Maskinskrift

Hösten närmar sig. Det är dags att väcka liv i det projekt som jag faktiskt vunnit pris för: Feeding Frenzy. Målet är att starta upp denna burroughska maskin senare under hösten/vintern.

(må verklighetsstudion darra av rädsla inför mitt satsförstörelsevapen!)

När jag skickade in idén till FFKP:s tävling i våras var jag i det närmaste besatt av Burroughs och hans Novatrilogi. Sedan dess har sinnen och medvetande degenererat och sakta trubbats av med underkastelse och konformism som följd – jag känner behovet av mental genomsköljning och sträcker mig efter tre fantastiska böcker: Den mjuka maskinen, Biljetten som exploderade och Novaexpressen.

Här finns så mycket att hämta, man kan bläddra fram vilken sida som helst i någon av böckerna och börja läsa, låta sig uppslukas av intensiteten, fantasifullheten, galenskapen, gåtfullheten och språket. Språket som är såväl hotet – viruset i sig – som befrielsen – medicinen mot detsamma, mot sig själv. Låt mig bjuda på ett magnifikt stycke ”vanlig” prosa (ingen cut-up) från andra kapitlet i Den mjuka maskinen:

Du kan inte fatta vilket jävla liv det var när jag drog från Staterna – Jag kände den här langaren som vägrade ha nån skit på sig tryckte det bara i armen – ett till två gram över hans egen absorberingsnivå allt beroende på vilken rutt han jobbade på och pissade ut det i flaskor till sina kunder så att de kunde komma undan som ett gäng perversa typer om snuten slog till – Så Doc Benway utvärderade situationen och kom på den här idén ”En gång blev jag stucken av en skorpion i Övre Babianröven – upplevelsen var inte helt olik en fix – Hummmm.” Så han importerar den här speciella skorpionarten och föder upp den på metall och skorpionerna fick en fosforescerande blå färg och liksom hummade ”Nu måste vi hitta ett värdigt kärl” sa han – Så vi raggade upp den här gamla pillerpundaren och satte skorpionen på honom och han blev liksom blå och man såg att han fixade direkt på metallen – De här skorpionerna kunde styras via radar och betjäna klienterna så snart Doc fått degen – Det var schysst så länge det varade och snuten kunde inte komma åt oss – Hur som helst började alla dessa skorpionknarkare att lysa i mörkret och om de inte fick sin fix exakt på klockslaget förvandlades de direkt till skorpioner – Så det blev ganska jobbigt och vi blev tvungna att dra vidare maskerade till unga knarkare på väg till Lexington

När jag läste det här första gången blev jag så lycklig – nästan extatisk – och på samma gång dyster. Denna ambivalens möter jag varje gång jag verkligen snöar in på något, när besattheten sätter sina klor i kroppen. Det handlar om lyckan av att ha blivit rörd i grunden av något briljant och genialiskt, något som på en sekund jagade apatin och cynismen på flykten, känslan av att ha fått en glimt av något djupt mänskligt och betydelsefullt. Men så genast kommer dysterheten, övertygelsen om att inget bättre än detta är möjligt, litteraturen/musiken/filmen har med detta verk nått sin absoluta topp och bara degeneration återstår – tusen upphöjda verk man trodde var bra faller handlöst ned i ett mediokert brus.

Det här hände när jag upptäckte Aphex Twin på 90-talet och när jag av en slump ramlade över den amerikanska excentrikern och musikern Daniel Johnston. I min ungdom råkade jag ut för det i samband med upptäckten av Ernst-Hugo Järegårds demoniska inläsning av Skräckens labyrinter. Det hände när jag för några år sedan såg den japanska barnfilmen Min granne Totoro och när jag läste Hundra år av ensamhet av Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Och så hände det i vintras/våras när jag började läsa Novatrilogin som stått i bokhyllan ett bra tag.

Men det går över. Efter ett tag blir man alltid upphunnen av apatin, cynismen och tvivlet. Det låter lite sorgligt, nästan tragiskt, men jag ser det som en av livets barmhärtiga sidor.

This is what I said (and what I should have said) during my speech in Gothenburg last week.

1. What is Feeding Frenzy?

Since I was informed that I was one of the winners of FFKP”s ”idea contest” I have happily told friends and family about it. Of course I also mailed them my application text and the press release. The problem is that nobody understood what the idea is about. I don’t blame them. The text I sent to the contest is rather cryptic using vocabulary inspired by the american author William Burroughs, conspiracy theories and alchemy. I thought that was fun and suited the idea quite well. Anyway, here is a more straight forward explanation.

Feeding Frenzy is a piece of conceptual software. The basic idea is to manipulate the text content of web feeds (i.e. RSS and Atom) by using different collage techniques or text tranformationen algorithms. Basically it is a web application where you can register the URL to any feed (e.g. blogs, news web sites, etc) and choose which text transformation algorithm you want to use. This will result in a new URL – a kind of ”remixed” text feed – that you can subscribe to with your favourite feed reader client (e.g. Google Reader, Thunderbird, etc).

Feeding Frenzy is so far the project name during the development. It might change – and probably will.

