literary” digital fictions from “genre” digital fictions) — but I mean “literature” (and “literary”) as a way of referring to those arts we sometimes call fiction, poetry, and drama (as well as their close cousins). I mean the arts that call our attention to language, present us with characters, tell us stories, and make us reflect on the structures and common practices of such activities. I should probably also say that I don’t view the literary arts as a citadel, separate (and perhaps in need of defense) from, say, visual or performing arts. Much of the best drama, for example, brings together the literary, performing, and visual arts.
To me, “digital art” is the larger category of which “digital literature” is a part. It encompasses all the arts that require digital computation, not just the literary arts.
Turing Machines get Electronic
When I say that I mean “digital” as in “stored program digital computer,” what does that mean, more precisely?
In 1937 everyone who used the term “computer” knew what it meant. A computer was a person who calculated answers to mathematical problems. These computers weren’t expected to develop new, creative methods to prove outstanding mathematical problems. Rather, they were expected to follow a known and specified set of instructions which, together, formed an effective procedure for solving a particular kind of problem. We call such sets of instructions algorithms (from the name of Arabian mathematician al-Khwarizmi).
But with the publication, in 1937, of Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers” the world was quietly introduced to the mathematical thought experiment that we call a “Turing machine” — a concept that lay the groundwork for the kinds of non-human computers we have today. Turing’s paper wasn’t remarkable for imagining a machine that could carry out the work of human computers. In the 1930s there were already in operation a number of such machines (including Vannevar Bush’s Differential Analyzer) and at least 100 years earlier (by 1837) Charles Babbage had conceived of an Analytical Engine, capable of mechanizing any mathematical operation (and programmed via punched cards such as those used for automated looms, making it possible for his collaborator Ada Lovelace to be called by some the first programmer of a universal computer, even though the Analytical Engine was never constructed). Two things, however, separated Turing machines from all calculating machines in operation in the 1930s (and most of the 1940s) as well as all previous thought experiments (including Babbage’s).
First, according to Turing’s most prominent biographer, Andrew Hodges, the Turing machine was developed in response to a mathematical question (posed by Hilbert) as to whether mathematics was decidable. That is, was there a method that could be applied to any assertion that would correctly determine whether that assertion was true? The Turing machine was a formalization that made it possible to discuss what could and couldn’t be calculated — answering Hilbert’s question in the negative, and establishing one of the primary foundations for computer science as a science (the investigation of what can and can’t be computed).
Second, the imagined design of the Turing machine was in terms of a potentially implementable (if inefficient) mechanism. This mechanism was such that it could not only logically branch while following its instructions (doing one thing or another based on results to that point), and not only act as a universal machine (simulating the activities of any other calculating machine), but also store its instructions in the same read/write memory as the data on which it acted. This would make it possible, for example, for the machine to alter its own instructions while in operation. And it is from this type of capability that we get the words “stored program” in the phrase “stored program digital computer.” This lies at the heart of the computers we use each day.
This leaves us with the word “digital” — which, as it turns out, is not specific to computers, despite the fact that it’s the word we’ve latched onto in order to represent computers. “Digital” information, as opposed to “analog” information, is represented by discrete rather than continuous values. It’s actually related, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to the sense of fingers and numbers as “digits.” Each of the first nine Arabic numbers (or ten, if one includes zero) can be expressed with one figure, a digit, and these were originally counted on the fingers, or digits. Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine called for representing decimal numbers using ten-spoke wheels — which made it a design for a digital computer, because each of the ten wheel positions was discrete. In contrast, may early 20th century computers used analog, continuous representations — such as varying electrical currents or mechanisms that turned at varying speed. These analog computers could perform some tasks very quickly. For example, adding two quantities represented by electrical currents could be accomplished simply by allowing flow onto particular wires, rather than by actually establishing the two values and numerically calculating their sum. However, because of the lack of discrete states, analog computers were inflexible in their orders of precision and prone to noise-induced errors. During WWII Konrad Zuse built the first program controlled digital computer that, instead of Babbage’s decimal arithmetic, used binary arithmetic implemented in on/off electronics. This was a considerable simplification and made possible advances in increased speed and precision — important to our “digital” computers. Working independently (and very secretly) the British government cryptanalysis group of which Turing was part (and where he was instrumental in cracking the German Enigma code) created the Colossus, which has been characterized as the first fully functioning electronic digital computer. Many other projects and incremental advances took place, and especially notable of these was the University of Pennsylvania ENIAC (believed, while the Colossus was still secret, to have been the first fully functioning electronic digital computer). A 1945 report of future design plans — based on insights from ENIAC designers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, working together with John von Neumann — was very influential on the design of future stored program digital computers (leading to the perhaps inappropriate name “von Neumann architecture” for such systems).
