The Sputterly Utter

Now that I am out of the magnetic sphere of Kenneth Goldsmith's rhetoric, I do have a couple of critical thoughts about his talk.

His criticism of the derivative and even plagiaristic quality of contemporary literature hinged in part on the Booker prize descriptions of the works. The fact that the same description applies to a contemporary coming of age story as well as Romeo and Juliet and To Kill a Mockingbird doesn't speak inherently to the evils of Literature as an art form so much as it speaks to the evils of marketing writing, which is an evil that I believe most authors submit to as a victim. Using the marketing copy written to sell a book to analyze the originality of the work is a little dose of bad faith.

Then, later, during the Q&A session, someone brought up the fact that there is not much new going on in uncreative writing since Quenau and Goldsmith exalted in the interestingness of the spiral of the same experiment being performed again and again in new technological and historical contexts. Why doesn't the same apply to conventional literature? Why doesn't this renewal spiral apply to the coming of age novel? Romeo and Juliet have a different historical and technological and political story than To Kill a Mockingbird which is different to whatever coming of age contemporary novel I'm not reading now or to Lena Dunham's Girls series. Why doesn't conventional literature benefit from the same  mechanism?

I am moved by the idea of humans acting like machines, but I am also moved by machines acting like humans. There is a pathos to how crappy they are at it.

Other than that, though, great talk. Artists, like the rest of us, are allowed their contradictions. Just because you stand up in front of an auditorium does not mean that you have to have everything figured out. I hope I get a chance to buy Kenneth a beer before he leaves Berlin!

Looking forward to this one!

Kenneth Goldmith is the founder of Ubuweb. Respondant is Florian Cramer.

The book Uncreative Writing is available from Amazon.

Googlism introduction is very cute.

In Germany there are only 2 programs for creative writing. In the US there are 375 graduate programs for creative writing. The notion of creative writing has been controversial. Linked to realisms of various forms (Tolstoy, Balzac and still contemporary Western mainstream lit).

Brian Geis said, "Writing is 50 years behind painting" and that was 50 years ago! Joyce wrote Finnegan's wake in the 20th century, but did it really change anything?

Pluto is a figment of the modernist imagination, its stint as a planet coincides nicely with the span of what we consider modernism. There was no post modernism for literature.

When alphanumeric language becomes digital, text becomes material material. The demonstration of dumping text into images and altering them is impressive. Code is language. All media is now created from "words." This was not true back when Pluto was a planet.

Words aren't used in digital world to convey emotion, but more as a brick. Digitized language is more fluid and multi-useful than pre-digital language. The web is a writing machine. Most of that is machines talking to other machines.

The internet of things will bring more machines online than humans. This will be another data explosion on the web. Armies of refrigeraors and dishwashers are steps away from literary production readable only be other machines. Invisible to human eyes and bypassing humans all together. Robopoetics. (Literary Future, Books).

Why not start writing drone poetry for our future robot overlords now?

On the web, text is not read. It is skimmed, archived, liked, shared... Archiving is digital quilting. It is folk art. Collecting is creating. Writing on an electronic platform is inseparable from archiving.

The mp3 requires everyone to become a librarian. Copying, organizing, backing up. Listening to music has become exhausting.

The writer is producer, editor, publisher and distributor. The whirr of a hard drive is the palpable evidence of the creation of literature.

The discovery and re-distribution of an object is more important now than the object itself (This is starting to make me feel guilty now!) The new writing is pointing.

He tells us about downloading Schwarz's document cache from the pirate bay. The documents are a mess, poorly scanned, useless old old science papers. So what was Schwarz doing, really? The act of moving the information is more important than the content. He lacked the filtering. Why?

In the future, the best writers will be the best filterers.

Some examples of the new writing. Conceptual, uncreative writing. Automated writing. Taking Oulipo farther with the natural tools of the digital reality. "This is all done by hand, it is very beautiful" says Goldsmith of a piece he is showing. But how funny to have that instinct when standing before us to convince us of the beauty of the future of digital automated literature.

A lot of these are available as print on demand books. Interesting that the printing part seems to be important. Why would that be so?

