The Virtual Sentence: A Book of Exercises

"The Virtual Sentence" is an exercise book for the era of ChatGPT. Its title is indebted to Gilles Deleuze, who uses "virtual" to name a reality that is neither actual (already here), nor potential (not yet here). Said of the sentence, the term points to the articulate alternatives that surround what gets spoken out loud or committed to ink and pixel. This is neither the total space of linguistic possibility, nor the particulars of what you might have said, considered afterward in a spirit of regret, or relief. Today, the space of the virtual sentence is increasingly endangered, most dramatically by the accelerating aptitude of text-prediction algorithms used in the large-scale, unsupervised language models collectively known as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT).This book aims to interrogate these techno-linguistic regimens by offering hands-on exercises from eight contributors, each designed to provoke exploration, and expansion, of the space of the virtual sentence. The values in its pages are variety and self-surprise, and it turns to the genre of the exercise - a miniature ritual of permutation and invention-in order to generate, rather than to stipulate.