DRIFT/COPY/PASTE Poetics
a. Select text fragments from social media feeds
b. Hack on gathered words and phrases
c. Construct tercets out of the textual rubble
a text-based dérive.
a glitch art process.
an oracle.
Book design by Patrick Quinn + Patrick Kiley. Printed and bound at Publication Studio, Troy, NY.
ISBN: 978-1-62462-164-2
Samples:
https://codepen.io/patrick-quinn/pen/rNOjeVZ
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lEror3Vey_5y9pMZI4B8YvMGrhUF-EL6/view?usp=sharing
An excerpt from DRIFT/COPY/PASTE Poetics was included in The Operating System's ongoing series, Experimental Speculative Poetics: https://medium.com/the-operating-system/ex-spec-po-presents-drift-copy-paste-poetics-ii-by-patrick-quinn-20f3fd11d4a6
Notes:
“When you cut into the present the future leaks out.”
—William S. Burroughs
http://www.ubu.com/sound/burroughs_breakthrough.html
“‘Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.’ This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.”
—Walter Benjamin
https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades_Project.pdf
“As interpreted by Gregory Ulmer (in his book, Applied Grammatology), Jacques Derrida’s philosophical project was not merely to deconstruct language, but to initiate a new way of writing. This new way of writing involves slippage—one homonym into another. Derrida’s new ‘grammatological’ way of writing is less concerned with historical/etymological connections between words and more concerned with future/generative connections between words. Derrida is not concerned (merely) with what language has meant, but what language may come to mean. Derrida’s project is not about arbitrary, willy-nilly slippage; but it instead involves a very rigorous kind of play and failure. At one point, Ulmer (charmingly) calls Derrida, ‘so rigorously irresponsible.’ This kind of grammatological remixing of language has no end. It never settles on a fixed state where language ceases to evolve and each word finally comes to mean one and only one thing. Instead, meaning is always emerging and subsiding, and stasis is perpetually deferred and postponed. Ulmer’s Derrida proposes a writing not of increasingly precise taxonomies and increasingly accurate canonical texts, but a writing of perpetually emergent creation and invention—a remix writing.”
—Curt Cloninger
http://www.remixthebook.com/remix-as-if-by-curt-cloninger-2
“S+7:
Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago…” (from Moby-Dick) becomes “Call me islander. Some yeggs ago…”. Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs.”
http://www.remixthebook.com/the-course/potentialism
David Brooks Hits the Pavement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2qsbmd9Zcs
“long live blogs: long live free literature: long live public domain and creative commons: long live self-publishing: long live torrents: long live free pdf’s: long live pay-what-you-want: long live image-based poetry: long live the internet:
poetry is dead: long live poetry”
http://internetpoetry.co.uk/doctrine
“We are living in a fake world. But we find reality in this fake world.”
—Haruki Murakami
“The simple act of moving information from one place to another today constitutes a significant cultural act in and of itself.”
—Kenneth Goldsmith
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/goldsmith_boring.html
“According to the editors of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Aerial/Edge Books), this sort of poetry is more like punk rock or Dada, but distinct from these previous movements in that the content crucial to its construction is sourced from the Internet.”
“Flarf’s poets heed the call placed by Bruce Andrews in his essay “Praxis: A Political Economy of Noise and Information,” which says that poets should not seek refuge in past, traditional models of sanctuary from the proverbial barbarian onslaught; they should instead vivify and inhabit the mess, and turn it into poetry.”
“Each author is recombining “found” text, renaming, editing, and presenting it for new amusement or indignation. But appropriation is merely the point of departure for many Flarf poets. It’s not at all like Conceptual poetry—in many ways, it’s just the opposite—because it’s labor intensive and bespoke. It seems these authors enjoy a different degree of estrangement from their original sources. Author and reader share culpability, but they also bear witness to a glimmer of a new dramatic realism that is not fatalistic, but rather weirdly happy and upbeat.”
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/building-blocks-of-noise
“There’s this idea that juxtaposition creates a little pop in your mind to take you out of your immediate, mundane reality. When we do these crazy things with Google, a lot of times we’re putting something beautiful together with something ugly, and it makes this third thing that is completely delightful and unexpected.”
—Sharon Mesmer
https://www.pw.org/content/can_flarf_ever_be_taken_seriously?cmnt_all=1/
“Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. Debord defines the dérive as ‘a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.’ It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relation and ‘let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’.”
http://thebinarygraffiticlub.com/derive.html
“That rupture, now nearly two decades old, is no longer interesting to younger poets, it seems, most of whom never knew life without the Web. Instead, it’s the mining, massaging, and reworking of found online texts into something personal that appears to be fuelling some of the more adventurous poetry being written today.”
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/post-internet-poetry-comes-of-age
Irish art critic Declan Long states that his research “seeks to consider how attention to marginal, neglected, or ‘failed’ sites within and on the margins of cities might create productive political spaces of uncertainty that prompt speculation on alternatives to the certainties of our present ‘reality.’”
https://twitter.com/declanlong
“A cluster of glitches can form an outline, define an area, trace a route through uncharted space. This space is an n-dimensional ‘potential space’ and glitches can be used to navigate this space, seeking unexpected patterns, chance juxtapositions, and unveiling subliminal content.”
http://sonicfield.org/2014/03/errormancy-glitch-as-divination
“It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.”
—John Cage
“This is an attempt to crochet together a hyperknitted patchwork of multiple entry/exit ways. We are not repeating others’ comments robotically like mechanical dolls with record-playback-erase heads because we have hacked open those devices to inhabit them. We are not repeating ourselves but rather recursively transcoding a system that can swallow itself like a circuit bent Ouroboros, the infinite dragon. We are limited to a number of words and topics, finite and localized although overlapping and deterritorialized, speaking multiple expansions.”
“The vocabulary at the edge of ‘hackerdom’ is a kind of populist coded satire of elitism called l33t. As Cracker is strategically excommunicated from moral activity by Hacker, l33t becomes not only a vocabulary but a pervasive affect. ‘The’ becomes ‘teh’ and ‘owned’ becomes ‘pwned’ as mistakes fold into the language, dirty glitch becomes linguistic atom moving horizontally and playfully rather than being controlled by linguistic legitimacy.”
—jonCates ++ jake elliott
http://gl1tch.us/4RTCR4X0RZ.html
“When you state that ‘Jodi uses a keen understanding of computational circuitry to create software glitches.’ the trouble is that JODI actually readily admits to having && working w/technologies in intentionally naive ways or in learning technologies as they make projects. They sumtimes enjoy the childlike use of systems or in learning/playing w/systems as their process.”
—jonCates
http://gl1tch.us/RebeccaJackson.html
I am sharing this project on GitHub in the spirit of distribution and DIWO culture.