“A Literatura Cibernética 2” by Pedro Barbosa

In A Literatura Cibernética 2: Um Sintetizador de Narrativas [Cybernetic Literature 2: A Narrative Synthesizer] (1980), Pedro Barbosa advocates the same analytical perspective of literary machines, which he had begun in the first volume. Influenced by Max Bense and Abraham Moles, the author develops the idea of “artificial text,” which would be later challenged by E. M. de Melo e Castro (1987), in the sense that Castro’s transmedia stance considers that all texts, produced over time with the aid of various technological tools, are always artificial.

In this second volume, which is devoted to fiction, Barbosa publishes a narrative synthesizer, addressing the concept of “matrix-text” as a transformable grid by the computer program. Being aware that in the fictional field there is a concern for semantic and narrative coherence, the author publishes the most interesting outputs of the variants of the series “Era Uma Vez…” [Once Upon a Time…], “Fábulas” [Fables], “Histórias dum Baralho de Cartas” [Stories of a Deck of Cards] and, finally, “História dum Homem Citadino” [Cityman Story], whose literary reception has been more explored, e.g. Christopher Funkhouser (2007) and Roberto Simanowski (2011), who curiously read it as a poem.