Erin Workman
ePortfolio for Digital Revolution and Convergence Culture
Like Heather, I’m not certain about what I feel has been left out of the syllabus, so I’ll focus on adding to our discussion of authorship. As we learned when discussing our Wikipedia articles, notions of authorship vary from person to person, and some of us feel very strongly about what does or does not make an author. We’ve also talked about what it means to collaborate or co-author a piece, specifically within academic contexts. I’d like to add some additional examples to this discussion, not as a way of making any conclusions, but as a way of complicating what we’ve said already.
Similar to Flarf poetry, spam poetry and prose is compiled from email and website spam, though typically the author's adding original material is much more limited than with Flarf poetry. One Contemporary poet--J. Gordon Faylor--has composed and released several collections of spam through Lulu, a print-on-demand press. Spam texts such as these push our questions of authorship and collaboration even further, in that composing these works is almost completely a matter of assembling or remixing found texts. In making this claim, I don't mean to conflate assemblage and remix; I think that both processes are used in this type of work. Some pieces "work" by juxtaposing dissimilar texts, while others remix found texts to create a seamless line of prose (seamless in the sense that the text almost follows traditional syntax). That these types of texts have "made it" in the poetry scene is evident by their inclusion on lists like Steve Evans' attention span, which is compiled from contemporary writers' lists and reviews of texts they're currently reading.
Like Flarf, Collective Task consists of a listserv of Contemporary poets. Each month, a member of the collective send a "task" to the list, and the participants have the month to create a piece in response to the task. Many of the responses are alphabetic texts, though some include images, audio, and video. Also like Flarf, Collective Task has led to a series of events in which the authors present their work, most notably the 2011 event at MoMA. In addition to the event, the pieces are compiled in a text that is printed and sold at the end of each iteration (new members come and go each year). This type of composing seems related to our discussions of collaboration and co-authorship. Are the collective task members co-authors, in the sense one member creates a task and others respond to it? Again, as with the other types of text I've described, I think that this collective is calling authorship and collaboration into question or, to put it a different way, they're playing with notions of co/authorship.
Though some of the texts we've read this semester--Fitzpatrick, Johnson-Eilola and Selber, Lessig, and Jenkins--have focused on what authorship comes to mean in convergence culture, I think that looking to the poetry community for examples shows us that convergence culture can be about play just as much as it can be about participating and contributing to/benefiting from collective intelligence.
Flarf poetry started on a listserv (Flarflist) where poets like Sharon Mesmer and Ben Friedlander sent in snippets of poems compiled from "strange" Google searches. The poetry quickly moved beyond the confines of the Flarflist to events like the Flarf poetry festival at Kelly Writer’s House at UPenn. Though the poems begin as a compilation of Google search results, the poets arrange those results and add original material to create an oddly coherent poem (see: "Annoying Diabetic Bitch"). I think this type of composing relates to the questions we've posed about collaboration: in this instance, is Mesmer collaborating with Google/users? Could we call her an author if much of the work is a type of remix? Certainly Flarfists have these kinds of questions in mind as they compose and discuss their work with other poets. Questioning authorship is a main tenet of Flarf, and perhaps Contemporary poetry in general.
