“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” offers a digital deformance (Samuels and McGann) of a selection of poems from one section of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) using sound-, text-, image-, and video-generating AI. The deformances are not illustrations of Stein's text, but rather demonstrations of the types of thought experimentation that Stein practiced and theorized.Each still or moving image, and each sound work in this exhibition generated by a Large Language Model is "plunging to deep recesses of textual and artifactual forms" (Samuels and McGann 35-36). Experiments using text prompts taken from Stein's poems activate these digital archives of cultural memory in ways that expose the operations of Stein's syntax; puns and imagery; as well as her understanding of media, materiality, and style. They are designed to tease out "what we did not know we knew," and lead "into imaginations of what we had not known at all" (Samuels and McGann 48). Users are invited to "read backwards" from the deformance to the source text, seeing the deformances as re/"[i]nterpretive moments" that "unfold in fractal patterns of continuities and discontinuities" (Samuels and McGann 48).