Writing Machines Notebook

Annotations, sketches, shards, snippets, marginalia

Uncreative Writing: Bart's Notes

"Uncreative Writing" by Kenneth Goldsmith

Date: 17/09/2025

Pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/UncreativeWriting_Notes

Reading group: Bart - Ema - Robin - Tommi - Youjung

Protocol:
We took turns reading pieces of the physical book out loud. While one person is reading, the others will take notes in a digital copy of the text.

Notes:
Kenneth: "The previous forms of borrowing in literature, collage and pastiche—taking a word from here, a sentence from there—were partially developed based on the amount of labor involved. Having to manually retype or hand-copy an entire book on a typewriter is one thing; cutting and pasting an entire book with three keystrokes—select all / copy / paste—is another."
Bart: Interesting how the ways we interact with content changes a lot depending on what the format is, and the possibilities of the technology at a certain time.

Kenneth: "Koons and Prince began their careers by stating upfront that they were appropriating and intentionally “unoriginal,” whereas Frey and Leroy—even after they were caught—were still passing their works off as authentic, sincere, and personal statements to an audience clearly craving such qualities in literature."
Bart: Interesting how they highlight that there is a difference between taking text and claiming it's your own vs taking something while giving credit. this is something I would a assume is logical myself.

Kenneth: "For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing."
Bart: I like how he shows how all the previous info has been implemented in a real setting. Creativity will always prevail.

Bart: When giving credit where credit is due, how is this different from referencing books or works. If anything it makes text more clear for people who dont know every niche text you call by name.

Kenneth: "Perhaps the best authors of the future will be ones who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse and distribute language-based practices."
Bart: How do current autors fit into this, if we edit what others edit and others edit before, will there be new things to add

Kenneth: "It explores the rich history of appropriation in the visual arts and proposes ways to apply these precedents to literature."
Bart: Interesting to highlight the difference between visual art and writing, writing is not visual art?

Kenneth: "Moving away from modernist notions of disjunction and deconstruction, difficulty is now defined by quantity (too much to read) rather than fragmentation (too shattered to read)."
Bart: This fits with how I personally consume media, interesting

Kenneth: "An afterword speculates on one potential outcome of uncreative writing, “robopoetics,” a condition whereby machines write literature meant to be read by other machines, bypassing a human readership entirely.In 1959 the poet and artist Brion Gysin claimed that writing was fifty years behind painting."
Bart: It's interesting to see this in comparison with AI development, text based AI was earlier but images are behind?

On Creativity and Inventiveness

Thoughts by Tommi

What does it mean to be “creative” in the era of mass content creation? At the beginning of Uncreative Writing: Managing language in the digital age, Kenneth Goldsmith paraphrases Douglas Huebler, writing:

The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.

How can we be sure that whatever we are writing or generating has not been conceived by someone else, somewhere in the world, sometime in history? If we cannot, how important and how determining is it for us that the outcome of our creativity is something unique or unprecedented? Let’s assume that there is no other similar thing about what we are “producing” anywhere else in the Universe. Can we say this idea is ours, and ours alone? How can we prove that a creative outcome, no matter how special, has not been indirectly co-created by the virtually infinite inputs that sparked our inspiration, or the building blocks of knowledge that we required to formulate an opinion?

Goldsmith’s provocation about true authorship questions the very core of the definition of creativity. Let’s take Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The genius of Albert Einstein is not in the invention itself, but rather in the ability of combining, “marrying” previously disentangled theories.

Thursday 8 January 2026

Happiness and fulfillment

Being aware that probably all one could have ever think of has been already written, portrayed, or performed somewhere is a venomous limitation to the spark of inventiveness and creativity.

What is the value I can add? If I cannot read, watch, or experience paramount representations and variations of what I am feeling, of what I am thinking about, does it have any sense for me to just spit it out?

Reading Notes from Sibyl

Date:2025/10/01                                                                Group Members:Barbara & Sibyl 

All notes are based on the Etherpad.

The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise - Georges Perec

~ Summary

You want to ask your boss for a raise, but every time you try, it gets ruined.

For instance:

·He doesn't look up when you knock

·None of his daughters have measles, but the fourth one is not OK > Wait 40 days.

·He swallowed a bone from the cafeteria lunch fish

“Narrative in the form of a flowchart, but there is only an input but no output. Stuck in a loop!”

