proto-langltch artwork(s):
This topic contains 16 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by 
curt 6 years ago.
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Here is some art related to messed up language. Feel free to add your own.
Note that, when I link something like Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” poem, I’m not saying that poem is “glitch.” Schwitters didn’t know glitch from Kanye West. I’m simply saying it may be a place to start — either to realize that such things have already been done and to avoid repeating them, or as a starting place from which we might proceed.
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Raymond Queneau: One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
(a generative version)http://www.bevrowe.info/Queneau/QueneauRandom_v4.html
Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons
download from http://lab404.com/lang/artworks/Guy Debord / Asger Jorn: Memoires
download from http://lab404.com/lang/artworks/Kurt Schwitters: Ursonate
text: http://www.ubu.com/historical/schwitters/ursonate.html
audio: http://www.ubu.com/sound/ursonate.htmlBrion Gysin: Poem of Poems
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/gysin_brion/Gysin-Brion_Poem-of-Poems_A.mp3
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/gysin_brion/Gysin-Brion_Poem-of-Poems_B.mp3
Curt Cloninger: ‘Twixt the Cup & the Lip
http://www.lab404.com/video/cup/
Lois CK: Pootie Tang
Great thread, Curt. I’ll add some Russian Cubo-Futurists to the mix. (And we’ll have to chat sometime about protoglitch as glitch (or not). I’ll email you.) I also wonder, seeing Gysin above, if working some Burroughs into the list isn’t in order. I’ll include some audio below.
Alexei Kruchenykh:
Winter (1926)
dyr bul scyl (1912)
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/krucenych_aleksej/Krucenych-Aleksej_Dyr-Bul-Scyl.mp3
Kr dei macelli (1920)
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/krucenych_aleksej/Krucenych-Aleksej_Kr-Dei-Macelli.mp3
Zanzera, veleno (1922)
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/krucenych_aleksej/Krucenych-Aleksej_Zanzera-Veleno.mp3
Velemir Khlebnikov
various. (Read by Valerij Voskobojnikov in 1977)http://www.ubu.com/sound/chlebnikov.html
William S. Burroughs
Silver Smoke of DreamsThanks for these, Steven. Of course the challenge with all of these pre-glitch precedences will be to try and figure what “glitch”( as we each understand/practice it) brings to the table.
As a visual artist, one of my critiques of “experimental writing” is that no matter how “experimental” it is, it always still remains within the boundary (however near the boundary) of writing, poetry, literature, or whatever. So hopefully we can also begin thinking about tweaking language in toto, rather than merely tweaking something that winds up being a poem. Still… we have to start somewhere, and these are some promising places to start.
Indeed. When the “experimental” begins to (re)present the traditional in content and/or form, we need to question it. This also true of other media, though: songs, cinema, web design… Which leads me to ask you if one must escape the medium and/or genre in order to effectively change the language. In other words, are they intertwined as fully as McLuhan suggests? If this is true, and one must escape the medium to truly experiment, how are we defining poetry, songs, cinema, etc.? Is redefining genre a co/prerequisite of redefining language?
Good brainfood, Curt.
I would seek less to escape a medium or a genre than to stress the medium or genre from within until it spills over its own boundaries (hypertrophy). It gets strange when “language” is your medium, because language is already spilling beyond an artistic genre (like poetry) or an artistic medium (like video). I would say McLuhan’s model doesn’t go far enough in intertwining medium/message, because he starts with a presupposition that medium and message are two separate things, like they could be split apart.
So some very broad questions: What is the relationship between language and meaning? Can something have a meaning without speaking a language? I think it can. Otherwise, we have the “language” of film, the “language” of dance, the “language” of painting, and everything is reduced to a metaphorical “text” to be “read” (which is way too convenient for semioticians; now they suddenly become the experts on everything). In which case, we could just databend a digital image and say we have “glitched” the “language” of photography. I am more interested in a less broad, more common sense understanding of the term “language,” like what are called human languages (although even then, “human” might be too limiting). So language as something broader than “poetry” or even “writing,” but not as broad as everything in the world. And then, having understood it as such, how might we glitch it?
Other broad questions: Can a language be a language without having meaning? And a meaning to whom?
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mconnmofn21qb58eqo1_r1_1280.jpg
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcpgdiXfXA1qb58eqo1_1280.jpg
I think the question of meaning<–>language is a very important one, and precisely why Kruchenykh’s work is useful to such conversations. Not for his sound “poetry,” but his theoretical writings that assert the primacy of sound in language as well as his McLuhan-esque assertion that “content follows form.” Though his writings are underdeveloped, they are interesting starting points for my arguments regarding language, sound, and the use of “irregularity” as a method of disruptive meaning making. (My gli.tc/h presentation will articulate all of this.) Yet as you’re referring to, we need also interrogate the nature of meaning, namely the anthropocentric ont/epistem/phenomen/ologies that typically dominate such conversations (especially those within the language-focused humanities).
Some equally broad questions: Is consciousness a necessary precondition to meaning and meaning making? That is, can objects participate in not only creating, but also experiencing the gli.tc/h? Also: can “new” language be articulated using old language systems? To what extent can we write about non-writing? Or are similarly new delivery methods required for such scholarship/performance?
Thanks Steven. I look forward to reading Kruchenykh (and to hearing your presentation!). Here is something I wrote recently that considers the difference(s) between
1. humans / objects
2. consciousness / experiencehttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/manifesto-theory-%E2%80%98new-aesthetic%E2%80%99
From my perspective, the differences are far from trivial. But I’m also interested in the liminal space between the differences.
i’m curious – where would things like concrete poetry (Apollinaire’s Il Pluet for example) fall into the discussion? if at all? The reason I ask – the text is meant to be read/spoken but also to present an image – so the visual/verbal languages are one in the same. This is a thread that’s somewhat related to what I’m thinking/researching in regards to ASCII art – where somewhere languages become mixed or suspensions maybe? lol sorry if i’m confusing your conversation…
Bill, here are my thoughts:
I think concrete poetry is not yet glitched language.
