In addition to teaching text generation in an unofficial seminar at INALCO, Jean-Pierre Balpe also wrote a handbook titled Initiation à la génération de textes en langue naturelle. Exemples de programmes en Basic (Paris : Eyrolles, 1985).

Teacher and poet, Balpe draws on his experience in both fields to reflect on the teaching of poetry. He published several works and, in 1981, earned his postgraduate degree with a thesis titled "Research on Some Formal Writing Procedures Used in Pedagogy” (Université Paris III), emphasizing an active pedagogical approach.

“In 1974 (or 1975… my memory on this point is not precise), I published my first educational work, opening a path toward a more intelligent use of poetry in elementary school. Since then, many writings have been published in this field. That book was followed by a series of works in the field of pedagogy, notably a book on spelling in 1976, then a collection for primary education published by Nathan, in collaboration with Georges Jean and others. My ‘pedagogical’ work ended in 1986 with Promenade en poésie published by Magnard, because by that time I had long since started working in and publishing on computing. » (archivesdebalpe.blogspot.com/2016/02/en-1974-ou-75-ma-memoire-sur-ce-point.html)

Renga is a generator of rengas (a poetic genre of Japanese origin) created in BASIC language and presented at the exhibition Les Immatériaux in 1985. The reproduction shown here was executed in a DOSBox environment with a runtime cycle of 800 instructions/second, realized by Philippe Bootz. This version was installed at La Rose des vents in Villeneuve d’Ascq in 1991.

Jean-Pierre Balpe (alias “Un Monde Incertain”) describes this work as follows: “In 1984 (I think…*) I was involved in the creation of ALAMO (Atelier de Littérature Assistée par Ordinateur, an acronym largely based on a play on the name of another founder: Paul Braffort), which I left in 1985 due to a fundamental disagreement. In 1985, I was tasked with setting up the text section of this huge exhibition. I presented various works by different authors, whose names I can’t recall now as I no longer have the catalog. I personally presented a program, Renga, which was originally meant to be developed with Jacques Roubaud. However, he found the constraints of automatic generation too restrictive and left me to complete it on my own. Over the two months of the exhibition, this program generated more than 36,000 of these poems.” (archivesdebalpe.blogspot.com/2016/03/en-1984-je-crois-je-participais-la.html)

The exhibition inventory described the “Machines Stylistiques” installation in the “Texte évanescent / texte dématérialisé” [Evanescent Text / Dematerialized Text] site of the “Labyrinthe du Langage” [Labyrinth of Language] section, where Renga was presented, as follows: “[…] based on pre-structured dictionaries, programs for automatically generating syntactic structures and macro-textual structures, the machine can generate an infinite number of texts of a given stylistic type. Examples of these are visible here—partially in Alexandrins artificiels, in Nouvelles à votre façon, and, fully, in Renga, whose display mode was designed so that readers could perceive the essential steps of the computational analysis.” (Inventaire. Published on the occasion of the event Les Immatériaux presented by the Centre de Création Industrielle from March 28 to July 15, 1985, in the Grande Galerie of the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou)

A virtual reproduction of the exhibition’s scenography and photos of the original installation are available at lesimmateriaux.beyondmatter.eu.

Roman is a piece of educational software published by the Centre national de documentation pédagogique [National Centre for Pedagogical Documentation] in the “Micro-savoirs: logiciels” [Micro-knowledge: software] collection. Designed for classroom use, it was programmed in BASIC for a Thomson TO7/MO5 nanonetwork, utilizing the computers deployed in schools at the time as part of the “Plan informatique pour tous” [Computing for All Scheme]. Teachers could manage the class from a local miniserver to which students connected with their Thomson MO5 client stations.

The copy preserved by the National Library of France (BnF) consists of a 5.25-inch floppy disk, a 46-page user manual, and a 43-page pedagogical documentation booklet. The latter indicates that it is a “second edition,” yet we could find no trace of the first edition. The recording shown here was made by Jean-Philippe Humblot, engineer at the Sound, Video, Multimedia Department of the BnF, using the DCNANORESEAU emulator.

Jean-Pierre Balpe (alias “Un Monde Incertain”) recalls:

“From 1981 to 1986, I was an IT advisor at the Ministry of National Education and, as part of this, I created the software Roman which, based on student prompts, generated a text using documents from Flaubert, Maupassant, Stendhal, Zola, etc. (I don’t remember the others) that they had to work on by suggesting modifications—often leading them to rewrite everything. It is thus an exercise in simultaneous reading and writing. Published then by Nathan, this floppy disk—which I no longer have—was, I believe, fairly widely distributed.” (archivesdebalpe.blogspot.com/2016/04/je-date-cette-archive-autour-de-1983.html)

The pedagogical manual notes:

“The name of this tool is somewhat misleading: ROMAN might suggest that the goal is to produce or study fictional texts with students. The reality is more modest. In fact, ROMAN aims to assist in text production, and while initially this production falls within the framework of fiction, we will later see how it can be used to produce texts of entirely different kinds. ROMAN is a tool and intends to be used as such. It is relatively independent of the materials it uses, allowing teachers to guide work of very different natures, some of which are outlined in this brochure.

[…]

This computer tool is deliberately conceived in the mindset of an active pedagogy of writing. Breaking away from the relatively passive practice of computer-assisted instruction, it is intended only as an aid to classroom practice.

In recent years, many educators have realized the great value of approaching writing instruction in a more productive rather than analytical way, and many works have been published on the subject (see the bibliography in the appendix).