What is wrong with creative writing? Research into the Booker prize. In 2011 the 6 shortlisted books were not very creative. We don't think of them as uncreative or plagiarized, even though they are undeniably derivative. Half of them have the surprise arrival of a letter as an element. Four of 6 have a murder in them. The exact same description for one of these coming of age novels was used to describe exactly tons of other previous coming of age stories. What is original and what is creative? There is more creativity in non literature than in literature.

Maybe the best authors of the future will be programmers of language.

Finally managed to get out to the HKW and am ready to listen to my first panel of the festival.

Moderator Rose White
With: Francesco WARBEAR Macarone Palmieri Staphanie Rothenberg Jeff Crouse Isaac Leung 
Stephanie and Jeff will perform as part of the Laborors of Love.

Stephanie Rothenberg's presentation: There were 97 billion dollars in porn revenue in 2006 but the porn industry has gone into a major decline since then. 4cam, YouPorn, etc even regualr social media is used by sex workers to promote their work. Porn is looking for a new business model. Jeff and Stephanie had a sweatshop in real life and in second life. The virtual sweatshop made real Double Happpiness brand jeans. More info behind this link. Another new business model starting up at the same time was the Mechanical Turk by Amazon. HIT=Human Intelligence task, which is the Amazon terminology. Artificial artificial intelligence is when something looks automated but is not. Labors of love--why not stimulate the economy while stimulating yourself?

Presentation by Jeff Crouse The Labors of Love site is launching here at the festival. This is an interface for sending your sexual fantasies to Mechanical Turk for the making of videos. So, mechanical turk workers find videos and the site automatically montages them together. You can then see a map of where people are looking at your request and the status of it. The whole process takes 40-60 minutes. They are interested in what kind of creative license the Mechanical Turk worker takes. Mechanical Turk has a ten-minute limit for completing a task. (This moderator says um a lot.)

Francesco too many names presentation This is a hip dude. Pluto is a queer entity. It's identity makes us uncomfortable. How do we know that Pluto wants to be identified? Barbara Degenevieve did "the hot bods of queer porn." Her manifesto goes like so: Porn is made to get people off. This requires objectification. Embrace the need to fetishize and be fetishized. What is netporn? by Katrien Jacobs is a media studies professor and netporn conference organizer. Netporn is defined as an interzone. Altporn. DIY ethics. Alternative channesl, etc. An authenitc body is uncontrolled, unprofessional, etc. Real Core--Sergio Messina. Real Core was born in photo-based discussion groups in the early 90s. Happy, authentic porn. Mostly at home, mostly normal people in normal life. The feeling of trespassing into someone's privacy is part of the thrill. But really, authenticity is a product. Authenticity is fake.

Isaac Leung presentation Isaac researched sex machines. He showed an interview with an artist whose name I didn't catch. "Americans are inventors..." of fucking machines. He looked at three kinds of machines. Garage culture fucking machines is one kind. Many of them are not even used, the pleasure is a lot in the building of it. Second type is Teledildonics, which is a mediated sex via phone and internet. Often takes more than one real human. For example, connecting a dido to a videogame controller, Thrill Hammer, Sex Machine Cams, essage, oh my bot. Third type = sex robots. First Androids in Nuremberg makes complicated sex robots.

PLEASURE VS DISCIPLINE Michel Foucoult Chastity devices have evolved into sex toys.

What do we really know about dying? He began to study the Near-death experience. It was similar to Raymond Moody's description. Lack of pain, calm, out of body experience or not, and a tunnel with a light at the end. Loving compassionate supportive. Sometimes a review of your life with comprehension of its meaning. A being of light. A garden full of dead relatives. You come to a border and you know that if you cross you don't return. Some are sent back. Some go back on their own. Heart attack victims were chosen to study, so that the people being studied could be compared. If you compare near death from suicide and heart attack, you don't have similar brain states. Can there be consciousness without brain function? Run with the data, even if it contradicts the current model. Collected over 1500 stories about what happens when you die. Premonitions. Deathbed visions. Every culture has them. You are visited by a dead relative. Negotiation of death date. Helping us look forward to death. Deathbed coincidences are when the dead person comes to someone they care about after dying to say they are ok. watches and clocks stop. Animals react. There is light at death. Compassionate light. Have a good death. Relax into the death process. Make sure that you do not die in a hospital. Die at home or hospice. See your grandchildren. Teach people, even children, not to be afraid of death. Prepare for death. Not only your paperwork but your relationships. Discuss death. Don't be afraid. The idea that because many people experience something similar at death does not mean that your mom and your dog are going to really come usher you into the afterlife where you will wander around picking daisies for eternity, but all the same I do like the idea (leaving the afterlife and ghosts completely out of it) that the experience of Death itself might be rather pleasant.