It was only after the war that a number of successful efforts were made toward stored program digital computers. The first was the Manchester University “Baby” in 1948 (it used a CRT display for its storage) which was followed by a more complex Manchester prototype in 1949 and then replaced by an industrially manufactured version, the Ferranti Mark I, in 1951 (for which Turing wrote the programming manual and constructed a random number generator that produced truly random digits from noise). Similar efforts include the University of Cambridge EDSAC (1949), the University of Pennsylvania EDVAC (1951), the MIT Whirlwind I (1949), and others.
Strachey’s Next Step
Once there were stored program digital computers, all that remained (for our field to take its first step) was for someone to make literary or other artistic use of one. I believe that — in 1952, working on the Manchester Mark I — Christopher Strachey was the first to do so.
Strachey, born in 1916, grew up on Gordon Square, which was then center of the Bloomsbury group. His father was English cryptographer Oliver Strachey, his mother American suffragist Ray Costelloe, his uncle the famous Giles Lytton Strachey, and his neighbors included Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and John Maynard Keynes.
He went up to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1935. While this is the same time and place where Turing was doing his fundamental work on computable numbers (as a recently-graduated junior research fellow) it is likely that the two knew each other only socially, and never discussed computing. Strachey worked as a physicist and schoolmaster after graduating from Cambridge, becoming increasingly interested in computing during the late 1940s. In January 1951 he was first exposed to a stored-program computer: the Pilot ACE computer under construction at the National Physical Laboratory. He began writing a program to make it play draughts (checkers), inspired by a June 1950 article in Penguin Science News.
That spring Strachey learned of the Mark I computer that had just been installed at Manchester — he had known Turing just well enough at Cambridge to ask for, and receive, a copy of the programmer’s manual. He visited for the first time in July, and discussed his ideas for a draughts-playing program with Turing, who was much impressed and suggested that the problem of making the machine simulate itself using interpretive trace routines would also be interesting. Strachey, taken with Turing’s suggestion, went away and wrote such a program. As Strachey biographer Martin Campbell-Kelly writes:
The final trace program was some 1000 instructions long — by far the longest program that had yet been written for the machine, although Strachey was unaware of this. Some weeks later he visited Manchester for a second time to try out the program. He arrived in the evening, and after a “typical high-speed high-pitched” introduction from Turing, he was left to it. By the morning, the program was mostly working, and it finished with a characteristic flourish by playing the national anthem on the “hooter.” This was a considerably tour-de-force: an unknown amateur, he had got the longest program yet written for the machine working in a single session; his reputation was established overnight.
A year later, in June 1952, Strachey had wound up his responsibilities as a schoolmaster and officially began full-time computing work as an employee of the National Research and Development Corporation. That summer he developed — with some aesthetic advice from his sister Barbara, using Turing’s random number generator, and perhaps in collaboration with Turing — a Mark I program that created combinatory love letters. This was the first piece of digital literature, and of digital art, predating by a decade the earliest examples of digital computer art from recent surveys (e.g., quite useful books such as Christiane Paul’s Digital Art and Stephen Wilson’s Information Arts).
Strachey described the operations of this program in a 1954 essay in the art journal Enounter (immediately following texts by William Faulkner and P. G. Wodehouse):
Apart from the beginning and the ending of the letters, there are only two basic types of sentence. The first is “My — (adj.) — (noun) — (adv.) — (verb) your — (adj.) — (noun).” There are lists of appropriate adjectives, nouns, adverbs, and verbs from which the blanks are filled in at random. There is also a further random choice as to whether or not the adjectives and adverb are included at all. The second type is simply “You are my — (adj.) — (noun),” and in this case the adjective is always present. There is a random choice of which type of sentence is to be used, but if there are two consecutive sentences of the second type, the first ends with a colon (unfortunately the teleprinter of the computer had no comma) and the initial “You are” of the second is omitted. The letter starts with two words chosen from the special lists; there are then five sentences of one of the two basic types, and the letter ends “Yours — (adv.) M. U. C.”
