First, who knew that Alex had his finger on the pulse like that? The COMMENTS section following the article is a fascinating window into some of the issues we’re playing with this term (sorry): some commenters see an enjoyable and subversive “hustle”; some see a counterludic structure of gamified exploitation being exposed by canny performance artists; some see a fascinating metagame at work; others see what Huizinga calls the “spoil-sport” ruining the Bike Angels game in a “this is why we can’t have nice things” vein.

Second, as we look at Montfort and Strickland’s project, I wanted to alert you to an important precursor, Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1960), a paper-based machine of sorts that generates 100 trillion sonnets and was the founding act, more or less of OULIPO, a collective of mostly French avant-garde writers (the acronym translates to “workshop for potential literature”) who experimented algorithmic and other hacks to play with words. Montfort and Strickland are quite aware of this legacy and I think the Spar project is an homage of sorts.

Here’s a cute early Web transposition of Queneau’s project (the Interwebs used to be fun, folks!). If anyone is interested in histories of the avant garde, there are lots of final project possibilities re: OULIPO, Surrealism, Fluxus, etc. etc.

Oh yeah: one more thing. I shared an open link to the NYT piece, but in case you don’t know, all CUNY folk get free digital access to the NYT! And the WSJ (Whomp whomp).