Always wanted to be cool. Tried to analyze what makes something culturally relevant and why he is not. He eventually gave up trying to find the next big thing and started doing what he liked. But then came back to the idea of studying it. It's idiotic, but fascinating Define cool: n. the acquired relevance in the contemporary culture of a particular demographic. Studied cool people. Started by approaching the cool people he knew. Asked cool people how it felt to be cool. Interviewed them for 6 months. 1. Cool people will talk openly about being cool, but not on record. 2. Cool people have a following and are codependent with their following. 3. Cool people make it look effortless, but they work hard at it. 4. Cool makes you lonely. 5. People embody a persona. They play a character and they end up losing their real selves. Cool people are projections from us. We project on to them what we desire. We get comfort from being inferior to them. What you need to be cool 1. Must be appointed by someone else. 2. Cool comes from the fringes of mainstream. It starts against status quo then becomes the status quo. 3. Cool is temporary. You cannot stay cool forever. Eventually you have to let go. Cool is not constant 4. Cool is a product of effort. Where is cool culure going? Why is it important? What is the biological relevance and importance of cool?

Travel as a conduit to getting out of a stalled spot? Wanted to travel but not to be a drop out or to change his profession. He researched the rules of the Journeyman and translated the rules to his profession and to his time. Must bring work equipmant. Only two sets of clothes, but wanted 7 days of clothes without washing. Work for board and lodging. He added on all continents and within 2 years. He had no money. Moved into a tiny room to save money. In 2010 he paid off his debt and went to Shanghai with 500 euros. Did 16 jobs and all continents. His stories about culture problems are entertaining. Dancing is illegal in Bangalore! Seriously?! But Indians I know LOVE to dance. That is nutty. The last rule of the Journeyman is to report your insights. That is what he is doing today. Living without possessions is a relief. It simplifies things. You learn that you don't need stuff. It's all about the people. The best city in the world is useless without great people. It's not where you go, it's who you travel with. But great cities are made of and by people. Don't follow the expected patterns. We should not all follow the same rules. You have to push yourself to be able to find your rules.

Her father told her when she was 5 that her destiny was to be a champion swimmer. At 12 she wanted to be an Olympic champion swimmer. There is a small group of humans who do long distance swimming. At 30, she decided to swim 100 miles in the open ocean. The world record at the time was 58 miles. They looked for a place to do it. They found Cuba. Great symbolic and real border. Havana to Key West. She had swum so far from the Bahamas. When she retired, she feared losing the feeling of passion that sports brings. Sports gives you measurable success to commit toward. 42 hours to swim from Cuba to Florida, in rough water. 103 miles. Sharks. Jellyfish. The gulf stream. It's treacherous. She didn't make it the first time she tried. She swam her 100 miles from the Bahamas. The Cuba failure stewed in the back of her mind. She became a journalist. When she turned 60, she felt much closer to the end than to the beginning or even to the middle. 60 is a big deal. She examined her life. Asked, "Have I been living with passion and commitment every day." She did not swim a stroke for 30 years when she retired. At 60, she started training again. She clandestinely trained again for the Cuba swim. The box jellyfish now inhabit the Florida Straits. It's tiny, but it will kill you. She has people who dive around while she swims and scare off sharks. YIKES. 51 hours of swimming. Training alone is 20-hour-long swims. Holy shit. Sensory deprivation is part of swimming. Her description of how you think and the things your brain does while you swim this distance is kind of blowing my mind. She says she will probably never make it from Cuba to Florida, but she will never stop trying.