As Jeremy Douglass notes in his essay “Machine Writing and the Turing Test,” the love letter generator has often been discussed in terms of queer identity, rather than in literary terms. Certainly there are reasons for this — Turing and Strachey were both gay, and at least Turing openly so. (In fact, it was only a few years later that Turing committed suicide — after arrest and conviction for homosexual activities, followed by a sentence of hormone injections that caused him to grow breasts.) It might also seem from the most widely-reproduced outputs of the generator (e.g., that found in Hodges’s bio) that it was a love-letter generator that “could not speak its name” (the word “love” being conspicuously absent). But I suspect that the primary reason for the lack of literary discussion of Strachey’s generator is that the output simply isn’t very compelling. Here, for example, are the two outputs reproduced in Encounter:
Darling Sweetheart
You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.
Yours beautifully
M. U. C.
Honey Dear
My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. My fellow feeling breathlessly hopes for your dear eagerness. My lovesick adoration cherishes your avid ardour.
Yours wistfully
M. U. C.
I would like to suggest, however, that examination of individual outputs will not reveal what is interesting about Strachey’s project. As he wrote in Encounter: “The chief point of interest, however, is not the obvious crudity of the scheme, nor even in the ways in which it might be improved, but in the remarkable simplicity of the plan when compared with the diversity of the letters it produces.” That is to say, Strachey had discovered, and created an example of, the basic principles of combinatory literature (10 years before Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) — which still lie at the heart of much digital literature today. Combinatory techniques allow a relatively small number of initial materials to be arranged, following certain rules, into a vast number of possible configurations. In relatively unconstrained systems such as Strachey’s, each individual output is more likely to induce a humorous reaction than deep literary consideration. In fact, Turing biographer Hodges writes of the love letter generator that “Those doing real men’s jobs on the computer, concerned with optics or aerodynamics, thought this silly, but … it greatly amused Alan and Christopher” (p. 478). In the amusing nature of individual outputs, Strachey’s system could be said to anticipate Roger Price and Leonard Stern’s Mad Libs (conceived in 1953, but not published until 1958, see Nick’s Poems that Go intro), though the love letter generator’s more restrained combinatory vocabulary made it possible for most (rather than only a few) words to change from output to output. It is clear, however, from Strachey’s contribution to Encounter, that he also understood the other side of combinatory literature — the view of the system itself when one steps back from the individual outputs, the remarkable diversity that can be produced by a simple plan. The production from such a simple plan, as has been pointed out with other combinatory texts, of more potentially different outputs than any of us could run our eyes across in a lifetime devoted to reading its output. It is a work that can only be understood, in fact, as a system — never by an exhaustive reading of its texts.
And it is not surprising that Strachey’s effort is mostly of interest in terms of how it operates, rather than in the text it produces. After all, designing interesting ways for computers to operate — algorithms, processes — is at the heart of what most computer scientists and creative programmers do, from Turing and Strachey’s moment to this day. And, as I have been arguing under the heading of “reading processes” (1, 2, 3), we need to recognize this as a potential site of literary creativity.
August 1st, 2005 at 3:08 pm
[…] 8217;s program as the first work of digital literature and perhaps all digital art: “Christopher Strachey: The first digital artist?” Her […]
August 1st, 2005 at 4:31 pm
In 2002, I spent some time tracking down Strachey as the writer of the love letter program for the Mark I; it is often erroneously attributed to Turing. I came to the same conclusion that Strachey’s program represents the first computer-based art. I first heard about the Mark I love letter program a few years earlier in a wonderful seminar Simon Penny ran at Carnegie Mellon on AI, agents and art.
August 1st, 2005 at 5:47 pm
I like the way you define your terms and think you make a compelling case – I’ve written a brief discussion of the implications in this WRT post.
On the other hand I’m not so sure citing Wilson’s Information Arts as an example of what is being updated here – I flipped through the front-matter and the section on Digital Informations Systems / Computers, and Wilson is pretty clear that the book “focuses on art that addresses research activity in the last seven years.”
Are there more concrete examples of timelines we should be updating? Has anyone else offered strong cases for “first” digital art or digital literature, that we can consider by comparison?
