Between chance and repetition: Lesson 7

Lesson 7.  The Unconscious Mind of Chance

From https://www.slideshare.net/emilyvalenza/surrealism-dada

A. Automatic Writing

In the early 20th century, artists and writers who came to be known as "Surrealists" invented 2 techniques that play with chance elements. These techniques are known as "Automatic Writing" and "Exquisite Corpse." (Trivia: If you are familiar with "memes" and "mash ups," the Surrealists invented those, too. See example above.)

From https://www.slideshare.net/ScottScholz/surrealism-in-paris-1539554

B. Exquisite Corpse

Wikipedia: "Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original French term cadavre exquis) or rotating corpse, is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun", as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse).

From https://www.slideshare.net/wyncko/exquisite-corpse-8354646

C.  Class Adaptation.

Each student will be asked to write a word, a phrase, or a sentence starting from the letter of the alphabet assigned to him or her. The teacher then collects each item and assembles the pieces on the board to see what the class came up with. The class can also reflect on the intersection of this assembly technique with the Cut-up, the Permutation, and the Word Cloud approaches we have employed before. There is also the addition of a collective element in the composition, something that is known today as "Collaborative Art.''

D. Sample recent adaptation

Here is a recent adaptation of surrealist writing styles:

From https://www.pinterest.com/perkoo/poetry/

D. The principle of Free Union

Take a look at this excerpt from a piece by André Bréton and compare it with the piece above.

Free Union

by André Breton

My wife whose hair is a brush fire
Whose thoughts are summer lightning
Whose waist is an hourglass
Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger
Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude
Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow
Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass
Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer
The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut
Whose tongue is an incredible stone
My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child
Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows
My wife whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs
With steam on the windows
My wife whose shoulders are champagne
Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins over the ice
My wife whose wrists are matches
Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts
Whose fingers are fresh cut hay
My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit
And Midsummer Night
That are hedges of privet and resting places for sea snails
Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea
And a fusion of wheat and a mill
Whose legs are spindles
In the delicate movements of watches and despair
My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders
Whose feet are carved initials
Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks
My wife whose neck is fine milled barley
Whose throat contains the Valley of God
And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom
My wife whose breasts are of night
And are undersea molehills

...
My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire

--Translated from the French by David Antin. From The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology, ed. Michael Benedikt (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1974).

E. Discussion points

1. How are the two poems similar? What similar patterns do you see?

2. How do they illustrate the bi-play of Chance and Determinism, open and closed structures?

3. How similar or different are they from your Chance Notebook?

4. Is the title Free Union an apt description of what's going on in Bréton's text?

5. What can you say about the description of the wife? Are these apt metaphors?  Why and why not? Why would Bréton use (or abuse) metaphors this way?

Between chance and repetition: Lesson 6

Lesson 6. Memory and Chance

Otto Zitko, from "Polyne," http://www.michaelwoolworth.com/artists/otto-zitko

A. The Chance Notebook

1. For this section, the assigned project will be a Chance Notebook. The idea is to jot down the words people say wherever they are, as the words come within earshot, without any attempt to edit or suppress anything as far as possible. You must pretend to be a pure passive recording machine.

Go to a mall or any crowded place, like the cafeteria. You can include other sounds, known or unknown, human or nonhuman. A page is enough but two pages is also okay. You may also use the technique of concrete typography if you feel like it.

2. "Chance Reading Session." Read an excerpt of your Chance Notebook in class.

3. Next, rewrite your Chance Notebook into a vignette, or a very short piece in ''conventional'' prose narrating or describing the auditory "events" that you recorded . 

4. Which between the two is more realistic for you? Why or why not?

5. Do you agree that reality follows the order of Simultaneity while language follows Sequentiality? Like the contrast below between the linear order of stairs and the nonlinear nature of Zitko's graphism?

From https://www.pinterest.com/godelieftielens/otto-zitko/

B. The relationship between Memory and Writing

For this section, watch the YouTube trailers for "Memento" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Ioza-LfSk and "5O First Dates" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io8DlI1xaKI (where Lucy watches the video made for her to remember).

