Uncreative Writing

     Our class examined something called "uncreative writing" this past week. Uncreative writing focuses on employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling,

plundering, as compositional methods. The concept was created by Kenneth Goldsmith while he was teaching his class called “Uncreative Writing” at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. He formed his class based on the notion that traditional forms of creativity were under attack, being eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. Because of his ideas about uncreative writing, we were able to create our own piece of uncreative writing called Cobain Texts His Mother About the History of Rap.

      This poem was created in a unique fashion, each member of the group listened to three randomly selected videos. The first video was an interview with Kirk Cobain, discussing his personal life. He spoke about his drug use, music, and health issues. The second Video was a hilarious clip from Jimmy Fallon's late night TV show, in which he had people on twitter send in funny, weird, or embarrassing text messages from their mothers. Fallon picked some of the best ones and displayed them to his audience. The third clip that our group viewed was also from Jimmy Fallon's television show, but this time Justin Timberlake was in it. They sang several songs that displayed the history of rap in a short period of time. As each member of the group listened to these different videos, they were then asked to transcribe every word that they heard into a group chat. Once the videos were finished, they were then asked to copy and paste what they had into one document and delete everything but the words they typed. By doing this, they created their own work of uncreative writing.

      What's fascinating about these videos, is that they are very unique in comparison to each other.  For example, Kurt Cobain's interview had a very monotone and sad tone, but the Justin Timberlake video was very upbeat and fun.  The poem we created changes tone based on the diction we pulled away from the videos.  As we can see, the diction used by Kurt Cobain isn't as humorous or upbeat as Jimmy Fallon or Justin Timberlake's diction.  Overall, Uncreative Writing has been an interesting concept introduced in class based on modern technology giving us complete accessibility to take one persons words and use it to create any form of literature.  

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La Maison de Monet a Giverny
The House of Monet at Giverny 

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Response to Bots and Self Generating Text

      A bot, short for robot, is a computer program designed to operate autonomously, performing scheduled, responsive, or real-time operations in a computer, through the internet, and/or social media networks.  Bots are a unique type of program because they can interact with humans, and often take on a human-like persona. Some may even argue that bots have the capability to interact with other bots or even humans.

     An excellent example of a bot that takes on human characteristics would be the Real Human Praise Twitter bot, that takes pieces of positive reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (a movie and television aggregator), changes the director or producers name to a Fox News anchor or personality, and tweets it every two minutes. This Twitter account and bot were produced by the TV show The Colbert Report as a response to the rumor that Fox News publicists had thousands of fake social media accounts to try to deflect any negative posts or comments made about their news channel. The constant positive praise comes across ridiculous and ironic, which is exactly what the producer of The Colbert Report (Rob Dubbin) was going for to put shame to Fox News.

     Another great example of a self generating text that is created by the powers of bots, is the NRA Tally. This self generating text uses some factual evidence and some sarcasm to create a political stance against the NRA(National Rifle Association). It creates a headline about a mass shooting,
followed by a statement about the NRA, which creates a satirical moment for the reader. The efforts by this bot and many other bots can be seen and heard all around the world. 

     As one looks deeper into these bots a lot of interesting thoughts and perspectives can arise. Should a person really listen to the bot? Who is actually writing these texts?
     When thinking about bots, it is hard to establish who the author of the text is. There are many different contributors when it comes to making bots. Because of the different aspects that are involved in making the bots, there could be several different authors. The person that wrote the computer code that is actually generating the bot could be considered an author. The computer that is generating the text could also be considered an author. In some cases, bots use previously written pieces of art to create different works of art. The pervious authors could also be considered an author to the new piece of art. The considered author is dependent on what the reader thinks of a contributor. Some might think since the computer cannot truly think for itself, it should not be considered an author. Authorship is dependent on personal opinion.