What the fuck is going on here?

In week 6 of digital humanities, we have been

focusing on the concept of “uncreative writing.”  Uncreative writing is taking some form of original text, whether it is a song, book, or an article, and transforming it into another form of art.  Most of the time, the text is converted into some type of poem, as we saw in a previous tribe’s blog post.  The only downfall to uncreative writing are the many hard to answer questions of meaning and authorship.  First of all, meaning does not have to be black and white.  For example, those who do not know how this poem was generated could argue that it has meaning.  Just like any other poem, there is rhyming, repetition, stanzas, and hidden messages.  Even though it is not your typical poem about love, life, or friendship, it is has potential to be meaningful to any given reader that can find a relation to it.  Second, who actually owns the final art work – the author of the original text, the publisher, or the author of the newly creative piece??  To help us answer these questions we have read articles by Kenneth Goldsmith and Mark L. Sample, who both support and encourage uncreative writing, for it is not plagiarism.  In Goldsmith’s article, he supports using others' work by stating:

Kenneth Goldsmith

“Is this writing or is it mere transcription? It depends on who you ask…to an uncreative writer – one who finds unexpected linguistic, narrative, and emotional richness by subtly shifting frames of reference in words they themselves didn’t write – it’s art.” 

Sample also shows support for uncreative writing by telling his students their work is meaningful.  Samples argues:

“I strive to instill in my students the sense that what they think and what they say and what they write matters—to me; to them; to their classmates; and, through open access blogs and wikis, to the world.” 

Both authors go into more detail in their full articles with examples of how this uncreative writing is truly a new form of art.  As we discuss our work of uncreative writing below, we can refer back to Goldsmith and Sample’s articles to help determine who has ownership of our artwork.

In support of both of these articles, we were encouraged to make our own piece of uncreative writing.  We did this by watching multiple YouTube videos portraying a Donald Trump and Game of Thrones remix, the Badass Honey Badger, best clips from Ellen, Mr. Rogers, and Kanye West.  As we watched about 30 seconds of the video clips, our tribe typed what we heard in Google Hangouts so all of the tribe members could contribute at the same time.  We then copied all our responses and composed the lines into a poem.  The end result was a hilarious outcome of repetition and catchy phrases.  Our tribe’s poem gained its name from a line added by an absent tribe member who had no idea what we were composing at the time.  The blog can be found by clicking on the following link: What the fuck is going on here?