Samenvatting

At the (Not) Jammed Poetry Night at Limestone Books Maastricht in 2022, seven writers read their poetry alongside “Scott”, a real-time printing system designed by the DuctTape Collective. Using Google’s English-language speech-to-text voice recognition system, it transcribed the spoken words in real time and printed them out on a dot-matrix printer manually operated by the two members of DuctTape. The transcriptions were flawed, misrecognizing spoken English words, or even fictitious when the poets read in Dutch. What’s more, the two members of DuctTape operated the printer’s paper roll in the manner of DJs scratching vinyl records, adjusting word and line spacing in real time so that the texts were printed not as conventional blocks of text, but as “parole in libertà” - a term coined in the early 20th century by the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti - or quasi free-form visual poetry.
Foreword in Mimesis: The Non-Standard Poetry Book, Maastricht: Limestone Books, 2025