~ Evaluation

• The design of the flowchart seems intentional but it’s a good hint for readers : the first 'playthrough' presents a more normal situation, which becomes increasingly absurd the deeper you delve.
• A lot of repeating sentences, if-statements, loops, like a code!

PROTOCOL

No punctuations !

A loop within the story with no exit !

~ Interpretation

• Connection to coding languages is very interesting
• You never actually ask for a raise. Only shows the process but you get stuck in a forever loop.
• Critique on company hierarchies: If your boss doesn't open te conversation to a possible raise then it will never happen even if you keep trying.

Rule and Constraint - Marcel Bénabou

~ Summary

• Hypocrisy of critics that laws of poetry/prose are seen as good but more unconventional constraints are "limiting the artist" including Anagrams, palindromes, lipograms, poetry (sonnet, anagrams) and so on.
• Language is a material object and a complex system of elements that form words/sentences/etc.
• Constraints go beyond assumed rules and reveal those two aspects.
• Some rules will not be a constraint , it will be a tool for someone to innovate something. Constraint is a tool to help explore new possibilities virtualities.

~ Evaluation

• Quite hard to understand.
• Tried to separate paragraphs and filter them to try to understand.
• Examples are hard to follow, we don't have the context.

~ Interpretation

• Oulipo pushes literary constraints to their other possibilities.
• Use tools to constitute process of deconstruction and restructuring.
• Interesting way of reframing materiality of language. Usually we think of the notebook as the object, not the written word itself.
• Tools in our brain help us combine words into sentences.

A Story as You Like It - Raymond Queneau

~ Summary

• Choose your own adventure book (hypertext version)
• Three peas are sleeping in a pod.
• You get two choices every time

~ Evaluation

• It's like a narrative adventure game.
• You have some power over what the story contains "This does not suit me" "I prefer they not dream".
• You voice your opinion! "I wish to see.." "I don't care.."
• How does this fit into the writing machine definition?

~ Interpretation

• Power of the reader over the narrative.

Comparison between The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise & A Story as You Like It: the former you're the main character in the story, ACTOR // the later you're a reader casting judgement on the writer, REACTOR

Methods 2025-10-01: Group Discussions Of Texts That Had Been Read

Etherpad for Group Discussion

Georges Perec: The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise (1968)

• There are different versions of this work: a diagram, a text, a radio broadcast > we mostly engaged with the text and/or the diagram.
• The experiences of “reading” the flow chart and the text are very different:
  • The concept of the diagram is a loop; a text is always linear.
  • The diagram is the script of a computer program, the text is the entire iteration.
• The written text is prefaced with an intro by the translator, which gives helpful context.
• The text is not punctuated and only in lower case. This is probably meant to simulate a computer algorithm and mechanical processes, but it also resembles the stream of consciousness of a human. The lack of punctuation makes the text uncomfortable to read, it is easy to get lost in in it—but also entertaining.
• The subject (“you”) never actually asks for a raise. A possible interpretation: Perec is trying to critique hierarchy of companies.
• from the intro: there’s an “exhilarating potential of repetitiveness and recursion”
• “decide to try your luck afresh tomorrow”
• “circumperambulate”: to walk/wander without a destiny in circles (webster: to circle on foot especially ritualistically); in portuguese perambular means to wander

Marcel Bénabou: Rule and Constraint (1984)

• Rule is a metric or a form while a constraint is a generative result.
• Bénabou argues in favour of constraint and points to strict as well as freedom-based literary schools of thought. He argues that both are missing the whole point of language, which is to be treated as an object in itself, not a mere conveyor of information.
• Some forms of constraint are accepted/desired: poetic forms like an alexandrine or a sonnet (also, haiku or limerick) have specific rhyme schemes, or a set number of syllables or lines.
• Constraints does not confine the authors but liberates them, you escape from your own censorship.
• Constraints can enhance your creativity by limiting your toolset. Rules are for comprehension, constraints are for cerativity.
• Language is something material. Language and rules itself have a material.
• "Each page is a bed where letters lie"
• "Constraint forces the system out of its routine functioning, thereby compelling it to reveal its hidden resources"
• "Constraint goes beyond rules, people who have questioned language can escape the system and reveal hidden resources" – maybe a reason why someone starts to learn coding to understand the constraints

Raymond Queneau: A Story as You Like It (1967)

• Interesting to put this into the context of the time when it was created, modern day the stories are very complex but might have been interesting back in the days.
• All of the choices that you get at the end is very opinionated, everything is a opinion which is quite different from asking your boss for a raise. In this, reader casts a judgement to the choice and story.