What ROMAN seeks to offer teachers is:

• the ability to make full use of two well-known, and therefore non-disorienting formal writing procedures,
• the ability to collectively manage individually created work,
• the ability to extend students’ initial productions into larger-scale work,
• the ability to analyze the processes involved in producing the generated texts,
• the ability to invent new formal text production procedures.”

(Jean-Pierre Balpe, L’outil informatique ROMAN. Pedagogical Brochure, Ministry of National Education, Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique, Educational Software Unit, 2nd ed., 1987)

Poèmes d’amour is a poem generator, written in GW-BASIC, here reproduced in a DOSBox emulator environment with a runtime cycle of 400 instructions/second by Philippe Bootz. This version was also installed at La Rose des vents in Villeneuve d’Ascq in 1991.

As Jean-Pierre Balpe explains: “Poèmes d’amour has a rather odd history: created for fun in the 1980s, I showed it to an Uzbek friend who proposed it to a small Russian publisher, who published it as a trilingual edition: French-Russian-Uzbek. The Uzbek version was an improvisation by Hamid Ismaïlov on the theme, with his reflections and hesitations. As I gave this booklet to the BnF, I don’t quite remember when this all happened exactly, but it was sometime around 1980.” (Personal communication to Erika Fülöp)

The photos come from the personal archives of Jean-Pierre Balpe.

Voix blanches features four automatic text generators on PC written in GW-BASIC: Amour, Antiaphorisme, Proverbe, and Renga. This setup, which runs them in a random order, was installed at La Rose des Vents in Villeneuve d’Ascq in 1991.

The reproduction shown here was created using a DOSBox emulator by Philippe Bootz, running at a cycle of 500 instructions/second.

This work was created using HyperCard (2.1 or 2.2) and appeared in issue no. 3 of the digital magazine KAOS, founded in 1991 by Jean-Pierre Balpe and edited by him. KAOS was originally an IT company co-founded by Balpe in 1985, and the magazine accompanied this venture with literary creations, distributed to clients and partners.

This floppy disk edition, released in 1993, was a collaboration with issues no. 129-130 of the magazine Action poétique.

The video capture shown here depicts a reproduction using the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator in a VirtualBox environment, realized by Philippe Bootz.

Autobiographie presents narratives and poetic texts on “days of an ordinary life” in parallel, displayed in vertically juxtaposed windows on the screen.

The same video capture shows two other works by Jean-Pierre Balpe. Question d’amour et de poésie was created in collaboration with poet Henri Deluy, while Réponse de J.P. BALPE à Claude ADELEN is “a poetic generator created by Jean-Pierre Balpe in response to a challenge from Claude Adelen, who had provided strict generation rules. The reader is allowed to modify the dictionaries, but not the generation rules. It’s up to them to understand how these dictionaries are constructed if they want to preserve the coherence of the generated texts!” (Philippe Bootz, Les basiques : la littérature numérique », Leonardo/Olats, 2006)

This generator, created with HyperCard (probably version 2.2), appeared in 1994 in the proceedings of the meeting “Nord poésie et ordinateur,” held on May 12, 1993, at the University of Lille III, titled A:\Littérature (Roubaix Villeneuve d’Ascq: CIRCAV-GERICO Mots-voir, 1994), edited by Philippe Bootz. The volume was accompanied by two 3.5-inch floppy disks featuring several digital literary works, including Balpe’s Hommage à Jean Tardieu.

The video capture presented here, recorded by Erika Fülöp, shows a reproduction via the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator in a VirtualBox environment provided by Philippe Bootz. After an opening screen showing a drawing of the Minotaur with a young woman, both nude in a bed, another drawing of four female figures invites the user to click to generate a poem paying homage to the poet Jean Tardieu. The displayed texts express unfulfilled desire and indirect eroticism, underlied by the omnipresent background image.

This HyperCard generator was published in issue no. 8 of the digital poetry magazine Alire, co-founded in 1989 by Philippe Bootz, Tibor Papp, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marie Dutey, and Claude Maillard. It is reproduced here via the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator in a VirtualBox environment. The video capture was made by Philippe Bootz.

These “Meditations on the human mind by an electronic brain” invite the reader to click to produce philosophical prose, full of questions and ellipses.

The subject continued to fascinate Jean-Pierre Balpe, as the title resurfaced about fifteen years later in a blog post attributed to Marc Hodges, a fictional author within the universe of the hyperfiction La Disparition du Général Proust . An interactive installation created in 2015 for the Centre Culturel de Rencontre de l’Abbaye de Saint-Riquier (Somme) also bore the same title. As the author explains, “this installation consists of a large black cube into which the spectator may enter. The software then recognizes them, and a synthetic voice attempts to describe how it perceives this animal that has just entered it” (artnum.univ-paris8.fr/balpe/L-Esprit-Humain-2-200). A third version of the generator is still available on Jean-Pierre Balpe’s website and proposes to generate “para-metaphysical poems” (artnum.univ-paris8.fr/balpe/l-Esprit-Humain-Poeme-Para-Metaphysique).

This HyperCard generator was published by Éditions Ilias on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. It is part of the body of work that Jean-Pierre Balpe would publish or republish through this publisher, founded by his KAOS co-founder Ivan Graviloff, offering “the first 'hyperbooks' on the French market” (Les Echos, November 8, 1994).

The work is reproduced here via the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator in a VirtualBox environment. The video capture was made by Philippe Bootz.

