Simulating computer-mediated environments that dominated our lives in the COVID era, in merged with the screen for days, stanzas that move across a four-array structure play unpredictably together -- allowing, if the reader generates several versions, multiple views of the impact of screen-dominated isolation on everyday life. But even with many plays, the viewer is unlikely to see all the variables that are stored in the four arrays that emanate from this aleatoric narrative engine.

In the COVID era, computer-mediated systems furthered education, hosted the arts, and allowed a networked reach to a wider world. And I was constantly amazed by what my students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago expressed with computer-mediated systems in this era of restricted lives.

In my own work in the COVID era, the flexibility of the computer screen and the power of algorithmic control allowed me to code the complex aleatoric system that underlies merged from the screen for days. But in contrast, the sadness that pervades this work was engendered by enforced withdrawal from shared real lives. The database that my code accesses at random was created from my own written observations.

The dichotomy between the expressive potential of algorithmic structures and the need for real life that this work expresses is keyed when the history of generative literature is referenced in the background by Jonathan Swift's Lagado Engine from Gulliver's Travels. (the drawing probably did not appear until the 1727 third edition of Gulliver's Travels [1]). Although Swift imagined this engine as a satire that predicted where literature, art, and science would go astray centuries later, for years, I have been haunted by the beauty of his illustration.

1. Eric A. Weiss, Anecdotes [Jonathan Swift's Computing Invention] Annals of the History of Computing 7:2, April-June 1985.