William Burroughs famously and presciently referred to language as a sort of virus. A virus is indisputably alive, yet it depends on its host for its life.
During class today, we're going to play a language game called SPAWNNWAPS. The game has very few rules, only one of them absolute. Players generate text through a combination of traditional authorship (the writer's thoughts and feelings and whatevers rendered in alphabetic language) and "borrowed" language from other sources (cut-n-paste, collage, appropriation, etc.). Anybody can change anything, move anything, recombine anything. Change your name! Change your color! The only rule is that nothing can be deleted. This is purely additive. I've opened three "piratepads" where we'll enact this viral phenomenon. We will build these pads for exactly 50 minutes, the outside limit of the human attention span (or so I'm told). you can hop from pad to pad, import/export, etc.
Here is a link to the first pad: http://piratepad.net/nI16WtW3b4
POETICS OFF THE PAGE/////// This is the blog of Casey Smith's spring 2016 seminar of the same name at the Corcoran School of Arts + Design at the George Washington University in Washington DC. Send questions or comments to Casey Smith at kcs@gwu.edu.
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