Paul Fournel: The Theater Tree — A Combinatory Play

• Example for different ways of writing scripts/texts (like a "choose your own adventure games")
• Black mirror: pretended that the way the story was made is revolutionary, but actually it was not! Fournels ideas at the time also not revolutionary
• Similar structure to Italo Calvino's books

Michael Winkler: Where Signs Resemble Thoughts (1960s)

• Michael Winkler: both an author and an artist
• Language is a code that we all came up with it and agreed on.
• The point of a code: someone else has to be able to understand
• Winkler made symbols out of words by connecting the letters within a circle (there are other possible codes!)
• Connecting the words with the symbols, it's possible to reflect on the word itself > serendipity
• It is an interesting exercise to take language apart to look at the single components
• Ideographic from Greek: ideo = that is seen; gramma: letter / written sign
• Other writing systems are (more) symbolic in themselves (with e.g. Chinese a system like winkler's would be way more complicated)
• Winklers symbols on the circle visually resemble the connection between stars (as in astrology)
• Language as a code is underlying computing, but the codes in computing are very inaccessible to people using other writing systems

Ema's gatherings

Ema's space

don't write above this line, but underneath

Blog, Reflections and Piece of Writings

feel free to throw your link here!

• Youjung's & Youjung's blog
• Lea's
• Barbara's

Writing Machines: Technotexts and Media-Specific Analysis by Katherine N. Hayles

Reading group: Luca, Barbs, Soda and Daan.

Daan: One of the many discussions that sticked in SI28 was the discussion on technotexts and the meaning of them. Luca and Barbs explaining them to me, I was overthinking the meaning I guess. Definition the text said: when a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it, it mobilizes reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence. To clear it up even more, we gathered some examples of what they are:

• How to make a Dadaist poem by Tristan Tzara. https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/tzara.html

• Stanley Parable videogame

• Printed instructions on how to use the printer hanging above the printers at WdKa/PZi.

Printed instructions on how to use printer

All technotexts are metatexts but not all metatexts are technotexts,, I believed was said by some classmates and tutor (Barbs, Tommi, Marloes(?)) while discussing this topic.

Sharing from Soda: Chinese Characters as Writing Machines

1. Writing as a System of Meaning

In our group discussion, we explored the origins of Chinese characters and how they reflect the human effort to record the world through visual forms. Early Chinese writing evolved from drawings of objects and natural phenomena, gradually turning into a structured system of symbols.

2. Chinese Characters as a Logographic System

Chinese writing is a logographic system, in which each character carries meaning rather than representing sound alone.

Many early characters were pictographic, directly inspired by what they described.

• 火 (huǒ, “fire”) resembles two crossed sticks with flames rising above.
• 日 (rì, “sun”) and 月 (yuè, “moon”) depict the sun and the crescent moon.
• 鱼 (yú, “fish”) outlines the shape of a fish.

Although the modern forms are more abstract, their visual roots are still recognizable.

3. Radicals and Phonetic Components

As the writing system developed, many characters became compound forms, combining two parts:

• A radical (semantic element) that indicates meaning.
• A phonetic component that suggests pronunciation.

For example:

• 烧 (shāo, “to burn”) combines 火 (“fire”) with 尧, which gives the sound.
• 林 (lín, “forest”) consists of two 木 (mù, “tree”), meaning “many trees.”
• 森 (sēn, “woods”) adds a third 木, implying an even denser forest.

This system reflects how meaning and sound interact within a single written unit.

4. Word Roots in Alphabetic Languages

Interestingly, the concept of radicals in Chinese is somewhat similar to word roots and affixes in alphabetic languages.

Both help readers recognize meaning and build vocabulary through patterns.

For example:

• In English, the root aqua- means “water,” as in aquarium or aquatic.
• In Portuguese, fogo means “fire,” and it appears in words like fogão (stove).
• In Dutch, licht means “light,” related to verlichten (to illuminate).
• In Italian, mare means “sea,” as in marino (marine) or sottomarino (submarine).

Just as radicals organize Chinese characters by meaning, these linguistic roots help organize vocabulary in alphabetic systems.