“An Experiment in Yellow is a digital “deformance” in Twine of Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), remediating passages of text through multiple cycles of prompts between Midjourney, ChatGPT, and DALL-E. “An Experiment in Yellow” “deforms and performs” the story anew to underscore the collapse of meaning-making into chaos in generative AI’s successive self-cannibalizing remediations. The intention is to amplify the unease rippling through the spiraling destabilization of the protagonist’s consciousness while also asking, what is the literary? How integral is humanity to authorship and how can that be defined? The interactor can decide.

“Spelarne”- published in Swedish 1903, is a protomodernist short story by Hjalmar Soderberg. This “deformance” argues through a re-imagination of the story through layers from text to illustration to abstraction and then finally to augmented reality, feeding lines of text to various generative AI and through hand drawn and printed imagery, to create a textual experience that deforms and oscillates to moving picture, revealing the way in which Soderberg was anticipating a modernist manner of writing for cinema.

“Moor and Mead Hall” “deforms” the opening of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by presenting it as music.  Reducing Beowulf from words to music reveals the underlying tension the poet frames as a battle between the justified Danes and the monsters abandoned by God, identifying it as an issue of territory, not morality. By removing the voice of the poet and leaving sound alone, “Moor and Mead Hall” focuses on the story beneath the Christian filter that itself may initially have deformed the oral pre-Christian version of the epic.

“In There Behind the Door” is a digital deformance of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) that makes visible her “topopoetics” (Cresswell). This work, published in Scalar, tests sound-, text-, image-, and video-generating AI–tools where arguably “there is no there there”--to iteratively reveal her poetics as a dense intertextual crossroads where operational pronouns of place mash up Aristotelian, Baconian, and Cartesian topoi together with Matisse’s “Grand Interieur Rouge.”