The expansion of NANOGENMO is National Novel Generation Month. The Internet artist Darius Kazemi calls for writing code that could generate a novel of 50000 words in his tweet in November, 2013 ( Kazemi et al., NaNoGenMo ). He tweets, “Hey, who wants to join me in NaNoGenMo: spend the month writing code that generates a 50k word novel, share the novel & the code at the end” ( Kazemi, “Hey, who wants” ).The Github page of NaNoGenMo is administered by Kazemi, Hugo van Kemenade, Michael Paulukonis, and Martin O'Leary. This group of internet artists sets out the rules, goals, and ways to participate in the NANOGENMO. Their intention is to bring in participants to devote to the project. Running from 1st November 12:01 am GMT, to 12:01 am GMT 1st December, participants write the code that eventually generates the novel of 50000 words. The rules require participants to share at least one novel that is being written and its source code. The source code does not need to be copyrighted, although participants do need to be cautious about acquiring rights for other sources that are used to produce the novels. The Github pages documented 9 editions of NANOGENO since 2013, covering 500 works (Kazemi, NaNoGenMo). This genre indicates an e-lit movement that experiments, expands and challenges the affordability and capability of computational algorithms. At the same time, there have been many critiques pertaining to their literariness, the role of authors, authenticity and the concept of reading and writing.

Steve Tomasula discusses the role of machine as an author and reader that changed the concept of writing and reading, for instance, the code poetry of Nick Montfort’s “ppg256-1” produces random string of words and letters leads to ask the nature of the poetry, the role of authors and readers, and authenticity. Machine poetry, code poetry and other pertained contemporary literature that “[have] a huge variety of aesthetics, and authorial stances” of what Tomasula calls as “postliterary or postliterature literature” (Tomasula “Our Tools Make Us (and Our Literature) Post” 50-52; also see Berens, Kathi et al., Editorial Statement, consequence ). Hence, NANOGENMO can be pivotal for algorithmically designed, futuristic works of electronic literature. Published in 2022, the fourth Electronic Literature Collection incorporates 6 NANOGENMO works, including Nick Montfort’s ‘consequence’ and Leonardo Flores’ ‘Tiny Protests / Protestitas’ ( Montfort’s consequence, ELC4 and Flores’ Tiny Protests / Protestitas, ELC4 ).

Reference:

Berens, Kathi., Murray, John., Skains, Lyle., Torres, Rui and Zamora, Mia. Editorial Statement, In Nick Montfort, consequence, Electronic Literature Volume 4, Electronic Literature Organization, 2022. https://collection.eliterature.org/4/consequence

Flores, Leonardo. “‘Tiny Protests / Protestitas’. In Kathi Inman Berens, John T. Murray, Lyle Skains, Rui Torres and Mia Zamora, Electronic Literature Volume 4, Electronic Literature Organization, 2022. https://collection.eliterature.org/4/tiny-protests-protestitas

Montfort, Nick. “consquence” In Kathi Inman Berens, John T. Murray, Lyle Skains, Rui Torres and Mia Zamora, Electronic Literature Volume 4, Electronic Literature Organization, 2022.

(2013 November 13). Hey, who wants to join me in NaNoGenMo: spend the month writing code that generates a 50k word novel, share the novel & the code at the end [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/tinysubversions/status/396305662000775168
Kazemi, Darius., Kemenade, Hugo., Paulukonis, Michael and O'Leary, Martin. NaNoGenMo(2013). GitHub repository . https://nanogenmo.github.io/

Tomasula, Steve. “Our Tools Make Us (and Our Literature) Post”. In Joseph Tabbi (Authors), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, pp. 39–59, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. ”http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474230285.ch-00

Term author:
Shanmugapriya T