Bootz writes: “As early as 1991, Jean-Pierre Balpe generated infinite novels. He would publish two of them on floppy disk with Éditions Ilias in 1994: Le masque and Paysages sans ombres [Landscapes without shadows]. […] Le masque is a novel in which the Mask is a character. The software generates rather long pages. They are composed of reflections on the human mind, interspersed with descriptions and action elements. The work builds on developments from other generators such as Croquis parisiens or L’esprit humain. The design of automatic generators follows the snowball principle—they enrich each other.” (Philippe Bootz, Les basiques : la littérature numérique, Leonardo/Olats, 2006)

A HyperCard generator published by Éditions Ilias on a 3.5-inch floppy disk, in the same series as Le masque. The work is reproduced here via the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator in a VirtualBox environment. The video capture was made by Philippe Bootz.

Bootz notes: “Paysages sans ombres [Landscapes without shadows] […] was created under the pseudonym Patrice Zana, on Macintosh using HyperCard—software that Jean-Pierre Balpe would use for all his subsequent generators. Paysages sans ombres functions in the same way as Croquis parisiens: it describes charming vignettes using independent sentences. These may be long and, unlike Croquis parisiens, present thematic continuity across several sentences.” (Philippe Bootz, Les basiques : la littérature numérique , Leonardo/Olats, 2006)

HyperCard generator, here reproduced via the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator in a VirtualBox environment. The video capture was made by Philippe Bootz.

In the work itself, the author explains: “Un roman inachevé is a novel—in progress—which, as its title suggests, can never be completed because its pages do not exist prior to their reading and each reading results in the destruction of the current page and the automatic generation of a new one. Thus, each reader is the sole reader of an inexhaustible text that nonetheless tells a story. As in real-life experience, their view of the narrative is subjective and partial. Only the community exchange among readers could approach an inherently inexhaustible totality.” (Jean-Pierre Balpe, “Le roman,” in Un roman inachevé) Philippe Bootz further notes: “Un roman inachevé (a work conceived for the Ministry of Culture in 1994 and later incorporated into Romans), is designed to self-destruct after several tens of thousands of pages. An auto-autodafé, in short, emphasizing the insignificance of these objects which, as understood, exist only within the implemented system: the flows and exchanges of data among themselves or with readers, the present moment of their execution, the tension between the infinity of their possibilities and the necessarily limited number of their realizations for any given reader...” (Philippe Bootz, Les basiques : la littérature numérique, Leonardo/Olats, 2006)

HyperCard generator published in 1997 in issue no. 10 of the magazine Alire, in collaboration with the magazine DOC(K)S. It is reproduced here via the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator in a VirtualBox environment. The video capture was made by Philippe Bootz.

The ELMCIP Knowledge Base describes the work as follows: “These satirical writings use sarcasm and irony to reveal human truths—or rather, delicate truths that are usually private. The reader’s role is to examine generated fragments and find intertextual links. The reader always brings their own story to the interpretation of the text. So the reader is never naive, and, according to Balpe, each time the reader engages with the text, they see a new one that provides an opportunity for a new meaning. Each short epigram describes or discusses a different situation involving one or more characters, and these little anecdotes display thematic consistencies. The women in the epigrams ‘pontificate’ or ‘swear by’ the superiority of women, creating a satirical—and at times sarcastic—theme of moral elevation that is asserted with the false confidence of the female characters. One epigram says: ‘Evelyne pontificates, Evelyn chatters constantly, Her abilities are recognized by all, Everyone would praise her merits, and proclaim her superiority…’ In the epigrams about men, the tone shifts to one of pejorative and sometimes vulgar satire and sarcasm.”

Although this work, like all HyperCard ones of the time, was made in black and white, we found a color screenshot in the author’s archives. Where did it come from, and how? “I haven’t the slightest idea,” the author comments. “Maybe I colorized it for an article” (personal communication). We share it as a historical curiosity.

“Expanding hyperfiction in flux”: a generator, multiple generators, a network of blogs, a series of fictional profiles on social media, a website...

Balpe recalls: “The concrete, real work on La Disparition du Général Proust began around 1980 (I couldn’t give a more precise date) and was built on my earlier research. So nearly 40 years of exploration into the automatic generation of literary texts. It’s safe to say that this work has spanned a large part of the history of computing, and the tools I’ve used—from the first programs in APL, then in BASIC, then in Hypercard—have constantly evolved.” (poetiques.blogg.org/mon-site-personnel-a115641082)

And in another blog post: “The hyperfiction La Disparition du Général Proust is a reflection-in-action—that is, in texts—on what digital technology can contribute to literary writing. Beyond the title’s assertion, which regards Marcel Proust’s work as the most accomplished symbol of what literary writing in French can be, the goal here is to continuously play with the work of the writer chosen as a paragon of French literature. An even slightly attentive reader will quickly realize that the texts offered in my hyperfiction continuously process Marcel Proust’s writings in various digital ways. Most of them result from purely computational processing—from gathering available data online to the final outputs made available for reading, which are the products of more or less complex algorithmic treatments.

