{I was invited to teach a seminar at City College’s MFA program in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice. This is the syllabus for the course I came up with. I wanted to share it as a resource for people who are interested in the topic, and also in hope that I’ll get some feedback on it, in case I ever have a chance to teach it again. Please leave comments if you have suggestions. I removed housekeeping stuff–program policies, assignments, deadlines–so if you are a student in the course DO NOT refer to this version of the syllabus because it’s missing information that’s essential to you. It’s fine for everyone else.}
Themed Workshop: Writing and Digital Media
Introduction
How is writing on a computer different from writing with pen and paper? How is text on a screen unlike text on a page? Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith has said that writing online is the same as archiving; the platforms for distributing writing on the internet—from Blogspot to Facebook—automatically add metadata, organizing entries with timestamps and user-defined tags. But “archiving” implies a purposeful preservation for the future, and the examples of Geocities and Friendster, among others, show that users’ digital writing can be deleted by the companies that own the platforms it’s on, and further steps must be taken to archive it properly. Furthermore, an archive maintains a standard of historical significance, and most of the writing produced online wouldn’t meet any such standard. Text messages, chat room transcripts and status updates have just as much in common with everyday speech as they do with the printed word, in that they have the most meaning at their moment of utterance, the moment they appear on the screen. But the enduring traces of the written speech of digital text have interesting implications for artists and writers, who have long tried to capture the immediacy of speech and physical presence in their work.
The relationship of digital media to speech and the archive will be the central question of this seminar, as we consider how writing—one of the most transformative technologies in human history—inhabits and adapts to other technologies of communication, and the possibilities of these developments for art. We will approach the issue from a variety of perspectives, reading critical and philosophical essays on literacy and orality by thinkers such as Freud, Derrida, and McLuhan, and studying recent works of art and literature that exploit various features of digital text, from the ease of appropriation with the word processor’s copy-and-paste tools and the “active” text of code to experiments with the short forms of blogging and poetic stylizations of chat vernacular.
How to Read
Over the course of the semester we will consider what digital media does to the idea of a text, both in our theoretical discussions and in our practical work as readers of blogs, twitter accounts, interactive fiction, and other forms of writing that pose a challenge to linear habits of reading. When I put a blog on the syllabus, I don’t expect you to read every post from beginning to end, but I do expect you to read enough to draw some intelligent conclusions about it. You should come to class prepared to share an excerpt that struck you as interesting—whether that is five tweets or three blog entries—and give a close reading of it.
For each meeting there will be a reading in critical theory in addition to artworks. Students are not expected to “apply” the week’s theoretical text to the artwork; rather, the readings should be seen as two parallel tracks. For the most part they will be discussed separately, but I expect the quality of our discussions of artworks will be influenced by an understanding of writing as a medium and a technology developed through the theoretical readings.
Schedule of Readings and Assignments
9/3: Introduction
Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, SAMSUNG
Oliver Laric, Still Available
9/10: Participation
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, Introduction, Chapters 1-3 (pp. 1-76)
Douglas Davis, World’s First Collaborative Sentence
9/17: Interactivity
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, Chapters 4-5 (pp. 77-135)
Mark Amerika, Grammatron
Olia Lialina, Agatha Appears
Imri Sandstrom, A While Ago I Decided to Eat
10/ 1: Code as Poetry
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, Chapters 6-7 (pp. 136-176)
Rosalie Hirs & Harm van den Dorpel, Family Tree
mez, _cross.ova.ing ][4rm.blog.2.log][_
mez, LiveJournal
Bjorn Magnhildoen, PlaintextPerformance
Pall Thayer, Microcodes
Stanford Code Poetry Slam finalists
Nick Montfort, Concrete Perl
Nina Freeman, untitled
Ryder Ripps, git-poetry
10/8: Text Adventures
Marshall McLuhan, “The Photograph: The Brother-without-Walls” (pp. 188-202) and “The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim,” (pp. 258-265) in Understanding Media [PDF]
Matt Sheridan Smith, Play
Jeremiah Johnson, Wave Muse
Nina Freeman, Perishable
10/15: Conceptual Writing
Lev Manovich, “What Is New Media?” (pp. 18-61), The Language of New Media [PDF]
Kenneth Goldsmith, Soliloquy [PDF]
Kenneth Goldsmith, Fidget [text] [Applet])
Tan Lin, BIB. [PDF]
Sheila Heti, “From My Diaries (2006-2010) in Alphabetical Order” [PDF]
Claude Closky, Welcome to My Blog and My Latest Things
10/22: Flarf
Sigmund Freud, The Mystic Pad [PDF]
Mainstream Poetry (esp. “Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism”)
Nada Gordon, “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas”
Sharon Mesmer, “The Swiss Just Do Whatever”
Ji Yoon Lee, “RE: Dear translationmachine,” from Foreigner’s Folly: A Tale of Attempted Project [PDF]
Brandon Brown, “99: Nine translations for the Flarf Anthology,” from The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus [PDF]
10/29: User Engagement
Jacques Derrida, “Exergue” and “Preamble” (pp. 7-32), Archive Fever [PDF]
Guthrie Lonergan, 3d warehouse
Joel Holmberg, Legendary Account
11/5: Modified Readymades
Jacques Derrida, “Exergue,” “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” and “Linguistics and Grammatology” (pp. 1-73), On Grammatology [PDF]
Jeff Baij, Everything U Stand 4
pvvq on Buzzfeed
11/12: Alt Lit
Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” [PDF]
Tao Lin, “hikikomori” and “i’m going to touch you very hard”
Mira Gonzalez, selected poems (1, 2)
Bunny Rogers, Cunny Poem [PDF]
11/19: Internet Poetry
Harryette Mullen, “African Signs and Spirit Writing” [PDF]
Steve Roggenbuck, i am like october when i am dead
Steve Roggenbuck, videos
Michael Hessel-Mial, Tweets Like a Lovebird
11/26: Robots and Aliens
Mikhail Epstein, “Reconfigurations of Textuality” (pp. 69-78) and “Scriptorics: An introduction to the anthropology and personology of writing” (pp. 117-129) from Tranformative Humanities [PDF]
Angelo Plessas, Robot Poetry
Oscar Schwartz, bot poet
Christian Bok, Xenotext [PDF]
Christian Bok, “The Piecemeal Bot is Deconstructed: Notes toward a potential Robopoetics” [PDF]
12/3: Case Studies
Bhanu Kapil, Was Jack Kerouac A Punjabi?
Kevin Killian on Amazon
12/10: Case Studies
Paul Chan, Wht is a Book?, Wht is Lawlessness? and Wht is a Kardashian? [ebooks]
Rob Horning on Buzzfeed Community
culturetwo.wordpress.com 