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.
I am a fan of your work. Thanks for helping me think this evening.