Whether it’s Proust Memories, whose text is an infinite cento adjusted by a relatively simple algorithm, or the Poèmes Stein (in their various forms and, of course, with some "Steinian" processing), or the Monde Virtuel de Faust [Faust’s Virtual World], which repurposes a large number of Proustian elements into something so radically different that the original materials are often unrecognizable—the algorithms, more than the themes, are what give coherence to this ever-flowing work. It can only be grasped in its entirety, especially through the multiple paths offered by Le Sens de la Vie, where generative and non-generative texts reflect each other in echoes that serve as so many testaments to human literary creativity.” (poetiques.blogg.org/comment-la-disparition-du-general-proust-a115641080)

“As of January 1, 2013, this ecosystem—created in 2004 and composed, as of February 10, 2013, of forty-one blogs—is in continuous expansion. Designed to be dynamic, it undergoes constant changes, such that no reader can be certain of having read any definitive version—because by nature, none exists. Some of these blogs, for which I’ve lost the login credentials, remain frozen; others evolve constantly. Ultimately, the hyperfiction is also an autofiction—in other words, a fictionalized autobiography in which reality and fiction often blend and blur together. The whole structure forms a network of cross-references, mirrored repetitions, and variations that define a novel approach to literary writing. As of that same date, there had been over 1,800,000 visitors and more than 5,000,000 pages viewed—numbers which, as we all know, don’t mean all that much.” (poetiques.blogg.org/hyperfiction-a115641072)

Here we offer a small selection from this universe—open across space and time and entangled with Un Monde Incertain, which expands and (more or less…) continues it. Some of the blogs that once belonged to this world no longer exist. Some have been preserved—often incompletely—via the Internet Archive, which we can share here. Others partially survive within the Archive de l’Internet of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, only accessible from dedicated terminals in about twenty accredited libraries across France, including BnF locations.

For the blogs preserved in the Internet Archive, it is possible to navigate between various snapshots using the timeline to reconstruct the content.

• generalproust.oldiblog.com
• hyperfiction.canalblog.com
• jpbalpe.blogdrive.com
• meshaikus.canalblog.com
• lyriqueroman.canalblog.com
• sensdelavie.canalblog.com

“Expanding hyperfiction in flux”

The nature, beginning and end, scope and boundaries of Un Monde Incertain are… uncertain… Just like La Disparition du Général Proust, it consists of a website made up of “labyrinths” (dédales), a set of generators, a series of blogs, and a series of video series [sic] created by a collective of real and fictional authors, and a “digital installation” on Facebook… These are “artistic productions essentially based on the automatic generation of literary texts,” attributed to a certain (?) “Un Monde Incertain”. The profile of this Blogger user takes us to a page listing “their blogs,” including blogs signed “Jean-Pierre Balpe” as well as others that belong to the universe of La Disparition du Général Proust: Journal de Charlus, Poèmes Posthumes , PoésieAlpha, e-littérature, Poèmes illustrés, Mes Mémoires, Écrits mixtes, Mes archives, Monsieur Roman, Les vidéos d'Un Monde Incertain, RomanMonsieur, Béta-Roman

Jean-Pierre Balpe explains the project in a blog post: “[M]y goals when I decided to launch the Un Monde Incertain project were very deliberately placed at the intersection of generative literature and video—thus, of mobility. [...] Uncertainty has always been central to my ‘traditional’ writing projects, forming a constant thematic thread—whether in my novels such as La Toile (devoirdevacance.canalblog.com/archives/2021/02/06/38800069.html) or Un Monde Flou (http://unmondeflou.canalblog.com/) or in many of my short stories. This uncertainty, originally a personal psychological question, quickly met the uncertainty of the world—where, despite our era’s effort to master everything through technology, we remain overwhelmed by events. So although Un Monde Incertain was conceived before the arrival of COVID, its approach was reinforced by the media’s near-obsessive focus on uncertainty. It is therefore no coincidence that I became interested—more than fifty years ago—in generative literature, which by its very nature, relying heavily on randomness, is the productive source of an infinite number of uncertain texts.

[...] An automatic generator has neither clear intent […] nor consciousness. […] [I]f it gives the impression that what it writes at any given moment ‘means’ something, that impression is just an illusion—one that only functions with the cooperation of a potential reader. There is thus, in any generative literature project, an initial provocation: pretending to write—which in our societies carries high social status—is, in a very real way, to challenge that status. This provides the programmer with a deep personal satisfaction, which also confronts the author that I am. But that’s not the issue here. My objective is more about exploring how to create a totally original work, in all its forms, that would still be considered 'literary'—that is, a work that engages with reading, and in doing so, opens new perspectives for its readers. Once the foundation of this creative project was laid out, I asked myself […] [h]ow to conceive of a large-scale work, infinite and eternal by design, whose driving principle would be a balance between coherence (certainty) and incoherence (uncertainty).

[…] I wanted to explore another path by fixing this ephemerality in creations that are both temporarily fixed and generally mobile. Hence the idea of a series of video creations around a number of texts produced by my generators, which would build coherence through how they are navigated in full. In short, a generative hypertext. […] The entirety of Un Monde Incertain, a prototype of which can be found online (unmondeconfus.canalblog.com), would form a specific ensemble among all the possibilities contained in the intentionally structured construction—organized into various labyrinths, or “dédales”—of my personal site (www.balpe.name): that of the video series.” (articlesdejpbalpe.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-propos-dun-monde-incertain.html)

In 2021, the video series project Un Monde Incertain is declared complete (Épilogue (Épilogue 1, Saison 10) ). That hasn’t stopped this universe from continuing to exist—or even expand.

A few blogs belonging to this universe:

• mondehesitant.canalblog.com
• unmondeflou.canalblog.com
• unmondeconfus.canalblog.com
• unmondeincertain.canalblog.com
• poesiealpha.blogspot.com
• archivesdebalpe.blogspot.com
• mauriceroman.canalblog.com
• tension.canalblog.com

Since the 2000s, Jean-Pierre Balpe has created an entire series of other blogs under his own name, while continuing at times to play with the boundaries between real life (whatever that may be) and fiction, between “traditional” writing and automatic generation. Several of these blogs document his archives and his theoretical and artistic work, offering valuable insight into his body of work and his thinking.