August 1st, 2005 at 6:07 pm
I remember hearing about this generator from Michael in 2002, actually. Noah, this is a very rich post which I knew for a while that you had coming – it’s great to read it. I have many thoughts about this, and will share as many of them as I can, disconnected as they may be:
Your post reminds me of a few reasons why historians of new media should try to establish who was the “first” at something. At times it seems like figuring this out amounts to awarding some laurel at a silly contest, but there are a few good reasons to investigate what the first work in a form was, some of which Jeremy Douglas mentions in his follow-up post on WRT. I’ll offer two others: For one thing, we should document who was first for the same reason we document who was second, third, and so on, up to the most recent. To not care about who was first is like not caring about any other aspect of new media history. We should consider the story of the first digital artwork to be at least as interesting as the story of any digital artwork. For another, when we find a “first” that has been overlooked, as Noah has done here, this allows us to ask why it was overlooked, and to learn about how history has been framed and understood so far.
It’s interesting to see how the presentation of Christopher Strachey’s love letter generator differed from that of a new media first I documented in Twisty Little Passages: Leonardo Torres Quevedo’s 1912 invention of the first computer game, a chess-playing automaton capable of playing out an endgame against a human opponent. While Torres’s invention was not programmed on a general-purpose computer, it was a digital computing system that followed an algorithm and responded to input from a player. In 1914, Torres took this first video game to Paris for a flamboyant public demonstration – the equivalent of today’s E3. Strachey’s literary system, on the other hand, was described in an art journal.
There might be interesting “queer readings” Strachey’s love letter generator, although I’m not convinced of that yet. (An attempt to exhaustively occupy every possible position, as in Barthes’s reading of de Sade?) But, not to put it too bluntly, queers can simply write about love. They aren’t constrained to only write about queerness. Auden’s “Lullaby” is a poem about love (“universal love”) that can only suffer from a reading that assumes it is about something else, something that isn’t universal. Strachey’s love letter generator, although it’s certainly in a different register, may be similar. To me, it embodies a sense of overflowing, that everything must be said to the beloved, but that only one thing can be said at a time – not something that is specific to any gender or sexual orientation.
Finally, to argue against this last “reading” of the love-letter machine a bit, I have to ask how seriously we can take it. I resist the idea is that literature may only be created by those who are certified literature-makers. Some would claim that Eliza, for instance, isn’t literary, despite simulating a character, enacting parody, etc., because Weizenbaum wasn’t part of a literary tradition. I don’t find this position tenable. But I think it’s worth asking whether something like Strachey’s love letter generator is actually anti-literature, a prank meant to mock the idea of writing and literary creation rather than to contribute to literary art. Of all previous machines, real and imagined, it most resembles one offered as a parody of writing by Johnathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels:
Was Strachey’s disdain for literature as great as Turing’s was said to have been, despite (or perhaps due to) Strachey’s having literary neighbors in Bloomsbury? I believe it’s written somewhere – I recall this from an undergraduate class on Turing that I took, but can’t think of the source – that Turing was aggressively anti-literary, so much so that his father was delighted when Turing told him there was, at least, one line of Hamlet that he actually liked. His father asked what it was. “The last,” Turing said. “Exeunt, bearing off the bodies.”
I think it does matter if this program was intended as a mockery of literature, although, even then, I’ll admit that it might be of literary value – the poets who perpetrated the Ern Malley hoax on the journal Angry Penguins demonstrated that the most ill-intentioned efforts can yield literary outcomes; perhaps a hoaxing programmer could do the same. It would make for an interesting origin myth for computer literature.
August 1st, 2005 at 7:24 pm
Lots of great stuff here, and I wish I had time to respond to it all!
First, however, a brief note about Turing and literature. In the Hodges biography the point is made that Turing wasn’t a fan of literature in general — but apparently those literary works that appealed were quite important to him. For example, Hodges quotes Lyn Newman (p. 475) as writing that she
pushed first Anna Karenina and then War and Peace into his hands. I knew that he read Jane Austen and Trollope as sedatives, but he was totally uninterested in poetry and not particularly sensitive to literature or any of the arts, and therefore not at all an easy person to supply with reading matter. War and Peace proved to be in a very special way the masterpiece for him and he wrote to me expressing moving terms his appreciation of Tolstoy’s understanding and insight. Alan had recognized himself and his own problems in War and Peace and Tolstoy had gained a new reader of a moral stature and complexity and an originality of spirit equal to his own.
