Typographical Hallucinations / Katherine Hayles and Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith

'Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age'

Kenneth Goldsmith started his book altering Douglas Humbler's quote “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more” by changing objects to texts. Following an example of Marjorie Perloff and her unoriginal genius he establishes the term of uncreative writing, underlying that nowadays texts differs from each other in their ‘technical’ aspects, the way author ‘conceptualised and executed his writing machine’ to rephrase and reorganise other’s words. With the development of Internet the 'art of Copy-Past’ in literature has become the major trend that generates many works “proclaiming that context is the new content”. In his book Goldsmith cites as an example a poem that consists from shopping mall store list rewritten in poetic form or the work that put together status updates in social networks with names of deceased writers, or Flarf, the new movement in writing that accumulates the worst of Google search result. So, in fact the text I wrote so far is a shortened and rephrased version of Kennet Goldsmith text, borrowed from others he mentions in his book.

Nevertheless the new gender has its charm and evokes emotions and connotations as the reaction on writing process itself. Further development of technology became a catalyst for a new era of literature and art in complex. Contemporary artworks put to the end traditional understanding of originality and replication and brought new conception of creativity.

During his classes of “Uncreative Writing” in the University of Pensylvania Goldsmith penalised students who tried to be creative and original. “Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patch-writing, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.” He found creativity not in their texts but in the way they choose what and how to reframe, proving that “the suppression of self-expression is impossible”. So the concept of ‘creativity’ haven’t become obsolete, but transformed in compliance of new realities. In other words, creativity goes not with the object but with method, the way the object was created. In era of Internet and computers “even if literature is reducible to mere code—an intriguing idea—the smartest minds behind them will be considered our greatest authors.”

Katherine Hayles

'Writing Machines'

This book represents Katherine Hayles response for few intriguing questions: how to bring together two different spheres: media and material word, and if so: what will be relationships between them. To answer this questions she establishes the main concept: medial ecology. The term was created to describe complex relationships between different medias, similar to the ones we are observing in nature: mimicry, deception, cooperation, parasitism. There are two types of relationships between medias she highlights in her preface. First is representation, "that assumes a referent in the real world, however mediated." The second is simulation with no counterpart. However there aren’t strict borders between them as different medias cycling through one another, making new and new layers. This is a process which Richard Gruisin and Jay Bolter named remediation.

Nevertheless, each media has its specificities, which Hayles tries to decode in her book. She pushes off different concepts to underline them: code and natural language, regularities and creativity, materiality and media. All this aspects could be found in literature and the way we produce and consume literary artefacts: texts, books. Printed book has its material properties and design that determine the way we read it: sequentially, moving from page to page and following the scenario author prepared for us. With the development of electronic literature, appearance of hypertext and contextual links, our perception of literature thoroughly changed. Moreover the representation and its visual component are not stable and predeterminated anymore. The way text looks like depends on the device, programme, code in the end, and being a reader I cannot influence on in, just choose between variants. So it seems that book lost its materiality or being a representative of media it remediated and got its new material characteristics corresponded with ... iPad reader or any other inscription technology. So Katherine claims that physical representation, its material methaphor affects what the words mean, or at least affects the way we persuate them and understand them and as a result the meaning we give them.

In chapter I author moves away from abstract terminology and tries to bring 'sense of materiality’ to her studies wrapping up it in some sort of novel. She establishes the ‘main hero’ Kaye, and binds autobiographical facts with fiction. She leaves us to guess where is her own experience and where is fiction that was born under former experience. Kaye lives between two worlds: science and literature, strict rules and creativity, mundane work and imaginative realm, code and natural language, concepts that met in desktop computer.