• photoroman.canalblog.com
• poetiques.blogg.org
• ecritsdebalpe.blogspot.com
• devoirdevacance.canalblog.com
• articlesdejpbalpe.blogspot.com
• archivesdebalpe.blogspot.com
• plutovieuxlivres.canalblog.com

The heart and sum of Balpe’s work of the last decade, the personal website of Jean-Pierre Balpe is presented as “A universe of automatic literary generation.”

The digital environment behind the generator was based on four components originally structured and programmed by Samuel Szoniecky: an SQL database, a framework (Zend PHP) to control the database, a web-based application for managing works, dictionaries, and generators built with Adobe Flex, and a SPIP website to distribute generated content and link to various web media (blogs, YouTube, etc.).

After the end of Adobe Flash in 2020, creating new works and dictionaries—as well as updating them—became impossible, and the SPIP site presented a security risk. The hosting provider OVH deactivated it in June 2023.

A new version of the digital environment is currently being developed using Omeka S and JavaScript, still by Samuel Szoniecky. The SPIP site is now hosted on a server at Paris 8 University, using a standard stylesheet, at the address: artnum.univ-paris8.fr/balpe/. The ability to create new generators is currently lost.

In 2015, the author described the history of the site as follows: “The concrete, real work on La Disparition du Général Proust began around 1980 (I couldn’t give a more precise date) and was built upon my earlier research. Nearly 40 years, then, of work on the automatic generation of literary texts. That means it has spanned a significant portion of the history of computing, and the tools I used—starting from the earliest programs in APL, then in Basic, then under HyperCard—have constantly changed. […]

All this history, the fact that the last tool I used, HyperCard, no longer works on modern computers, and (no less importantly) that my understanding of syntactic and semantic modeling had evolved, led me to ask a friend, Samuel Szoniecky, to help me create a modern version—supported by Digitalarti and portable across all platforms—of my automatic text generation tools. Over time, I had cobbled together a sort of 2CV, and he built me a turbo race car that opened up many new possibilities, especially for presenting automatic text generation in public settings. But my older works were no longer directly usable.

So I decided to create a personal website to present as much of this work as possible. This process forced me to dig through the digital traces still available online and to recover data from old programs by converting them into new formats. That work is ongoing. Eventually, all the materials I still have will be made available on this site.

This new presentation led me to reconsider La Disparition du Général Proust (see also several posts on this blog) by defining a new way to navigate this vast hyperfiction, without discarding the structure established through a network of interconnected blogs. The work thus becomes even more networked—and impossible to define using any non-digital concept of literature.” (poetiques.blogg.org/mon-site-personnel-a115641082)

In another post two months earlier, he explains the purpose and structure of the site: “The generative, networked, and continuously flowing hyperfiction La Disparition du Général Proust has become enormous, with many access points from Facebook, Google Drive, or Facebook [sic]. I decided to create a website with two main functions:

• to highlight all the ghost-authors who are, at once, both my hyperonyms and characters referenced by one another in a constant and flourishing web of mutual references—either as characters or as authors: this will be the role of the Dédale des Ombres (Labyrinth of Shadows) section.
• to make available many working examples of generators, allowing visitors to produce as many texts as they wish, within a vision of infinite yet coherent literary flow. This will be the role of Dédale des Écritures (Labyrinth of Writings) for more fiction-oriented texts, and Dédale de l'inspiration (Labyrinth of Inspiration) for those that lean more toward poetry.
• to post videos (Dédale des Actes, Labyrinth of Acts) or audio recordings ( Dédale des Paroles , Labyrinth of Words).
• to attempt to recover documentation of earlier works that have vanished from the internet for various reasons (Dédale des traces, Labyrinth of Traces) as well as works that are no longer active (Dédale des ruines, Labyrinth of Ruins).

As the reader will surely understand and anticipate, this entire structure is in fact infinite. While the Dédale des Ombres will eventually come to a close with the final disappearance of the source-author, the Dédale des Écritures or de l’inspiration, as long as the hosting provider OVH continues to receive its hosting fees, will continue at their own pace and with their own autonomy.” (poetiques.blogg.org/la-nouvelle-disparition-du-general-proust-a115641078; links have been updated in the quote to direct to the current site)

During his programming work in 2013, Samuel Szoniecky created a few tutorials demonstrating how to use the software (still hosted at generator.digitalartimag.com), which are available on this YouTube channel.

Another prototype site for the Générateur balpien [Balpean Generator], still by Samuel Szoniecky, also allows users to peek behind the scenes and test how the generators function. By clicking on the red icon of the little working figure next to the Paris 8 logo at the top of the page, you can choose a “work” and the associated dictionary (see “work dictionaries” in the menu that will appear on the left), select an item from the list that appears, and then click on the red crossed arrows icon next to the window displaying your selection. The generator will produce a word, a phrase segment, a full sentence, or even more. A video series titled Épilogue features screen recordings from the site www.balpe.name, along with commentary from the author.

After—and alongside—La Disparition du Général Proust, the site also became a central hub of another “expanding hyperfiction in flux,” titled Un Monde Incertain (An Uncertain World).

Under various names and forms, Jean-Pierre Balpe has maintained a significant presence in Facebook’s semi-fictional universe. Most, if not all, of his posts are public.

