thedeletionist.com


http://www.thedeletionist.com

JavaScript bookmarklet
Collaborative online project created by Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul and Nick Montfort


< Artists + Writers


thedeletionist.com

Launched in 2013, The Delitionist is a collaborative online project created by Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul and Nick Montfort that allows its users to submit the text on any webpage to a process of erasure, deleting selected letters and words with the aim of making a poem. Taking the form of a JavaScript bookmarklet that can easily be installed on a browser’s bookmark bar, The Delitionist is the result of a careful study of the history of erasure poetry, a mode that Borsuk, Juul and Montfort trace back to Bob Brown’s 1931 book Gems. Eventually they developed 30 different methods of erasure for The Delitionist, which determines the most appropriate method depending on the webpage with which it is confronted. The creators of The Delitionist underline the fact that the process is not random: The Delitionist will always produce identical results from a given webpage. In an essay about the project (“Opening a Worl in the World Wide Web: The Aesthetics and Poetics of Delitionism”), Borsuk, Juul and Montfort explain that they “were not interested in crafting exquisite poetry via artificial intelligence, but rather in understanding the features that make erasure legible as poetry.

– Raphael Rubinstein