Next, watch Jonathan Nolan's discussion of the plot structure of "Memento." The YouTube interview with Nolan is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYScJZWhaHA. For further reading, you can check out the Wikipedia page about the film at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_(film).

C. Discussion questions

1. What do you think is the relationship between an event and our memory of it as reconstructed in writing? Is our memory as expressed in any storage medium like writing reproduced faithfully, or is there a certain fictionality involved?

2. When you rewrote the "events" in your Chance Notebook into a vignette, what did you add, what did you take out? Why?

3. What are the parallels between what you did with your Chance Notebook entries and the writing of News or Journalism? How much is fiction, how much is truth?

4. Are the words and expressions you used to reconstruct the event properly yours? What is the role of culture in your reconstructed version? Who speaks, then, your Culture or you (or the Google search results you found)?

5. Are memory and language internal or external, or both?

Between chance and repetition: Lesson 5

Lesson 5. The Method of Chance

A. Jackson Mac Low and his "word clouds"

Going back to Tzara's poem, we recall that it is a set of instructions. And yet, it seems that there is something strange: it is a method that intends the production of Chance events. In other words, is Tzara's instruction poem really a method of composition? Can a method be structured by randomness? Isn't this a contradiction in terms?

To investigate this question further, we will take a look at Jackson Mac Low's typographical drawings which he called Drawing-Asymmetry at https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2014/02/05/the-poetry-of-silence-jackson-mac-lows-drawing-asymmetry/.

Below is an excerpt concerning Mac Low's typographical drawings from the web page cited above (my emphases):

     "The direction of the letters making up the words and word chains was not predetermined and Mac Low admits that he allowed it to unfold through his own “spontaneous choice.” Accordingly, the formal quality of the drawings is at once chance-based and personal, turning found text into a visual representation using the mind as a mode of automatic, aesthetic translation. Mac Low dubbed the products of his practice “performance poems” and saw the realization of his poetry, primarily through sound, as a formative component of the work. It was through vocalization and performance that the silences of his poetry could give rise to ambient noises that would give the piece new form.

     Like Cage, Mac Low was drawn, in particular, towards the use of long silences that permitted the field of ambient noise to become integrated within the piece. The silences, which structure the poems, were intentional, and although they allowed for a greater degree of indeterminacy, they also reflected the artist’s intention to create an open structure for the work. Mac Low disagreed with Maciunas’s “anti-art”; he saw Cage and himself as demonstrating an “openness to the world” while appreciating the role of the artist in that world. Although the scribble-like aesthetic of the Drawing-Asymmetry series suggests a child-like lack of intention, Mac Low was serious about the chance operation he employed, believing that his process as an artist was important to the critical reading of his poetry."

B. Guide questions

1. Do you believe in Chance? Does Chance exist?

2. Can we intentionally produce Chance? Are our actions governed by Chance?

3. If all writing is a Cut-up according to Burroughs, does this mean that all writing has a built in element of Chance?

4. How can writing be both chance-based and personal?

5. What is an ''open structure?'' Can a structure be open and stay within its structural integrity?

6. By extension, can your mind or self-identity be open and remain the ''same'' and not become other than itself?

C. Word Clouds vs. Drawing Asymmetries

Word clouds were invented primarily for visualizing huge textual data for word frequency. The more frequent the words are the bigger they are. Words are also color coded or space oriented for various purposes.

Although there is a sense in saying that word clouds "liberate" words from their syntactic moorings, there is still a limit to the use of word clouds as a  method of textual visualization. You can read the pros and cons here: Robert Hein, "The pros and cons of word clouds as visualizations," https://www.visioncritical.com/pros-and-cons-word-clouds-visualizations/.

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the ''analog'' version of Mac Low's drawing asymmetries versus the ''digital'' version of doing futurist inspired ''words-in-freedom'' processing?