To complicate the picture further, Hodges’s biography also quotes from fiction written by Turing…
August 2nd, 2005 at 10:32 am
Christopher Strachey:
The first digital artist? “Christopher Strachey is rightly viewed as a pioneer of modern computing. Hes not usually, however, viewed as the creator of the first work of digital literature. Research toward my submission for DAC, however, has lead me…
August 2nd, 2005 at 2:00 pm
There’s a nice page documentating the 50th year anniversary of the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (aka Manchester Baby) in 1998. This was one of the places I looked when I did my own bit of sleuthing regarding the love letter generator. Of particular interest is the Manchester Baby programming competition. You can still download a Baby emulator as well as the prizewinning entries. In 2002 I spent awhile looking for the love letter program, but didn’t find it. Possibly with a trip to Manchester one might be able to track it down. Depends on whether they kept around paper copies of Baby programs in their archives.
August 2nd, 2005 at 3:56 pm
Noah, this is great work, and it will certainly find it’s way into my teaching and other references. The more I’ve delved into it, the more I find the 1940s and 50s era of computation fascinating and rewarding to study.
I hadn’t realized Martin Campbell-Kelley was Strachey’s biographer; he’s also written a good book on the history of software (from MIT).
For anyone interested in the tradition of analog computation (circa WWII), Paul Edwards is excellent in The Closed World.
I believe I’ve documented a new media “first” of my own in my upcoming _Mechanisms_, but I’ll let it go at just that teaser for now. ;-)
August 3rd, 2005 at 1:56 pm
Sorry I couldn’t respond yesterday. I was at SIGGRAPH all day. (Hopefully I’ll be able to write up notes soon, perhaps as a comment on a SIGGRAPH post by Andrew if he has time to make one.)
Jeremy, in terms of where we might look for claims as to when digital art began — it’s not a bad question. For Paul and Wilson’s books I just flipped through, looking for the earliest dates I could find. Looking online, I found this timeline, which begins in 1956 (a date apparently chosen because of its use by Jasia Reichardt):
http://www.dam.org/history/
Do people know of other digital art timelines, or claims about the first digital art? I have the feeling that many folks start with Csuri.
Michael, I have good news about the program still being around for the love letter generator. David Durand has done some sleuthing in Strachey’s papers, and the whole thing is there. If the Baby and Mark I were sufficiently similar, perhaps it wouldn’t be much work (using some of the material from the 50th anniversary pages to which you linked) to get the first piece of digital art running in emulation!
Matt, thanks for the kind words and teaser… looking forward to _Mechanisms._
August 8th, 2005 at 3:44 am
I tend to teach about the history of new media arts in streams by each arts type over time. There are guides for specific arts types but not really ones with all of them. I’ve been contemplating commissioning a flash artist to put together a visual database where the streams can be turned on or off and all can be juxtaposed with technical milestones as well as conceptual. Given the excellent work both yourself and Nick did on the New Media Reader — perhaps this is a task for you guys?
Here are some timelines I’ve utlised, there are heaps more but these are at hand:
The Electronic Labyrinth
Videotopia
History of Home Video Games
The Media History Porject Timeline
Timeline of Knowledge Representation
Media Profiles Timeline
A Linguistic history of videogame
The jazzy interface types, that refer to digital media arts:
Margot Lovejoy’s Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age
D.DaCosta’s Influences
And I thought the H-Bot: the Automated Historical Fact-Finder was fun.
August 19th, 2005 at 5:40 pm
[…] e” and “digital art” I mean something in particular by them.” Continue reading Christopher Strachey: The first digital artist? by Noah War […]
September 8th, 2005 at 6:10 am
[…] al story generator. Ractor and Meehan’s TaleSpin are probably among the most famous, Christopher Strachley’s love letter generator probably th […]
September 23rd, 2005 at 9:53 am
Re: Brit Artist – Andrew Campbell
http://www.andrew-campbell.com
A Fluorescent Pink Lavatory Brush…
October 15th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
An interesting follow-up to this recently arrived via email:
April 22nd, 2007 at 2:50 am
[…] to Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator, which Noah Wardrip-Fruin asserts is the first work of digital literature. The joke generator ( […]