Commentary on Uncreative Writing

In the academic world there seems to be a strongly held consensus that plagiarism, or any kind of intellectual theft, is inherently negative, and should warrant punishment.  This concept of strict ownership of ideas is challenged by the concept of Uncreative writing.  Uncreative writing can be defined as taking content from a variety of already established sources such as essays, videos, pod casts, etc., and making changes so that a new product is created.  One example of Uncreative writing is a collaborative poem written by our digital humanities tribe. This poem may seem random, and nonsensical to some, but was created with the purpose of transcribing the words of another to create a work of unique art.  This poem was created in a group chat between tribe members who were transcribing bits and pieces of YouTube videos while watching them.  The result is  a display of different words that come from the videos arranged in a poetic fashion. This work of poetry exhibits a form of dual authorship, between our tribe and the various pop culture personalities in the videos.  While the words in the poem are not our original thoughts, they are given new meaning by being placed in a poetic context.  The new form that this content takes is unique because the word order was chosen deliberately by the group, but could be considered not unique because without viewing the videos the content surely would not come to exist as it does now. While our tribes work of uncreative writing is telling, uncreative writing as a whole can be viewed from many perspectives including Kenneth Goldsmith’s, a college professor, who employs a variety of creative writing  in his teachings.

Taken from the main page for an Uncreative Writing class at The University of Pennsylvania, taught by Professor Kenneth Goldsmith, “This workshop will rise to that challenge by employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering, as compositional methods. Along the way, we'll trace the rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations spanning the arts, with a particular emphasis on how they employ language. We'll see how the modernist notions of chance, procedure, repetition, and the aesthetics of boredom dovetail with popular culture to usurp conventional notions of time, place, and identity, all as expressed linguistically.” This clearly brings up questions about ownership and authorship, one example of Uncreative Writing is when one writes down everything they hear from an interview, speech, music video etc, and using that as a piece of writing. Coming from an article from The Journal of Electronic Publishing, “Goldsmith’s perspective twists and breaks conventional notions of creativity. He discovers that even in re-enactment, a creative dimension emerges. “Even when we do something as seemingly ‘uncreative’ as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and re-framing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother's cancer operation. It's just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices” (9). Goldsmith’s musings on “Managing Language in the Digital Age” nudge his readers closer to valuing the choices he says we have not been taught to value.” Goldsmith is suggesting that it is an original work of art because through the act of re-purposing a whole new level of creativity has emerged, based on something that it itself is not a creative act. This is a fascinating development, that has only become possible due to the technology of the modern era, it also questions the meaning of language as well, the fact that one can take something already done and re-purpose it in a non creative manner and it then could have a completely different meaning, bringing about a fugue state and also a very elucidating revelation, implying that the meaning of things is merely an interpretation of one’s own personal experiences thus providing an outlet for more connection between individuals on an emotional level.