2. How does word cloud programming affect or influence the data output that we get from the input we make?

3. Word clouds are simply aids to data research. Robert Hein says that ''Like all research data, skilled interpretation is what provides the beautiful insight.'' Is the human brain still better at making and interpreting texts?

4. An artist and a researcher would have different priorities in word processing. What would they be and how does this impact the production of textual material?

5. Which approach you liked better, your analog Cut-up, your Permuted Text notebook, or your Word cloud output? Why? Is it possible to combine them as successive/all-ternating steps in the future?

6. Which part is Chance, and which part is repetition? Can Chance repeat itself?

7. Are YOU a product of Chance or by Repetition?

Submit you answers on a fresh sheet as an additional page to you Notebook collection.

The debut of the "animated" text: Lesson 4

Lesson 4. The Cut-up and the Free Word


A. Brion Gysin: Cut Up artist MK 2

1.  Some key notions:

#a. "A consumate innovator, Gysin altered the cut-up technique to produce what he called permutation poems in which a single phrase was repeated several times, with the words rearranged in a different order with each reiteration. Together with Burroughs they thought the spell of language could be broken by slicing, dicing and splicing" (ttps://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/01/brion-gysin-1911916-13786-poets-are.html).

From http://quoteaddicts.com

The American writer and artist William S. Burroughs, in an article called "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin," says that

   "All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic" (From http://www.ubu.com/papers/burroughs_gysin.html. My emphasis).

You can read more about Brion Gysin at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brion_Gysin

2. Questions to think about:

a. Why do we need to "liberate the words"? What's "imprisoning" them anyway? Do you feel that the words you yourself use everyday are not "free"?

b. How is it that doing Cut-ups seems to bring in the correlative ideas of the "aleatory" and "permutation"? Did you ''experience'' these elements when you were making your "own" Cut-up?

B. No Poets Don't Own Words

From https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/01/brion-gysin-1911916-13786-poets-are.html

“No Poets Don’t Own Words” (1960), performed by Gysin on his record Orgy Boys (1982), was one of several permutated phrases that reinforced the idea of freeing language from individual control, one of the dominant concerns he shared with Burroughs" (From https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1612393. My italics.)

Below is a longer "version" of the same piece:

From http://imgur.com/gallery/zkxnP

C. Guide questions:

1. What does it mean that poets (and writers and speakers) don't own the words that they use?

2. Does this mean that copyrights are wrong? What happens when words become the property of people?

3. Is there a chance that we can ever be original when we use language or whenever we speak?

4. What is the function of permuting the word combinations through aleatory mechanisms? How does this relate to the claim above of William S. Burroughs that "All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard"?

D. Project Output: Permutation Cut-up Notebook

With the advance in algorithms, it has become easy--and mainstream!--to do what Gysin did during his time. Although we still subsume the "word processing" he introduced as a kind of amusement to pass the time. It doesn't sound so radical anymore: until you pass them as your final papers or exam answers, of course! (Imagine the permuted grade you will get!)

This just shows you how radical the idea still is, that it is either treated as pure amusement or kept within the realm of "literature." However, it would be simplistic to reverse the situation because if we all talked like Gysin's permutations, the new radical may become--guess what--the same old Traditional-Grammatically-Correct Sentences-We-All-Love, sincerely.

Wait, is that right? Didn't Burroughs already say that All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard ? It seems we haven't really maximized the full impact of what he said. It means we are all Cut-up artists already since the time we were born!

So where is the radicality, where is the difference?

While thinking of an answer, head to Text Mechanic™ – Text Manipulation Tools at http://textmechanic.com/ and compose your own version of Gysin's permutational Cut-up. It's up to you to supply the elements. It can be a refrain from a song, a sonnet by Shakespeare, a news paragraph, a weight loss mantra, or a magic spell you heard ''works'' on crushes.

So yes, is there really any difference between grammatical and non-grammatical Cut-ups? Write your opinion at the back of your one-page chef-d'œuvre.