2. William Burroughs and the Cut-up technique

The idea is much inspired by the works and thoughts of William Burroughs, especially his ”cut-up” technique from the 60s. Cut-up was discovered by an english artist named Brion Gysin. What Brion did was that he copied out phrases from different sources, e.g. news papers and magazines. He then cut out pieces from different phrases using a razor or a pair of scissors, and rearranged the fragments. This produced a new text that was written down on paper or with a typewriter. Brion was a friend of William Burroughs who soon became obsessed with this new technique.

William Burroughs, an american avantgardistic writer, was quite an extreme and eccentric person in many senses. He was a notorious drug addict, a low-life criminal obsessed with guns and an almost militant homosexual. He was also a well educated, well dressed professor type admired by the beatniks. During the 60s he experimented a lot with cut-up and other similar text processing techniques. This resultetd in, among other things, the Nova trilogy – a non-linear, fragmentary story built of so called ”routines” and cut-up passages. The plot in the trilogy is basically a hallucinatoric story about a gigantic intergalactic conspiracy against humanity.

In books, articles, lectures and interviews Burroughs has given many different explanations to what cut-up really is about, what the technique means to him. First of all Burroughs wasn’t much of a theorist. The most important thing for him seems to have been the actual practice, or process, of cut-up – to spread the know-how and make people start to cut-up on their own. He even said: Don’t theorize, try it.

It was also a way to make the act of writing, or producing text, more concrete and physical. A way for a writer to become more like a painter that is constantly handling materials and colours, getting his hands dirty.

Burroughs had ideas of the cut-up process as some kind of psychoanalytical machine. He seams to have meant that during the process you create sentences with sub-consciously hidden information. In a lecture at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from 1976 he says:

Now, how random is random. We know so much that we don’t consciously know that we know that perhaps the cut-in was not random. The operator, on some level, knew just where he was cutting in as you know on some level exactly where you were and what you were doing ten years ago this particular time. But you couldn’t – most of you couldn’t, a few freaks who can – make that knowledge consciously available. And the same way, while you’re doing the tape – on some level you know just exactly where your words are. So cut-ups put you in touch with what you know and do not know that you know.

In the Nova trilogy Burroughs introduces a bizarre theory about human language as a virus spread by aliens at the dawn of man. The reason for this is to take control of the human race, using the language to destabilize the society using ”feedback loops” that eventually will result in a cosmic nova (!). Cut-up is in this context a sort of counter measure or guerilla tactic. By cutting up words both with scissors, razors and tape recorders you are actually hacking the language itself – hacking the control machine – and liberating yourself from the control mechanisms that keep humanity enslaved. Through out the Nova trilogy Burroughs repeats combat instructions:

Calling partisans of all nations – Cut word lines – Shift linguals – Vibrate tourists – Free doorways – Word falling – Photo falling – Break through in Grey Room -

Burroughs has also suggested that cut-up can be used to predict future events. From the same lecture in 1976 he says:

While you experiment with cut-ups over a period of time you’ll find that some of the cut-ups and rearranged texts seem to refer to future events. I cut-up an article written by John Paul Getty and got ”it’s a bad thing to sue your own father” – this was a rearrangement and wasn’t in the original text – and a year later one of his sons did sue him. I mean, it was just purely extraneous information and meant nothing to me. I had nothing to gain on either side. We had no explanation for this at the time. It just suggested that perhaps when you cut into the present the future leaks out. But we simply accepted it and continued the experiments.

Burroughs is an unreliable source, though, even when it comes to his own strange domains. Reality and fiction seems to constantly blend together. What is fact and what is fiction? I am sure the question wasn’t even meaningful to Burroughs.

3. Motivations behind Feeding Frenzy

First of all, I am aware that this idea with Feeding Frenzy might sound strange and pointless. It might even end up being very boring and uninspired, but still I want to try. I don’t want to sound anti-intellectual, but we must remember that this is an experimental practice. Again I quote Burroughs:

I would like to emphasize that this is a technique and like any technique will, of course, be useful to some writers and not to others — In any case [it is] a matter for experimentation not argument.

My main motivation behind the idea is a bit cryptic and hard to explain. Basically, it is about lost mysteries and bad fiction.

The purpose of much modern technology and invention seems to be to solve problems, increase transparency and overcome long distances. Some problems that have been solved during the last twenty years are organizing photographs, remember meetings, write nice looking reports, etc. Our lives are constantly becoming more transparent with tools such as mobile phones, chat and presence clients (e.g. MSN, ICQ, etc), calender sharing and synchronization (e.g. Outlook, Google Calender, etc) and of course social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). Communication technologies, airplanes, GPS and navigation systems and instant news reporting have made the world feel a lot smaller since grandpa. This is impressing, but also a bit boring and sad. The way problems are solved with technology, things tend to get a bit too organized, accessible and static.

Storm the reality studio!

What we consider to be reality is always a fiction. The reality we are forming now is made up of live broadcasts from wars and elections, browsing through news sites, reading feeds, chatting, weekends in London, synchronized calenders, Google searches, Facebook status lines, Twitter, conversations over Skype and cellular phones, etc. The technology that delivers this simplified reality and transparency is combined with a belief that we always know what goes on and that it is true. Reality turns into daft fiction.

