Uncreative writing

Reading Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing was at first very difficult because he immediately jumps into the thick of things and starts explaining the philosophy behind his art without every really saying what his art is until the reader is half way through the description of the philosophy. However, after I had figured out that what he does is write out works by other authors, as well as other forms of uncreative writing, I began to understand what he meant when he described his process as that of turning himself into a machine. In his description “the idea,” he states that all creativity must be purged from the system and this created a very interesting metaphor in my mind: that of a computer running a programming. Essentially, one has an idea, that is, a preset of rules by which to process input. The input comes in the way of a book or, in Goldsmith’s case, a newspaper from one day. Then, one simply retypes the text according to that rule, even if the rule is to not alter or change anything at all. This creates in a person an interesting condition because it truly is the most dehumanizing thing: to turn one’s intelligence off and become the opposite of what could be called artificial intelligence. Essentially, what could be considered as the thing that makes us human disappears and we are left with being an organic computer. On the other hand, perhaps the creativity in uncreative writing lies before the writing, in the formulation of the programming that one is going to employ to process the input, the set of rules through which to write. In that sense, the writing is only truly untainted by creativity if the rules are thought up before the input source is chosen. In other words, if one comes up with a set of rules and then goes out at random to search for an input. When I set out to complete my uncreative writing assignment, I decided that I would simply type the letters and words and not truly pay attention to the layout of the page, only the spacing of the letters and words themselves. I then, at random came across the Wikipedia page for “Islamofascism.” This was interesting because I don’t truly know anything about Islamofascism. After completing the assignment, I still know as much about Islamofascism as I did before the assignment. This makes me think that in retyping something such as this article, I am focused much more on keeping to the programming than paying attention to the article. Essentially, I am not paying attention to what I am reading, but instead I am paying attention to how I rewrite it. Therefore, I think I have succeeded in doing this assignment properly in that I did not think, only process. I successfully turned myself into an organic computer.