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About the Work

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell depicted a literature generated entirely through mechanical means, with no human input besides the treacherous activity of cranking levers.

In the first year of the war which shaped Orwellʼs adolescence, Gertrude Stein weighed in on the modernist war against conventional meaning with Tender Buttons. I felt an unforgettable glee reading Steinʼs astonishing sentences for the first time. With an air of having been thrown together randomly, yet simultaneously clearly constructed with extreme care, they present a profound artistry through their evocative prosody, syntactical intrigue and shattered webs of connotations. Abandonment of the pursuit of meaning in a traditional sense allowed finer shards of meaning to rise to the surface and assume an independent lustre which they could not have held before.

Bionic Ally is a gathering place for literature generated through a partnership of human and machine – the middle way between Orwellʼs versificator and Steinʼs meaningful nonsense. The principal tools used are autosuggest bars and autocorrections originating in smartphone software. Serendipity and our societyʼs unflinching capitulation to psychological surveillance are the sources of its quasi-prophetic powers.

In general I do not type strings longer than a single letter when writing as BionicAlly, and guide the creative process only through my choices and the prompting of new subjects with the introduction of a new initial letter. Deleting letters and accepting corrections of partial and reversed strings provides another Semi-Automatic resource for poetic genesis. At the same time, I'm grateful that my conscious will is still the chief arbiter of my creative decisions, and if I choose to break my habits for the sake of artistry, I do so without apology. When I wish to be particularly transparent about the process, segments I have directly typed appear underlined.

Autosuggest software learns over time, meaning that the particular turns of phrase encountered in my work proceed from my own linguistic habits whilst typing on my phone. Occasionally Semi-Automatic Poetry pursuades me that it can produce as deep or deeper insights into my life and outlook on the world than poetry I create in the traditional way.

If you would like to contact me or contribute to Bionic Ally, please use the submission form or email kolbitr[at]outlook.com, including your work's title and an instruction on how you wish your work to be credited.

Many people in my life have noticed and enjoyed the serendipitous creativity of predictive keyboard text entry, and I make no claims to being the first to use this to poetic ends; but I want this blog to take its part in formalising the recognition of Semi-Automatic writing as a culturally endorsed art form. The Semi-Automatic process has something unique to offer us, both in our creativity and in our grasp of the nature of our humanness in this early stage of the bionic era. Join me in my verbal adventure, by turns fun, freakish and fascinating, and explore the grey connective space between your analog mind and its digital hand-held reflection.

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