Jörg Piringer was born 1974 in Vienna, Austria, and still lives there. online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your He is a member of the Vegetable Orchestra and of the Institute Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, Goldsmith is also for Transacoustic Research. Piringer is a creator of audiovisual- the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches interactive poetry. He has a master’s degree in computer science. writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior edi- tor of PennSound, an on-line poetry archive. More about Goldsmith can be found on his author’s page at the University of Buffalo’s Elec- KENNETH GOLDSMITH: EIGHTEEN EARRERS tronic Poetry Center: . Kenneth Goldsmith, vocals. Recorded at WFMU Studios, Jer- sey City, New Jersey, April 2005.

Contact: Kenneth Goldsmith, 38 W. 26th St., 3B, New York, JULIEN OTTAVI: VOIX IMPRRSONEL NY 10010, U.S.A. E-mail: . Composed and performed by Julien Ottavi, March 2005.

Eighteen Earrers is an excerpt from a book of mine called Head Julien Ottavi, 17, rue Paul Bellamy, 44000 Nantes, France. Citations, published in 2002. The text consists of 800 misheard E-mail: . Web site: . lyrics of pop songs, all swiped from a massive online archive called “Kiss This Guy” (from Jimi Hendrix’s line “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky”). For a few years now, I have been developing research work on For several years, I have been devoted to Uncreative Writ- using the voice to produce body expression other than lan- ing. Over the past decade, my practice has boiled down to sim- guage alone, evolving from sound poetry, elaborating and per- ply retyping existing texts. I have thought about my practice forming various vocal pieces (in a wider register, ranging from in relation to Borges’s Pierre Menard, but even Menard was a whisper to a shout, through noise produced by pressure on more original than I am: he, independent of any knowledge the nose). I have also worked on a kind of composition in the of Don Quixote, reinvented Cervantes’s masterpiece word for field of “concrete music in a studio,” managing to transform word. By contrast, I don’t invent anything. I just keep rewrit- and expand the range of vocal experiments even further, with ing the same book. I sympathize with the protagonist of a car- the help of digital tools. toon claiming to have transferred x amount of megabytes, After this initial practice of vocal performance in a studio, physically exhausted after a day of downloading. The simple as well as instrumental improvisation, and with the advent of act of moving information from one place to another today portable computers, I was able to digitize and transform voice constitutes a significant cultural act in and of itself. I think it performance in real time (as I could not have done in my stu- is fair to say that most of us spend hours each day shifting con- dio—recording—period). tent into different containers. Some of us call this writing. I then realized that it was not possible to respect the tem- In 1969, the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The porality and the energy of vocal performances, or their phys- world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish ical involvement, with a “filter”/computer that showed only to add any more.” I have come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, al- its own limitations, adding material to, or interrupting, re- though they might be retooled as, “The world is full of texts, ducing or dramatically increasing the strength and energy of more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It a performance. Could a computer become an engine pow- seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing ered by a voice/fuel? Could this “digital” machinery stop be- today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, having like the prop of a performing body and become an the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we automaton, in which my voice would introduce another tem- must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. I have porality? Could my voice/mouth penetrate the heart of a dig- transformed from a writer into an information manager, adept ital machinery rather than just constitute a filter “agitator”? at the skills of replicating, organizing, mirroring, archiving, At the same time, I started work on automation: how can a hoarding, storing, reprinting, bootlegging, plundering and machine develop its own transforming cycles without any per- transferring. I’ve needed to acquire a whole new skill set: former likely to be influenced by the temporality of his/her I’ve become a master typist, an exacting cut-and-paster and an action or his/her relationship with an audience? How could OCR demon. There’s nothing I love more than transcription; the fuel/voice/mouth make sense and evolve differently when I find few things more satisfying than collation. controlled not by any person but by a machine (not forget- Almost 100 years ago, the visual arts came to terms with this ting that machine and automation are conceived and built by issue in Duchamp’s Urinal. Later, Warhol and then Koons ex- somebody)? tended this practice. In music we have vast examples from I had contemplated an automated vocal performance 4 John Oswald’s Plunderphonics to the ubiquitous practice of years ago, but never got down to working on it. Following a sampling. Where has literature been in this dialogue? One request by Joachim Montessuis for an event, I started to work hundred years after Duchamp, why hasn’t straight appropria- on an automated vocal performance. I reflected on what I re- tion become a valid, sustained or even tested literary practice? ally wanted to show of the evolution of my research. I could This piece, Eighteen Earrers, is my homage to pop music, a not accept the temporality of the performance and the ac- form that has embraced and run with the possibilities of the companying dramatization, and as I was not able to fully de- stolen. But it sounds nothing like pop music. As a matter of velop a proper command of my voice without mimicry or fact, as you’ll hear, I can’t sing at all. Perhaps, then, my in- clichés (like in a circus or a zoo), which are common in this competence qualifies for the “creative” component of this sort of situation, I did not attempt a public vocal performance work. After you hear me sing, I think you’ll agree that uncre- and used my voice only for recording, everyday life and ordi- ativity really is the way to go. nary communication. This proposal stems out of these reflections on time and Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing was called some of the most “exhaustive performance, on the timing of a performance, on a certain and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers relationship of time with space, on the roles of machines and Weekly. The author of eight books of poetry, founding editor of the digitization—on the power of man with a machine, the dis-

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