Recent assessments of contemporary writing have emphasised its relationship to conceptual art and algorithmic processing. According to Craig Dworkin, conceptual art focuses on the initial procedures an artist follows rather than the physical production of art objects. Likewise, conceptual writing ‘[distances] ideas and affects in favour of assembled objects, rejecting outright the ideologies of disembodied themes and abstracted content’. Scholars such as Marjorie Perloff and Kenneth Goldsmith have used the terms ‘unoriginal genius’ and ‘uncreative writing’ to describe a kind of literature that eschews traditional notions of authorship by foregrounding how writing takes place through the appropriation and manipulation of words. Rather than produce new texts that express affect or a sense of self, conceptual writers redeploy existing texts and discern meaning from the massive amounts of information in society. Conceptual writers also use language as data within systems of code, incorporating algorithmic techniques. Referring to Lev Manovich's notion of ‘database logic’, Dworkin observes that conceptual writing functions as an interface for returning an answer to a particular query or producing a particular output after the application of certain procedures. Algorithmic writing thus designates a kind of conceptual writing that performs computations with pre-existing texts.

The Oulipo is an important precursor to conceptual writing because it devises constraints on writing based on algorithmic processes. Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais founded the literary group in 1960 with the publication of the Cent mille milliards de poemes, a collection of ten reconfigurable sonnets by Queneau, and a postface by Le Lionnais that explains the concept behind the immense number of poems made possible by the constraints of the sonnet and a simple algorithm. It is impossible to read 100,000,000,000,000 poems, but the interest in the collection lies in the way Queneau structures the ten initial sonnets to allow an almost unfathomable number of permutations of verses to form potential sonnets. According to Jean-Jacques Thomas, the ‘pre-text’ of the algorithmic constraint ‘becomes the central text to be read [and] relegates the subsequently generated text to a subordinate position’. The Oulipian text is a proof of concept and derives its value not from what it expresses, but from the procedures by which it was generated.