autumn academy "uncreative writing à gogo"

sfd autumn academy 2023

"uncreative writing à gogo"

this year's autumn academy will take place between 5 and 20 october 2023 - in addition to the regular programme of the vienna poetry school.

brion gysin, poet friend of william burroughs claimed in 1959: "writing is 50 years behind painting". in 2011, kenneth goldsmith, concept poet from new york, said "brion gysin might still be right". goldsmith also claims: "you don't need to read my books, it's enough to understand the idea behind them, the concept". in 2003, the tireless writer transcribed the entire text of a weekend edition of the new york times and published the 800 pages long text as a book. he himself calls it the "world's most boring book". but it is "unboring boring" - which makes for a nice paradox. just like the book title of the work that made kenneth goldsmith famous: uncreative writing.
in keeping with this term of post-genius writing, which regards the old authorship as obsolete, the american literary scholar marjorie perloff wrote a book in 2012 in which she tried to bundle the new conceptual ways of writing of the u.s. present. once again, a supposed paradox has to serve as the title: unoriginal genius. the book has not yet been translated into german. which is not surprising, since it deals mainly with authors who do not want to be "read" in the conventional sense, with writers who reject writing as a testimony of an individual and instead deal with concepts of copy & paste, plagiarism, appropriation and other methods of stealing and appropriating texts. in austria, the names of these authors are more familiar in concept art circles: craig dworskin, vanessa place, christian bök, derek beaulieu or robert fitterman. according to marjorie perloff, this avant-garde after all avant-gardes is united by the conviction that text production in the digital world can no longer be written as it was in pre-digital times, that authors today have to be information processors rather than imagination generators, and that this is the only way to achieve a new way of seeing what is significant and what is insignificant: through information management. something that kenneth goldsmith would also immediately subscribe to.

the sfd-autumn academy 2023 is now dedicated to the lustful wandering around on these playgrounds of a very last avant-garde. perhaps a cliché potential in one's own "creative writing" can be recognised. would "uncreative writing" then be a complice of conventional writing. or even a double agent?

ps: in 2013, kenneth goldsmith set out to print the internet, the entire internet. web page by web page, sheet by sheet. the technology blog techhive calculated at the time that 4.73 billion sheets of paper would be needed to print the entire internet – a stack of which would be 492 kilometres high. the industrious goldsmith did, after all, get a 500 m² gallery full. undaunted, he rejoiced after two months of printing in permanence: "we've come a long way, i think we've got most of it".

pps: in our classes and exercises we pay a lot of attention to gender balance. Most of the time it's fifty-fifty, sometimes it tips over into a slight male, then again female surplus. but what has never happened before: exclusively male individuals design this autumn academy – "for reasons". we promise: that won't happen again. sorry.

fabian navarro: "all day internet – the art of uncreative writing".
a conceptual class of re-purposing pre-chewed material
in this class, the author introduces various concepts of uncreative writing. if text is available everywhere at all times, why create new text instead of using existing text. it is about ready-mades in literature, copying, recontextualising and rearranging text.
the books uncreative writing and wasting time on the internet by kenneth goldsmith are among the basics.
(analogue class with registration, 12 units)
13, 16, 17 and 18 october, presentation on 20 october 2023.
(application deadline for funded places: 24 september!)
info & registration (in german or english) >> http://sfd.at/navarro 

peter waldeck: "the wilhelm scream from your mouth - when autofiction & horror meet!"
an experimental online class on the successful fusion of descriptions of everyday life with horror situations.
uncreative writing as an exaggeration of the hackneyed. no one likes to tread on common ground, yet literary writing is teeming with phrases and clichés. with clichés of inwardness as well as stereotypes of divestment. for the "uncreative writer", however, all these hackneyed hollownesses are welcome source material for the old alchemist's dream of turning shit into gold.
peter waldeck's online class is about writing strange texts that mix auto-fiction with classic horror scenarios. introspection meets splatter orgy: load up your everyday observations with an explosion of b-movie clichés. with a maximum length of 1,000 characters.
bonus points for: bark beetle perspective, sad mood, highly literary language for the lowest splatter!
5 to 19 october, presentation on 20 october 2023
(open online class, free participation, entry possible at any time)
info & participation (in german) >> http://sfd.at/waldeck

fritz ostermayer: "compress everything that works – digressions into the economics of diminution".
a grotesque online class on the subject of "reducing great novels to pop song lyrics, raps and dialect poetry".
you could call it "lazy poetry in a few lines", but that's not it. small forms can be just as demanding and consuming as a sprawling epic. limitation and reduction might be more appropriate, but actually it's about a thing of impossibility that has great appeal. just think of the boiling-down-genius nicolas mahler, who in his visual stories compresses thomas bernhard, franz kafka, james joyce and even the big bang into an essence whose grandiose ridiculousness is only topped by a compelling grandiosity.
with mahler in mind, let's get to work: instead of shrinking via comics, the aim here is to condense and concentrate large masses of text into popular forms of poetry: lyrics, raps and dialect poems. the best thing to do is to take a favourite novel and compress it by hook or by crook. it's possible that the shrinking process will result in comedy, but it's also possible that a deadly sad and heartfelt ballad will emerge if you try your hand at cormac mccarthy's the road. but if you want to go about it in a particularly 'uncreative' way, you can of course leave the diminution to the algorithm of chat-GPT.
note: the transformation should be limited to a maximum of 1,000 characters.
5 to 19 october, presentation on 20 october 2023
(open online class, free participation, entry possible at any time)
info & participation (in german) >> http://sfd.at/fritzostermayer

friday, 20 october 2023, 8 p.m.; free admission
"uncreative writing à gogo"
presentation autumn academy
fabian navarro, peter waldeck and fritz ostermayer with authors from the classes
present texts written during the autumn academy.
venue: nachbarhaus/usus at schauspielhaus
porzellangasse 19, 1090 vienna
in cooperation with schauspielhaus vienna & usus

 (c) kenneth goldsmith

review

sfd autumn academy 2022 "reality will eat itself"
>> https://sfd.at/en/newsflash/autumn-academy-22-reality-will-eat-itself?set_language=en&cl=en

sfd spring academy 2023 "towards the end. antiapocalyptic writing"
>> http://sfd.at/fruehling23 (in german)