Cut/Copy/Paste: Remixing Words (Spring 2012)

Duke University, Spring 2012

Instructor: whitney trettien

In 1959, a German computer scientist programmed a Zuse Z22 computer to cut up and recombine phrases from Franz Kafka's novel The Castle. The string of words spit out by the program reads like a robotic Mad Libs mash-up of Kafka's original work. Who authored these computer-generated texts – the program, the programmer, or Kafka? Are they original poems, or merely derivative experiments? And can we consider the computer program itself a “text” in the same way as Kafka's novel?

This computer program is only one in an exciting and surprisingly long history of experimental writing that cuts up, remixes and recombines words as a way of destroying the cohesiveness of language. In this course, we'll look at ancient Latin cut-up poems; we'll play with seventeenth-century German paper instruments used to produce poetry during live performances; and we'll pull apart simple generative computer programs. Because these “texts” were written to be experienced, we will interact with them experimentally, pulling apart and remaking them – and our own writing – as a community. By engaging in these acts of intentional destruction, we will, together, crack open the mechanisms that make good writing work.

You cannot read the texts of this class without, in some sense, writing them, and we'll spend a good deal of time doing both in and out of class. In addition to weekly blog posts, students will undertake two major writing projects: 1) designing and carrying out a writing experiment in class, then producing a "lab report" discussing the results, and 2) implementing a final project that engages the set of questions we will ask throughout the course. This final project can take many forms, including a video remix, a digital poem, even a performance. Students do not need any programming or web skills (what we need, we'll learn together), but should expect to be flexible, adaptive and creative as we experiment throughout the semester.