Blog Post #4

Creatively Un-creative Writing

In 2011, American poet Kenneth Goldsmith coined the term "Uncreative Writing" in his book of essays, called Uncreative Writing:Managing Language in the Digital Age. Uncreative writing can take many forms, including writing screenplays for existing television shows and videos, creating essays comprised of pieces of other people's writings, and transcribing audio clips. In many of Goldsmith’s works, he often infers on the idea that “re-purposing a work is not plagiarism”, a theory that has brought much criticism along with it. These criticisms stem from where credit should be given. Re-purposed works have many different authors, and it becomes hard to tell who is the actual creator of the work. There are many different collaborators in a re-purposed work that all deserve credit for their part in the new piece. 

In the link below is a poem compiled of text that has been generated by our four tribe members in a group chat. The poem we created was composed of the audio we heard from three separate videos, a KurtCobain interview, Jimmy Fallon #MomTexts, and a history of rap with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. Each member of our tribe typed into the chat bits and pieces of what we heard in these videos, and we composed them into what can really be describes as a poem of many things. The most interesting part of this work is that while simultaneously hearing the same audio feed, each member tended to chose the same words/phrases to type into the chat. This makes the poem a flow of words our brains interpret, intertwined together, creating a poem of our similarities of mind. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nFqDHeQ5QIwByBSfgwME9HB11fiVcYhCn7cNecsWrDo/edit?usp=sharing