Beyond his profiles Jean-Pierre Balpe (2020-) and Balpe Jean-Pierre (2008-), Rachel Charlus (2011-) is a central protagonist of this world. The “digital installation” Un Monde Incertain (2015-) was, until just a few years ago, populated by dozens of author-characters who had escaped from La Disparition du Général Proust (Antoine Elstir, Pierre Charlus, Gilberte Norpois, Germaine Argencourt, etc.), each with their own profile, life, posts, and interactions. These profiles have since been deactivated and lost.

Alexandra Saemmer comments on Jean-Pierre Balpe’s current (May 2025) presence on Facebook by exploring his existing profiles.

Before Facebook—and then alongside it—there was Flickr...

“The video series is a collective work created based on automatic text generation. Each filmmaker must meet two requirements: not to exceed a duration of four minutes and to use only texts generated by Un Monde Incertain, accessible at www.balpe.name.” (www.youtube.com/@balpepoeme)

“I wanted to explore a different path by fixing the ephemeral in creations that are both temporarily static and generally mobile. Hence the idea of a set of video creations built around a number of texts generated by my generators, forming their coherence through the full paths they offer. In short, a generative hypertext.” (articlesdejpbalpe.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-propos-dun-monde-incertain.html)

In 2021, the Un Monde Incertain video series was declared complete (Épilogue (Épilogue 1, Saison 10)). However, the author continues to publish new video montages, and Proustian figures still appear as contributors—e.g., Pierre Charlus taking charge of the musical composition, or Rachel Charlus narrating stories, and so on.

View YouTube playlist

Throughout this exhibition, we have cited the author’s articles and blog posts on various aspects of automatic text generation. The role of the author, the automatisms tied to reading and literary writing, and the ways computing challenges those assumptions are central to his thinking.

His book Hyperdocuments: Hypertextes, hypermédias (Paris: Eyrolles, 1990) became a seminal work, as did the collective volume Balpe co-edited with Manuela de Barros, L’art a-t-il besoin du numérique ? [Does Art Need the Digital?], Paris: Hermès Science Publications—Lavoisier, 2006).

While some of these writings are now difficult to find, three blogs in particular provide access to many of these texts and offer a way into Jean-Pierre Balpe’s universe from a theoretical perspective as well:

• articlesdejpbalpe.blogspot.com
• poetiques.blogg.org
• ecritsdebalpe.blogspot.com

Before discovering the computer, Jean-Pierre Balpe published several collections of poetry. The BnF’s general catalog does not list Naissance de l’aube, reportedly published by Mic Berthe in 1966. However, a 1968 newspaper article confirms his involvement in the editorial team of the journal IMPACT 10. Beginning in 1974, he served as Secretary General and a regular contributor to the journal Action Poétique. Bleus (1985) and Le Silence (1990) were published within that journal’s collection.

“Having decided to write a novel by email—as there were once epistolary novels—I am launching it using my own address book: since you’re listed there, you are receiving this message today.” This is how the preliminary message sent by Jean-Pierre Balpe in early 2001 begins. The email goes on to outline a set of constraints, some of which would remain secret throughout the project.

Once enough recipients responded with interest, Balpe launched the experiment: “From April 11 to July 19, 2001, the internet users who had registered—after selecting the title Rien n’est sans dire—received one page of this unpublished novel each day in their inboxes. The novel obeyed a set of both public and hidden rules. Participants could reply to the author, and their responses were then integrated into the plot. Yet each recipient remained unaware that they were reading a personalized version of the novel: in total, there are 10 to the power of 30 possible versions. The complete project is now available for download on the CIREN website.” (poetiques.blogg.org/mail-roman-a115641064)

Included here is the series of preliminary emails as well as the full text of the Mail-roman.

• archive.the-next.eliterature.org/balpe/mail-roman/mail-preliminaire-1.pdf
• archive.the-next.eliterature.org/balpe/mail-roman/mail-preliminaire-2.pdf
• archive.the-next.eliterature.org/balpe/mail-roman/mail-preliminaire-3.pdf
• archive.the-next.eliterature.org/balpe/mail-roman/mail-preliminaire-4.pdf
• archive.the-next.eliterature.org/balpe/mail-roman/mail-final.pdf
• archive.the-next.eliterature.org/balpe/mail-roman/rien-n-est-sans-dire-2002.pdf

This public, interactive, and generative performance was presented at the Biennale internationale de poésie en Val-de-Marne, IRCAM, Paris, on November 14, 1997.

Composer: Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi
Texts and reading: Jean-Pierre Balpe, Henri Deluy, Joseph Guglielmi
Soprano: Donatienne Michel-Dansac
Percussion: Eve Payeur
Piano: Jean-Marie Cottet
Scenography by Michel Jaffrennou

Jean-Pierre Balpe (alias “Un Monde Incertain”) describes the work as follows:

Jean-Pierre Balpe (alias “Un Monde Incertain”) describes the work as follows: “In 1997, with composer Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi, we created a performance that has had no equivalent since, as it involved staging three poets (Henri Deluy, Joseph Guglielmi, and myself) confronted with real-time generated pastiches of their texts, the music also being generated in real time based on the poems, and confronting this poetic writing with the writing produced by a computer (the blind poet). Everything was interactive: the poets discovered in real time what was supposed to be their writing; the musicians (pianist, percussionist, mezzo-soprano) had to react in real time to the musical proposals of the computer. This performance was unfortunately presented only twice and I have not been able to find the archives on the IRCAM site, which used to have a page about this program. A film was made about the performance by Hervé Nisic, titled Personne. A work excerpt [NB include link!] is available here.” (archivesdebalpe.blogspot.com/2016/05/trois-mythologies-et-un-poete-aveugle.html)

Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi adds: “Neither musical illustration nor setting texts to music, but rather exchanges of different modalities of expression exploring all the relationships between text and its sonic possibilities. Six voices intertwine constantly with the music to compose a ‘symphony’ for voices and instruments: the voice of the blind poet, the voice of the computer, the voice of Jean-Pierre Balpe, the voice of Henri Deluy, the voice of Joseph Guglielmi, and the voice of Donatienne Michel-Dansac.” (brahms.ircam.fr/en/works/work/6590)

Philippe Bootz provides some further technical details: “A soprano is on stage, as well as the three poets (Balpe, Deluy, Guglielmi), each in front of a screen. An automatic generator creates a text in the style (!) of Deluy and Guglielmi, displayed on the monitor in front of them. This text is also projected onto a large screen for the audience. The poet then reads the text with full freedom: they may read it as-is or modify it. Jean-Pierre Balpe is the blind poet. The texts displayed in front of him gradually incorporate vocabulary and style from the other generated texts. This triple text generator, simulating three distinct authors, is coupled with a music generator designed and implemented by Baboni-Schilingi. The two types of generators exchange information in the form of metadata. This performance exemplifies the challenge that automatic generation poses to authors: Guglielmi accepted the machine’s texts relatively easily, but Henri Deluy resisted, mocking them, wanting to show that the simulated author meant to replace him could not match his level of creativity — a position that was not always easy to maintain!” (Philippe Bootz, Les basiques : la littérature numérique , Leonardo/Olats, 2006)

The three videos here presented are excerpts from the documentary Personne (2000) directed by Hervé Nisic.

A selection of 101 poems was also published by Farrago (Cent un poèmes du poète aveugle, 1999).

Interactive and generative installation commissioned by the Mission de la langue française (Lyon, Brussels, Montreal, Dakar), October 2000 — January 2001

Set designer: Maurice Benayoun
Composer: Jean-Baptiste Barrière

Jean-Pierre Balpe presents the work as follows:

“Created simultaneously in three French-speaking cities—Brussels, Lyon, and Dakar—Labylogue is a labyrinth of texts in which spectators in the different cities, equipped with a joystick and a microphone, attempt to meet one another. Though they cannot see each other, they speak: the computer interprets what they say and, against the bluish background of memory from these exchanges, inscribes its own interpretation of the captured dialogues.

This interpretation is generated automatically, so that each journey is always unique. When participants find themselves in the same part of the labyrinth, their image appears on the screen.” (poetiques.blogg.org/labylogue-a115641036)

Maurice Benayoun adds: “Halfway between a book and Borges’s Library of Babel, the walls are covered with phrases generated in real time, each one an interpretation of the ongoing dialogue. These texts are then interpreted orally, animating the labyrinth’s space like a synthetic chorus wandering along the edges of language in action.

Digital mediation introduces interpretive layers into communication that escape intention, sometimes obscuring meaning. Speech then reclaims its place. It slides over the machine’s interpretation, privileging human contact where the written trace starts to drift.” (www.benayoun.com/Labylogb.html)

Interactive and generative installation commissioned by the MARCO museum (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo), AFAA, and Alliance Française (Monterrey, Mexico), February—April 2002

Scenography: Miguel Chevalier
Composer: Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi

According to artist Miguel Chevalier: "MeTapolis is a virtual reality installation created for the Marco Museum in Monterrey, Mexico, immersing the viewer in an interactive 400m² environment. It is composed of fragments of images of the city of Monterrey, combinable in 2D and 3D, a generative soundtrack by Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi inspired by the city’s soundscape, and multicultural generative texts by Jean-Pierre Balpe built on the same principles. This original work exemplifies a generic and imaginary urban principle tied to all global megacities. It has been shown in various cities worldwide to become the city of cities—a global and transdisciplinary city.” (miguel-chevalier.com/work/Metapolis-2002)

The video we have has been titled Babel Poésie by Jean-Pierre Balpe. This title can be confusing, as the author later created another interactive installation by that name for the P0es1e festival in Berlin (February—April 2004). Like MeTapolis, it was multilingual, “an international poetry generator capable of producing texts in German, English, Spanish, Italian, and French. It writes texts for these new European citizens who now find themselves faced with a multilingual space where they often understand fragments without speaking most of the languages. These texts are both residual texts, chaotic speeches, blends of words and ideas, AND real contemporary poems produced in an infinite process of mental association: each poem is entirely new and cannot be reproduced. In its ideal installation, Babel Poésie is displayed across three screens to act as a permanent performance and a confrontation between active readers present.” (poetiques.blogg.org/babel-poesie-a115641040?noajax&mobile=1)

Generative and interactive virtual reality installation, in collaboration with Miguel Chevalier. This project led to the publication of a book (L’Herbier, Le Promeneur, 2009) and an artist’s edition box set (Herbarius 2059: 12 graines, Bernard Chauveau éditeur / Le Néant Éditeur, 2013).

