Reading Diary: Live-writing. Cox

Reading Diary:  Live-writing. Cox

This reading diary covers the following texts:

Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, New York: Columbia University Press 2011

The concept of uncreative writing (and the book) by Kenneth Goldsmith has influenced and informed my practice extensively. My work relates among other things, with technology as a mediator of human communication.

I read the book for the first time a couple of years ago and I became very interested in its bold (almost cynical) approach to appropriation and plagiarism. I was impressed and excited, and for some months I became a self-proclaimed ambassador to his work and all writing machines. I engaged in many discussions, some meaningful and others futile, especially with writers. But most importantly, I incorporated into my work some of the strategies outlined in the book. My interest expanded to Christian Bök and his experimental poetry and other artists and writters.

I’m revisiting the book now that some of my enthusiasm on appropriation has diminished. I found interesting the way how the book explores the potential poetic qualities of data, code, algorithms and writing machines of all kinds. Relating poetry to machines and computers is quite interesting. I wonder about the possibilities of poetry and artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms? Will computers (as Goldsmith suggests) could write poetry for themselves on day? Could they win nobel prices in literature? 

There are really interesting projects described in the book and lots of interesting exercises that can be done easily, like translating mp3 to text to images, transform code, print binary information, make memes, etc. But one important question remains: how to be critical? is being poetical enough to take a critical stance? I believe it is. But how do we decide what is poetical? It’s a closed circuit: Maybe what manages to become critical is the poetic. 
If we can't be critical, we are left with just the code. Instructions, at that's all.

Here I share some works (or exercises) I have done in the past using some strategies read in Kenneth’s Goldsmith book.

Autosuggestion poems:

[STATIC]

I am the prince of darkness,
Lord of Light,
And many other things long since passed.
Over time and across,
I roam these lands for the future
And while no man than before
Save to which they belonged

SOFTWARE

Love track the data
Appendix below low speed
Love track the web
And have the writer
That depends almost constant throughout time,
For''Shizzle in different IP connection to theirs.

* Generated by auto-suggestion algorithms 

This is another project that consists of a sequence of wikipedia entries illustrated by its corresponding Google image search counterpart. 

A book. 2013.