Master-Symposium: Uncreative Writing: a workshop & New Writing Group: public lecture

The Workshop: 24 and 25 March, 2015

It's clear that long-cherished notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. How does writing respond to this new environment? This workshop will rise to that challenge by employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering, as compositional methods. Along the way, we'll trace the rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations spanning the arts, with a particular emphasis on how they employ language. We'll see how the modernist notions of chance, procedure, repetition, and the aesthetics of boredom dovetail with popular culture to usurp conventional notions of time, place, and identity, all as expressed linguistically.

Moving forward, I adore the idea of an Un-Writing Program. Because the truth of the matter is that in the digital age, anyone working in digital media — video, sound, images, text — is a writer because all digital media is comprised of alphanumeric characters. This is a demonstration of what I’m talking about: 

https://vimeo.com/22313763

So that every student in the Un-Writing Program, regardless of what media they’re working in is now a writer, or better, an un-writer. 

Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called "some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of twelve books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of "I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews," which was the basis for an opera, "Trans-Warhol," that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, "Sucking on Words" was first shown at the British Library in 2007. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He held The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. In May 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama's "A Celebration of American Poetry" at The White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2011, he co-edited, "Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing" and published a book of essays, "Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age," which won the 2011 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Award. Goldsmith participated in dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany (2012). dOCUMENTA(13) published his "Letter To Bettina Funcke" as part of their "100 Notes - 100 Thoughts" book series. In 2013, he was named as the inaugural Poet  

Laureate of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

More about Goldsmith can be found at:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Goldsmith

THE Open LECTURE: 25 March, 2015

New Writing Group: a love declaration to complexity and its relationship to words

Kenneth Goldsmith, lecture

Respondents: Ingo Niermann and Anne Cotten

Deepening Day (Vertiefung): 26 March, 2015

with Ingo Niermann