Historically, glitch culture was first about audio (Kim Cascone), then about visuals. Given these historical precedences, there are at least a couple of ways we might glitch language.
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1. find the intersection of language and audio (spoken word) and glitch that audio (something like Burroughs/Gysin cut-ups).
2. find the intersection of language and visuals (books, typography) and glitch those visuals (something like Diane Gromola’s biomorphic type ( http://gromala.iat.sfu.ca/artdesign.html , scroll down to “Excretia”).
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Concrete poetry treats language as visuals (or as sculpture, in the case of Vito Acconci’s poetry). That’s a start. But I don’t think concrete poetry go far enough toward glitching those linguistic visuals (the are treated spatially, but not “glitched”). Futurist poems seem a bit more “glitched” ( http://bit.ly/VEBdfQ ), but even then, that example is supposed to be an image of a woman reading a letter from her boyfriend who is writing to her from the war front and describing the events of the war. So that futurist poem is visually mimetic, re-presenting something. Whereas a glitched visuals don’t usually purpose to re-present something.
In addition to the two ways of glitching language listed above, there even more insidious way of glitching language:
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1. getting into language’s underlying syntactical and semantic structures and glitching those.
2. prying open the space between signifier and signified (if you’re into Saussure) or the space between sign, object, and interpretant (if you’re into Peirce) or the space between language and myth (if you’re into Barthes).
3. tweaking the space between:
a. the real-time / affective /bodily / performative influence of uttered language (language as an immediate force in the world)
and
b. its denotative “meaning.”
JL Austin, Bakhtin, and Derrida are useful here.+++++++++++++++
Personally, I have been most interested in #3. #3 actually winds up involving glitched visuals and glitched audio.
#1 and #2 seem like they might be better cracked open via programming/code. Daniel, I welcome your thoughts on this!
more ideas linked to language/constraints:
Artlangs (synthetic languages designed to invoke a system of thought or for aesthetic reasons)
My favorite example is Oou:
Oou is a polysemous language, made up entirely of vowels. The same phrase can mean “I take drugs” and “You eat the sofa.” “Virtually impossible to understand one another: acts of communication become trippy idea-art.”
Esoteric Programming (programming language as art/joke/provocation/experiment)
INTERCAL: the first esolang (1972)
Technomasochism by Lev Bratishenko, Cabinet Magazine
brainfuck (1993)
simple, clear, and functional in its definition, but requires the programmer to construct long rants of gibberish to use. A rigid, contained system that takes us on a ludicrous journey — can be thought of in terms of Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes (1974)
languages of clashing systems:Piet (2008)
and one of my own: Light Pattern (2012)Intervening in the compilation process — conceptual languages that have rules but whose grammar can’t be used to create working programs:
Unnecessary (2005)
where every combination of symbols fails to produce a program, except the empty one
Kallisti (2007)
where every combination of symbols is a valid program but therefore makes each equivalent
(can be thought of in terms of Fluxus Event Scores whose instructions impossible to be carried out)Code Art / Code Poetry
readable by people and computers, with differing or conflicting meanings … just a couple examples as places to start:Pall Thayer’s Microcodes
cont3xt.net interview
Obfuscated Code — the IOCCC
(a variety of strategies, some similar to concrete poetry, or playing on meaning & nonsense)Fluxus Event Scores
The Fluxus WorkbookI see the distinction – thanks!
I really like this sort of conversation though, and wish I could read more (catch up). Its fairly new to me as an area to investigate, but there is something there. Something between language/spoken/performed and language/interpretation/viewed/read — – - – - like the machine can write/interpret and meat bodies can write/interpret but those operations maybe don’t match up sometimes. maybe that’s more like your #3 as well curt?
Right. I think this essay gets at some of what you are asking:
According to Bakhtin (and I agree), if language isn’t uttered in real time/space (whether that utterance is a hearing event or a reading event), then it didn’t happen. In other words, a volume of some unread novel lost in a cave somewhere isn’t really language, because it fails to intersect with lived time.
Of course, then the question becomes, spoken by whom? read by whom? If a machine runs code in the forest and there is no human around to read the code, did the machine “speak”?
joy.
@ http://working.gli.tc/forums/bot/curt/ i wwwould considerr mr. http://working.gli.tc/forums/bot/abillmiller/ ’s wwwerk to b in this categories… AKA as: http://working.gli.tc/forums/topic/proto-langltch-artworks/
jon (and bill),
could you link to some specific examples of bill’s work that you think are particularly language-centric?
Orphan Drift’s Cyberpositive (1994, recently reprinted):
http://www.cabinet.uk.com/picture/list-images/Landingpageimage.jpg
https://www.facebook.com/events/332574380160831/
Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus:
http://www.metamorphiction.com/index.php/printed/cobralingus/
Cutups at the Lazarus Corporation:
http://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/cutup/links
Exquisite Code:
lol
thanX – - – - I can try to find something today… i guess maybe these??!?!
transforms moby dick into a private code/language and then just drawings (2006?)
from a gallery talk/performance for a show i curated (2008)
not sure if this is whst @jonc4t3s mesnt…. but popped into my mind…. and out again
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This reply was modified 6 years ago by
abillmiller.
permutation poetry:
gysin!:
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/gysin_brion/Mektoub/Gysin-Brion_Mektoub_05-I-Am-That-I-Am.mp3
and Joseph Moore software re-performing/permutating the above permutations:
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