Jean-Pierre Balpe, (Meta-)Author: The Infinite Writing
International Conference
12-13 June 2025
University of Paris 8, Campus Condorcet

Jean-Pierre Balpe, one of the first authors and theorists in France to take an interest in the creative literary potential of computers but still little known to the general public, has been working for almost half a century on the automatic generation of texts as a mode of literary creation that questions our assumptions about language, writing and literature. Over the years, he has closely followed the evolution of digital tools and environments, developing increasingly powerful generators on the one hand, and investing in digital social networks on the other, not only to publish some of the automatically generated poetic and narrative texts, but also to attribute them to fictional beings, pseudo- or heteronymous ‘profiles’. The latest version of his text-generation software, a symbolic artificial intelligence, which to our knowledge remains unique worldwide in terms of its scope and refinement, is based on a theory of meaning, language, and their relationship to the world, developed by Balpe from the questions raised in his attempts to model generative literary writing (Balpe 2000, 2021). It includes millions of pieces of linguistic data accumulated since the 1990s, as well as a grammar defined manually and perfected as the experiments progressed.

First a poet and literature teacher, author of teaching manuals and theoretical works on the teaching of poetry (Balpe 1974, 1980) as well as collections of poetry (Balpe 1975, 1985, 1990), Jean-Pierre Balpe discovered computers at the end of the 1970s at the school where he taught and immediately became interested in their linguistic and poetic potential. He became an adviser to the Ministry of Culture on the digital transition, proposed a ‘clandestine’ seminar at INALCO on the automatic text generation, and took part in the Alamo group (Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs) of the Oulipo movement from its inception in 1981. However, he soon left the group because he found its approach to text generation limited. In 1987, he published Roman [Novel], a story generator for use in the classroom, accompanied by a manual entitled Initiation à la génération de textes en langue naturelle: exemples de programmes en Basic (Balpe 1986, Centre national de documentation pédagogique 1987). In 1985, he was in charge of the ‘Labyrinthe du langage’ area of the Centre Pompidou exhibition Les Immatériaux, curated by Jean-Philippe Lyotard and Thierry Chaput, which left its mark on the history of new media art with its reflections on the entanglement between art, technology, science and society. He then joined the university, becoming director of the Hypermedia Department at Paris 8 and then co-director of CIREN (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches en Esthétiques Numériques) and CITU (Créations Interactives Transdisciplinaires Universitaires). While pursuing his theoretical and pedagogical work, he continued to develop his software and worked on numerous collaborative projects, notably with composer Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi and poets Joseph Guglielmi and Henri Deluy (Trois mythologies et un poète aveugle, 1997) and artists such as Michel Jaffrennou (Barbe-bleue, 1998), Grégory Chatonsky (Capture, 2009), Miguel Chevalier (Herbarius 2059, 2009), and Orlan (ORLAN & ORLANoïde, 2018). At the end of the 1990s, her work also inspired a documentary by Hervé Nisic (Personne, 2000).

With the arrival of the Internet, Balpe quickly moved into cyberspace, creating hypertext fictions (Trajectoires, La Disparition du Général Proust) and a labyrinth of blogs where he mixed ‘human’ writing with generated texts. He also ventured into writing detective fiction – with automatically generated passages – questioning the society of the future under the effect of digital networks (La Toile, 1999). His website (now unavailable on the web and currently being rebuilt) has also developed as a constantly evolving space, with ‘mazes’ that allow pages of a novel and other potentially infinite series to be generated, right up to his ‘Posthumous Poems’. Finally, since the birth of social networks, he has been exploring the new spaces for communication and creation offered by Facebook and YouTube, extending his universe now called ‘Un Monde incertain’ [An Uncertain World] and continuing to write under the hijacked names of Proustian figures (Antoine Elstir, Maurice Roman…, and above all, Rachel Charlus). After experimenting with phototext, Balpe now explores video editing with ‘natural’, archival and synthetic images and voices, and even into musical composition with non-professional tools. The generations respond to each other and clash in this ‘work’ (a concept that should also be questioned), in the form of ‘battles’ [Combats] between ChatGPT and Balpe’s generator. Finally, despite his observation that ‘The book is the whole problem…’ (Balpe 2001), we also discover a fascination for the book object and its history in the blog Ma bibliothèque XVI, XVII et XVIIIe siècle.

On the whole, the automatic generation of texts and personal writing, the fictional and the autobiographical, the poetic and the theoretical, the codex and the digital continue to coexist and enrich one another in the Balpean universe. Jean-Pierre Balpe’s work and thinking raise a number of highly topical issues, not only in the field of literature but more generally in the relationship between creativity, reception, machines and audiences.

This conference, organized as part of a project funded by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord, with the support of the CEMTI, PLH, CELLAM, and Paragraphe laboratories, and in partnership with the Electronic Literature Lab and the Electronic Literature Organization, aims to encourage and bring together for the first time research and reflection on and around this innovative work and thought, with its elusive perimeters and its constant questioning of writing in all its forms.