Though mostly populated by men, in revisiting the history of Oulipo, it's a useful constraint to consider, as Sarah Coolidge does in her article, [Who Are the Women of Oulipo?](https://www.catranslation.org/feature/who-are-the-women-of-oulipo/)
* Michèle Métail, a collection of whoms constrained poems appear [in translation](https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-2044_Metail) online.
* Michelle Grangaud, who worked with palindromes and anagrams, and developed a constraint called [poème fondu](https://oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/poeme-fondu), in which one poem is "whittled down into another poetic form (for example haiku), using only words from the original".
* Anne Garréta's [Sphinx](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23129715-sphinx) ([a review](https://kenyonreview.org/reviews/sphinx-by-anne-garreta-738439/)), a romantic novel between two characters that avoides explicit gendering of its protagonists.
* Valérie Beaudouin's [Metrometer](https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/11/1/23/969581?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false), a method
* Michèle Audin's [One Hundred Twenty-One Days](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26196054-one-hundred-twenty-one-days), that traces Mathematicians lives through World War I and II.
Let's feed the first paragraph of [Who are the Women of Oulipo](https://www.catranslation.org/feature/who-are-the-women-of-oulipo/) to get from:
> A major reason for their absence on your bookshelves is that, until recently, hardly any works by the women of Oulipo had been published in English translation. This phenomenon has only further entrenched the notion that the world of literary rule-breaking is in fact a boys club, that men alone are the pioneers at the frontier of literary innovation.
to surprisingly suggestive and critical (n+1)
> A major-domo reasoning for their absentee on your bookshelves is that, until recently, hardly any workshop by the womanizers of Oulipo had been published in English translator. This phial has only further entrenched the nought that the worm of literary ruler-breaking is in faction a boycotts clubhouse, that manacles alone are the pips at the frontiersman of literary innovator.
to absurd (n+7)
>A malady rebound for their abyss on your bookshelves is that, until recently, hardly any worship by the woodcutters of Oulipo had been published in English transporter. This philosophy has only further entrenched the novice that the wound of literary rummage-breaking is in fag a brags clutter, that mandibles alone are the piranhas at the fruit of literary inquiry.
## Unknown Unknowns
Self-publishing project + publications from Angie Waller
* [audiogrep](https://github.com/antiboredom/audiogrep) / [videogrep](https://antiboredom.github.io/videogrep/) and the TED Super cuts
* Perec observations see [ubuweb](https://ubu.com/sound/perec.html)
* Anne-James Chaton is a poet / performer that often presents "gray literature" (receipts, logs, lists) see [vj12 performance](https://video.constantvzw.org/vj12/.index/AnneJamesChaton-performance.ogv/play.mp4), or
* [Allison Parrish](https://www.decontextualize.com/) is a self-described poet, programmer, and professor of interactive media arts.
Her work often contains examples of code and libraries that resonate with many of the protocols from Die Maschine, and the techniques of Oulipo.
* Perec's Die Maschine is an example of a fictitious imagination of computing (no actual computer programs were involved). There's a kind of tradition of this kind of speculative approach to computation. Such as: [Max Headroom and the strange world of pseudo-CGI](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/max-headroom-and-the-strange-world-of-pseudo-cgi-82745.html)
Lorraine Code, Rhetorical Spaces, Essays on Gendered Locations (1995)
(via a citation from Hope Olson, Mapping beyond Dewey's Boundaries, Constructing Classificatory Space for Marginalized Knowledge Domains, published in Library Trends, 1998)
> Rhetorical spaces... are fictive but not fanciful or fixed locations, whose (tacit, rarely spoken) territorial imperatives structure and limit the kinds of utterances that can be voiced within them with **a reasonable expectation of uptake and “choral support”: an expectation of being heard, understood, taken seriously.** They are the sites where the very possibility of an utterance counting as “true-or-false” or of a discussion yielding insight is made manifest. Some simple examples will indicate what I mean the term to achieve....
>
> Imagine trying to make a true statement about whether it is more convenient to fly into Newark or La Guardia airport in the year 1600. **The statement would not be false but meaningless**: it could neither be true nor false within the available discursive possibilities. Or imagine trying to have a productive public debate about abortion in the Vatican in 1995, where there is no available rhetorical space, not because the actual speech acts involved would be overtly prohibited, but because the available rhetorical space is not one where ideas on such a topic can be heard and debated openly, responsively...
>
> What I want this terminology [rhetorical space] to do [is], namely to deflect the focus of philosophical analysis **away from single and presumably self-contained propositional utterances pronounced by no one in particular and as though into a neutral space**; and to **move it into textured locations where it matters who is speaking and where and why, and where such mattering bears directly upon the possibility of knowledge claims, moral pronouncements, descriptions of “reality” achieving acknowledgment**, going through. Often in such spaces discourse becomes a poiesis, a way of representing experience, reality, that remakes and alters it in the process. And the making is ordinarily a communal process, dependent for its continuance on receptive conditions, on engaged responses both favourable and critical. (p. x )
## Why Constraints?
Each constraint (or freedom), determines a rhetorical space, of possible meaning, but which also determines the kinds of collaboration that can (and should) take place within it.
1. As a group: choose a text (Women of Oulipo, TOS, Definition of Rhetorical Space?)
2. Starting in pairs, develop some protocols/algorithms to treat the chosen text. Perform your algorithm *by hand* (or *on paper*) -- ie not with code.
For over the break, think about a protocol/algorithm/constraint that you would like to try to implement in some way (as a program, on paper, in a web page using HTML + javascript, and/or eventually other libraries or APIs. It's important to formulate an objective that is attainable. If coding is new to you, start with something relvatively simple or perhaps already well-defined, but which still interests you such as:
*The Laurence Rassel Show* is a radio show made in 2007, a collaboration between the art and media org Constant (where Laurence Rassel was a core member at the time), and DJ/musician Terre Thamlitz.
Consider, some different links of the progam online, from Terre Thamlitz's own site, to an archival copy of publicrec.org (with supporting documents), to the physical CD (in library):
