Uncreative Writing

Uncreative Writing PDF Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231504543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

Reading Uncreative Writing

Reading Uncreative Writing PDF Author: David Kaufmann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319622927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
This book examines Uncreative Writing—the catch-all term to describe Neo-Conceptualism, Flarf and related avant-garde movements in contemporary North American poetry—against a decade of controversy. David Kaufman analyzes texts by Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Robert Fitterman, Ara Shirinyan, Craig Dworkin, Dan Farrell and Katie Degentesh to demonstrate that Uncreative Writing is not a revolutionary break from lyric tradition as its proponents claim. Nor is it a racist, reactionary capitulation to neo-liberalism as its detractors argue. Rather, this monograph shows that Uncreative Writing’s real innovations and weaknesses become clearest when read in the context of the very lyric that it claims to have left behind.

Uncreative Writing

Uncreative Writing PDF Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149913
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
"In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have engaged in 'uncreative writing'. Examining a wide rage of texts and techniques, including the use of Internet searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices adopted by writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol. Yet, more than just a reconfiguration of texts, uncreative writing can also be suffused with emotion and offer new ways of thinking about identity, tha making of meaning, and the ethos of our time."--Publisher.

Day

Day PDF Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Geoffrey Young
ISBN: 9781930589209
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 904

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Book Description
Poetry. "I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity. On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day's NEW YORK TIMES word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page." With these words, Kenneth Goldsmith embarked upon a project which he termed "uncreative writing", that is: uncreativity as a constraint-based process; uncreativity as a creative practice. By typing page upon page, making no distinction between article, editorial and advertisement, disregarding all typographic and graphical treatments, Goldsmith levels the daily newspaper. DAY is a monument to the ephemeral, comprised of yesterday's news, a fleeting moment concretized, captured, then reframed into the discourse of literature. "When I reach 40, I hope to have cleansed myself of all creativity"-Kenneth Goldsmith.

Wasting Time on the Internet

Wasting Time on the Internet PDF Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062416480
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Using clear, readable prose, conceptual artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s manifesto shows how our time on the internet is not really wasted but is quite productive and creative as he puts the experience in its proper theoretical and philosophical context. Kenneth Goldsmith wants you to rethink the internet. Many people feel guilty after spending hours watching cat videos or clicking link after link after link. But Goldsmith sees that “wasted” time differently. Unlike old media, the internet demands active engagement—and it’s actually making us more social, more creative, even more productive. When Goldsmith, a renowned conceptual artist and poet, introduced a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time on the Internet”, he nearly broke the internet. The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Vice, Time, CNN, the Telegraph, and many more, ran articles expressing their shock, dismay, and, ultimately, their curiosity. Goldsmith’s ideas struck a nerve, because they are brilliantly subversive—and endlessly shareable. In Wasting Time on the Internet, Goldsmith expands upon his provocative insights, contending that our digital lives are remaking human experience. When we’re “wasting time,” we’re actually creating a culture of collaboration. We’re reading and writing more—and quite differently. And we’re turning concepts of authority and authenticity upside-down. The internet puts us in a state between deep focus and subconscious flow, a state that Goldsmith argues is ideal for creativity. Where that creativity takes us will be one of the stories of the twenty-first century. Wide-ranging, counterintuitive, engrossing, unpredictable—like the internet itself—Wasting Time on the Internet is the manifesto you didn’t know you needed.

Traffic

Traffic PDF Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Make Now Press
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Poetry.The latest in Goldsmith's transcription and defamiliarization efforts, TRAFFIC exhibits the author's signature mode: remediating found texts and crossing artifice with everyday life". "In both form and content, Kenneth Goldsmith's TRAFFIC recalls nothing so much as the extended tracking shot in Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Week-End, and the book's audacious sustain elicits the same series of responses: surprise, admiration, amusement, incredulity, horror, recognition, terror, boredom, impatience, awe...."--Craig Dworkin.

Against Expression

Against Expression PDF Author: Craig Dworkin
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810127113
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
Charles Bernstein has described conceptual "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors such as Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp through major avant-garde groups of the past century, including Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, and language poetry, to name just a few. The works of more than a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilities of non-expressive language. --Book Jacket.

Capital

Capital PDF Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784781576
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 928

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Book Description
Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.

Unoriginal Genius

Unoriginal Genius PDF Author: Marjorie Perloff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226660613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of "unoriginal" writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, "personal" than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980's and 90's. --

Reading as Art

Reading as Art PDF Author: Jérémie Bennequin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781907468261
Category : Altered books
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This is the book published alongside a group exhibition exploring the potential of the act of reading as art.The works included in the exhibition find different means to foreground and to investigate the activity of reading: the forms it can take (silent reading, reading aloud, spontaneous reading, purposeful reading, and so on), the matter of reading (the book, the screen, the space of the page), the bodies that engage in it and the contexts in which it occurs.All of the works are concerned to make reading manifest in some way; in so doing, they each show - differently - how reading is its own form of making.Featuring the work of 13 international artists, including Martin Creed and Pavel B�chler.Published on the occasion of the exhibition Reading as Art at Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre, 27 August - 19 November 2016