Poe, E.: Near a Raven: I quote: "The poem below [Link] was composed in 1995 and bears an uncanny similarity to a certain famous poem by Edgar Allen Poe. This is one of my longer pieces of constrained writing. Constrained writing (an old idea, but one which greatly increased in popularity in the latter half of the 20th century as a result of the work of the mostly French group Oulipo) is the art of constructing a work of prose or poetry that obeys one or more artificially-imposed rules. For example, there are two published novels from which the letter 'e' is absent - Gadsby, by Ernest Vincent Wright (1938), and La disparition by George Perec (still in print, and even available in a recent English translation (A Void, translated by Gilbert Adair) that also obeys the constraint!). Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to figure out the constraint imposed on this poem. The answer is given after the end, so if you want to try to figure it out, just look at the beginning of the poem, which is probably both necessary and sufficient to discover the rule. If you'd like a veiled hint, here's one: this poem could not have been written prior to 1947, since all the details of the rule it uses were not known before then." Link
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