According to the description on the artist’s site: “Herbarius 2059 is the digital avatar of the long-standing Herbarius tradition. It still resembles a book but blends the real and the virtual, featuring texts and images generated in real time. On an album of twelve blank pages, a fractal flower by Miguel Chevalier evolves before the reader’s eyes, side by side with a generative text by Jean-Pierre Balpe. Each virtual seed corresponds to a zodiac sign. Inspired by the historical Herbarius, Miguel creates a new virtual herbarium composed of ‘Fractal Flowers’—autonomous virtual seeds that sprout randomly, grow, bloom, and die only to give rise to a new evolving seed. We are transported into an intriguing vegetal universe populated with mineral flowers reminiscent of crystals. Facing each flower, the automatic writing generator by Jean-Pierre Balpe provides an imaginative description where fiction is omnipresent. The result is endlessly generated texts that constantly renew themselves before the reader’s eyes. Herbarius 2059 is a hymn to hybridization, opening a door to a timeless imaginary.

The text sources were drawn from scientific writings spanning from the 14th century to today. Rooted in tradition but leveraging modern technology, Herbarius points toward a 21st-century vision of bibliophilia.” (www.miguel-chevalier.com/work/herbarius-2059-2009)

Jean-Pierre Balpe shares an example from his generative herbarium: “Who does not know the Creeping Bugrane (or Linaria alba), a prolific plant, bushy, diaphanous, widely spaced, with multiple uses and so often described. The flower of the Bugrane blooms under oblique sunlight. The flowers of the Creeping Bugrane appear in September, repeated prominently; their colors range from white to violet, including blue. Its stem splits into many small branches, each bearing a large ragged flower. Bugrane seed oil mixed with Buttercup powder is used to multiply passions. July: many black fruits resembling small strawberries. The roots of the Creeping Bugrane are fasciculated, deep, and strong. A perfect plant of the Armenians, the Creeping Bugrane. Habitat and habits: southern Morocco (where the sun works hard) or northern California (where the hour is sorrowful). This plant was once called ‘Rare Arsenic’ by the Germans. It purges leukotrichia from below. There’s a message in the being of the Creeping Bugrane: try to avoid complicated issues. ‘When the fruits of the Creeping Bugrane ripen in August, everything moves toward evanescence,’ writes novelist Albie Saperstien in her book. ‘We should think less about what we do than what we are’. The first description of the Creeping Bugrane can be found in David Alfaro Siquieros’s herbarium dated 1223.” (poetiques.blogg.org/un-herbier-numerique-a115641128)

Interactive installation in collaboration with Nicolas Ticot and the company XLR-Project, as part of the WeekEnd des langues in Lyon.

It was presented at 18 bis Quai Saint-Vincent, 69001 Lyon, from March 25 to 28, 2010.

Software development: Pierce Warnecke
3D production: José Fuste
Performer: Aurélie Sorrel Cros

Nicolas Ticot presents the project as follows: “COLOR VOICE IA is a generative, audiovisual, theatrical, and participatory installation.

At the center of the setup: an interactive microphone. The spectator is invited to participate, question, and occupy the space. Through their actions, they interact with the environment. Nicolas Ticot and his team invited writer Jean-Pierre Balpe (Officer of Arts and Letters, poet and researcher in the field of literature and computing) to work on the theme of ‘meta-language’ through the lens of the ‘Situationist movement.’

Thanks to an interactive system developed by our team, we were able to integrate and adapt one of the first artificial intelligences for generating literature, created by J.-P. Balpe in 1981. Nicolas stages the real and the virtual through a projected avatar on one of the walls of Les Subsistances and a live performer, Aurélie Sorrel Cros, who wanders through the interactive space and invites spectators to converse with her virtual double.

Several hundred participants came to interact with our avatar on March 25, 26, and 27, 2010.

Even though the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined back in 1956, it had not yet become part of everyday language.

By intentionally choosing to explore the complexity of creative and technological processes—as well as a title as mysterious as it is ‘techno’—we were able to produce an innovative work that fully embraced its experimental approach.” (xlrproject.net/color-voice)

Interactive and generative opera project (incomplete production)

Composer: Alexandre Raskatov
Librettist: Michel Jaffrennou
Production: Ex-Nihilo

Inspired by the story of Bluebeard, this digital opera was designed for CD-ROM publication, following a structure similar to that of video games, and was intended to have a highly complex architecture:

“The CD-ROM contains 441 events—21 belonging to the opera’s narrative thread Dieu hésite…, and 420 forming a separate layer of contextual events. A ‘reading’ is just one of the many possible pathways through this space (441 factorial divided by 21, which means, for any given reader, an infinite number of possibilities).

The entry point into the CD-ROM is randomly chosen from among the 420 contextual events. However, entry into the music is not random: it always begins with the opera’s overture and proceeds, over 42 minutes, along the dramaturgical sequence A-B-C-…-U. The connection between contextual and dramaturgical events is conveyed through sound: the further the reader is from a dramaturgical event, the fainter the sound. The reader must then navigate toward the best possible sound to understand Dieu hésite…. The two extremes are: either the reader remains entirely within the opera, or never reaches it at all. For example, if the reader enters at event 21, they are far from A and must seek to move closer. If they enter at event 8, they are within A, and their task becomes to go from A to B, and so on…”

Jean-Pierre Balpe tells the end of the story: “There was only a prototype presentation, as the software tools needed to complete the project simply didn’t exist at the time. What I really wanted was to create an opera similar to today’s video games, where the spectator could move through a vast range of possibilities […]. So there was no staging—just a simple presentation of the prototype at IRCAM in the form of a video and possibly a CD-ROM.” (personal communication)

The working documents presented here show thorough reflections on the project’s conceptual design, as well as some of the texts generated. The first video features the only audiovisual production of the project we’ve been able to recover, while the second is a more recent montage by Jean-Pierre Balpe, using texts generated by the generator originally created for this opera.