A side quest within my ongoing exploration of liveness lately has been applying the notion to writing. I don’t mean liveness in a figurative sense, such as a particularly well-conceived fictional character coming “alive” in a good novel. I mean a literal sort of liveness, marked by protean dynamism and interactivity affordances in the text itself. Of the sort portrayed as magic runes on the One Ring or Durin’s Door in LOTR or the horcrux-diary with a bit of Voldemort’s soul in it in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Words that embody their own agency.Text is alive when it can reshape or regenerate itself in response to the environment and the reader’s actions, but without there necessarily being a living speaker or writer producing the liveness in real time through some sort of rewrite loop that passes through (and arguably produces) something resembling personhood. We’re learning that personhood-production is only one way to produce text, and not a particularly good way to produce living texts.We’re currently reading The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf in the Contraptions Book Club. Chat thread.In this post I’m concerned with living text produced by processes other than the default one — a live human speaker or writer responding to their environment in real time by modulating the stream of words they speak or type.Note that oral vs written is not an important distinction here — both can be live or dead kinds of text (think of memorized speeches or phatic utterances for example, or written texts evolving through drafts based on feedback), even though it’s generally easier for humans to speak liveness than to write it. This is notably not true for computers. Some processes (such as transformer models) do mimic the temporal-serial quality of spoken or serially written text, but other processes (such as text diffusion) have an all-at-once atemporal quality to how they generate text. Historically, the idea that language can literally be alive in this sense has