I am not a nostalgic person and I don’t think we should turn down modern technology in a kind of Theodore Kaczynski way. My view on reality is aesthtic and I think that technology could be used very different from now, used to remystify the reality and reinvent the irrational and strange, add some noise and glitches. Literature is one way to achieve this, but why can’t it be done by software too? I will try by cutting up feeds.

I am also very fond of the ”remix” concept. In music the process of remixing and musical reuse in form of sampling is widely used, especially in electronic music. Today the remix concept is used in a more broad sense than before, people talk about a remix culture which is about derivative work and reuse in general. Text transformation can definitely be seen as a remix technique. My hope is that Feeding Frenzy can be an interesting contribution to the world of creative reuse – a sampler for texts and feeds.

As you all know remix culture is today under attack from many directions. Law makers and the industries – the ”control machine” in Burroughs terms – have never really grasped the concept of derivative works. Lately even web syndication has been under attack. It seems as if the Associated Press (AP) and other news medias don’t always like what is done to their feeds. We will have to see how they feel about being cut-up.

I also hope that Feeding Frenzy itself will be ”remixed”, or misused in an interesting way that no one could anticipate. A great example of ”creative misuse” is the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. It was built during early 80s and originally marketed to guitar players for bass accompaniment while practicing alone. As a bass guitar emulator it is horrible. It doesn’t sound the slightest as an electric bass guitar and I don’t think it was very successful in that sense. Quite soon DJs and producers found the little machine and discovered its very characteristic sound – the musical genre Acid house was born. Even today you often hear the buzzing sound of the 303 in a lot of electronic music. In my opinion, being reused is a wonderful destiny for all inventions.

4. Implementation

Some words about implementation. My idea is to implement the whole system in Python. A lot of the source code will obviously be dealing with text processing and Pyhton has excellent support for that. In my opinion it is also a quite neat and elegant language. I will probably use Django to implement the actual website and its features. Django is a popular web application framework written in Python.

I will concentrate on implementing a ”good” cut-up algoithm. An important question is: what is a good transformation technique? For me the answer is simple: One that produces interesting results. There are no rules here, no way of cheating. There are only boring and interesting results. Remember that this is experimentation – it should be interesting and fun.

There are of course many other interesting text tranformation candidates. Since the scissors and razors of 60s new tools have emerged – computers and software. New more advanced text transformation algoithms can quite easily be constructed. E.g. multiple translations: You start with a text and run it through a translation software (e.g. Yahoo! Babel Fish and Google Translate). For example from swedish to german, then from german to french, followed by french to russian and then back to swedish. It can produce quite funny results.

Another example is mash-up techniques using search engines. E.g. you can programmatically cut a text into pieces then run a search with the text pieces and combine a text with help of the search results. It is just an idea. I haven’t seen it in use or tested it. It could be interesting. You can also mash-up many different feed sources which somewhat resembles the old ”fold-in” technique.

To begin with I will try to deploy the system ”in the cloud” using Google App Engine. App Engine is a platform for building and hosting web applications using Google’s extensive infrastructure. It supports both Python and Django. I am not completely comfortable with the idea of using a cloud service, though. Cloud-based platforms makes you dependent, you literary put your data in the hands of someone else. Talk about a control machine (in terms of Burroughs)! The reason why I still consider this is of course due to simplicity and practical details.  No servers to administrate, no failing backup scripts and no concerns about bandwidth. (How easy it is to sell out your ideals and principles – it only takes an ice-cream…)

5. Finally

This idea – Feeding Frenzy – doesn’t contain anything new. The practice of cutting up texts goes back 50 years as we have seen. And collage techniques in other art forms are much older. The idea of implementing cut-up and other text transformation techniques with software isn’t new either. You can find many cut-up machines by a simple Google search. Not even the idea of combining a cut-up machine with feeds is new. A couple of years ago a swedish artist (or maybe an artist collective?) created Poloblogg – an automatically generated blog that mixed together text pieces from many other blogs. It sometimes produced rather fun nonsense articles complete with pictures and hyperlinks.

There are some problems with these systems, though. With Poloblogg you could never alter the input in any way. New texts were generated by combining unknown sources. Both the input and the method was hermetically closed and even if the result could be fun and interesting there was no participation in the process. Other web based cut-up and text manipulation machines give you access to the input, but here another problem arises. The connection of input, the actual text transformation process and the output is slow and you often hesitate over which texts to use as input. It is a rather static and boring process that lacks flow.

The old analogue cut-up method is of course the most elegant and dynamical. It is hard to compete with. But there is one thing where it really can’t compete – again, the flow. Traditional cut-up is very slow and not always fun. What might be new with Feeding Frenzy is the possibility to connect a never ending stream of input to a configurable output in order to create ”remixed” texts.

And if Feeding Frenzy ends up being just boring, at least it doesn’t solve any problems.

Idag ska jag prata om Feeding Frenzy på IT-universitetet i Göteborg. Jag lägger upp vad som sades (och vad som borde ha sagts) här senare i veckan.