Artur Matuck

The idea of a faulty typewriter came to me, because I was misunderstood by Americans who nevertheless seemed to enjoyed my company. Humorously I thought they were improving

my ideas, but then I was really poking at them, that is, making fun of them, and I think this has to do with my personality.

I always tried to be humorous with people and I have pick up on this phenomenon of cross cultural misunderstanding to play around with Americans I have studied and taught in several American universities, in Lowa, California, Pennsylvania and recently in Florida and I have always played around with Americans in regard to cultural stereotypes and ideologies and in the end I was really being serious and this has always reflect upon my artistic activities.

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I used to say to them that American football would really develop when they discover me round ball. Or I would ask how many degrees Iowa is above the equatorial line and no matter how many degrees they thought it was I would answer that above me equator there is only the atmosphere and other layers above it. That Iowa was North of the equator. I sew used to say that in Brazil maps would locate South America above the equator and not North America. And I would ask why American maps were upside down and they would make many strange faces when hearing that.

Then during a seminar, that I did not have the time to prepare, I spontaneously mentioned the idea of a faulty typewriter, affirming that a typewriter that would make mistakes may actually improve our ideas, our texts, because mistakes could actually generate new ideas. I have heard that Karl Krauss had made studies about typographical mistakes in texts, and that he found them to be significant and not merely accidental.

And we students of [Professor Gregory] Ulmer were also reading Freud; his concepts on association, on dream construction, were being used as parameters or metaphors for the creation of alternative forms of electronic culture. All of that made the suggestion of a virtual faulty typewriter very well received, so much that after a week someone told me that me virtual typewriter had been programmed and was already available to be used as an object in

a MOO environment.

The MOO (MUD object oriented) is a text based virtual reality constructor that allows for interaction among different virtual characters activated by real human beings.

But in the beginning many people taught that a writing machine that makes mistakes was very stupid and I think that even myself did not realize the potential it had for a computer assisted form of creative writing.

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My first intention was to play, to be humorous, to disrupt writing, to play with language, to create anarchist forms of discourses, to be blatantly intrusive into language structures, to introduce mistakes, and playfully say that they could create new ideas, but that at first was a joke, and I think it was understood as a joke, but even so, the group of students around me, and the programmers that were assisting us, accept the concept as a play thing but even so they thought that it would be OK to go ahead with it, that after all, it could be fun.

It was only after I remembered few things about the proportion of consonants and vowels in texts that the possibilities of the faulty typewriter for "real", "serious" writing dawned on me.

First, I remembered hearing or reading that the richness of the texts of the Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa could actually be measured. Rosa is the Joyce of Brazil, or we could say that Joyce is the Rosa of Dublin, that is to say, that Rosa is considered to be the most innovative of Brazilian writers.

If one counts consonants and vowels in his text, the proportion (or ratio of consonants in relation to vowels will be higher than in a normal (one could say, journalistic) Portuguese text, and that would indicate that his text was more "informative", richer, than the normal Portuguese text.

Then, I remembered of an explanation of me information theory published by me Brazilian poet and theoretician Decio Pignatary, in which he mentioned the same fact and provided an example with the following consonants: C P C B N. Pignatary wrote that those letters were sufficient for a reader to read the word "Copacabana", but that the sequence of vowels O A A A A would not suffice for a direct association with the word where they come from: "Copacabana". Certainly the choice of the word "Copacabana" was an excellent mnemonic device.

Thinking in retrospect I suppose that those two examples that have inspired my work were, not coincidentally related to Brazilian culture, although the theory behind them, originated in computational linguistics, had first being thought by Edgar Allan Poe in some of his fictional texts like "The Golden Bug".

I could also go on to say that the "Copacabana Palace" has been a very famous hotel in Copacabana Beach where many American stars have been during Brazilian Carnival festivities. "Copacabana" is certainly a cultural icon in the whole process of American Brazilian cultural dialogue and will most likely floured in my Web site for this reason.

Thus, today, I realize that my intentions were not only theoretical, or literary, but also very personal in the sense that I was attempting to build an identity as an artist, a writer, a person, living in a foreign environment. That is I was performing the persona of a Brazilian, Third World hero, facing the dominant American culture.

My readings of Rosa and Pignatary were then certainly instrumental in the concept that provided the initial programming for the faulty typewriter, the programming that resulted in the typewriter

called "Theoretical Wind".