An Mertens will give a lecture and host a workshop at l’Ecole Supérieure d’Arts et Design de St Etienne on the use of the Python programming language for literary creation.

A line of code is like an action of a recipe. One prepares an ingredient, applies the action and the ingredient will be transformed. Oulipo, the Parisian collective around Raymond Queneau explored the idea of recipes or constraints for creating potential literatures since the 60s. Their work is a great inspiration for writing using code.

By using concrete examples, participants of the workshop learn to generate new transformed texts based on existing ones. They will work individually and in group towards the goal of creating generative publications at the end of the workshop.