There’s nothing new under the sun goes the old saw, and in a sense that’s true. The sun contains all known elements—at least it does in my hazy memory of astrophysics. But what the adagists missed that astrophysicists tend to grasp intuitively is the great novelty that lies in synthesis. Even if nothing on our earth is new, it’s certainly more varied and interesting than dense layers of flaming cosmic gas. The ability to combine even a limited set of basic ingredients multiplies the possible outcomes exponentially.
Language is a great example. Using only a limited set of words, humans are able to communicate any conceivable concept, and frequently do on daytime television. Individuals take credit not for words but for their particular combination—into speeches, novels, poems, plays, elegies, tirades, songs, taunts, and slogans—for ideas reside in the tight spaces between combined words.
The paradigm against which Marcel Duchamp pitted himself cast the artist as a kind of visual writer who used a series of known “words” to compose a new “sentence” that everyone could then read and attribute to him. Duchamp’s readymades proposed a new paradigm in which the individual components of a work—material, subject, composition—are subsumed by the idea that drives the artist to combine them. The resulting sentence may be meaningless or it may be hackneyed or it may be a paraphrase—what matters is why it is said, not what is said. The artist stops being a composer of representations and becomes a shaper and synthesizer of ideas.
When Joshua, Jeehyun, and I began discussing our project, we laid out some of the ideas each of us wanted to see it reflect: audience participation and co-creation, assembly and mass production, conceptual purity and coherence, procedural layering and growth. We referred in our discussion to Rauschenberg’s Open Score, Huyghe’s A Journey that Wasn’t, text parsing and poetics, a Japanese Flash game called Grow, and eventually settled on a project I did last year called AL-Gorithm as our starting point.
AL-Gorithm began as a technology project without technology, so we set ourselves the goal of exploring this constraint of our assignment even further. In our discussions, “technology” came to represent the superfluous trappings of an idea. Our project would be a pure idea, refined and distilled. It’s a simple text parsing program written for and performed by a human being (in this case, me) on a passage from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men that discusses the arbitrariness of symbols, concluding that they only have meaning in combination with other symbols in the presence of a set of rules. The piece was intended to explore whether it is possible to forget how to read—to learn to see text as an arbitrary pattern much as a computer does.
Joshua and I met and talked of lights passing through slits and colored blocks and three-dimensional hanging compositions. Joshua and Jeehyun met and talked of shadows and illusions and words. The three of us met and Joshua revealed the first synthesis of our discussions: we would focus exclusively on the assignment’s only required component—the paper—as way to explore the ideas of repeated synthesis, authorship, influence, and conceptual purity.
Rather than writing the paper as a group, in keeping with our commitment to exploring synthesis, we opted to write a version each and then combine the three, translating the resulting paper into our three native languages. Our second synthesis recombines the three linguistic variants of the paper as we read them simultaneously to the audience, who are engaged in the third synthesis of cutting up and reassembling parts of the paper into expressions of their own.
In this way, the words and ideas that led us to create this work become the work itself. No part of our work breaks character; no part is external to our concept.
Which leaves us with a pointy question. How much of the concept is actually ours and at what point does our authorship end? Our words are only ours in the sense that they describe an original idea. And how original is that idea? It is a synthesis of all the ideas we’ve grappled with and our particular experiences. Can we take credit for it, and should we try?
Writing in Harper’s in February 2007, Jonathan Lethem composed an entire essay refuting ownership of creative efforts from plagiarized bits of books, lectures, articles, and essays. His brilliant dissection of the “ecstasy of influence” is not exactly a collage—there are no visible seams, and the overall argument is Lethem’s—but neither is it an original piece of writing. It is a description of itself, a realization of the idea it describes. A contemporary media critic might call it a mashup.
But I would argue, with Lethem, that all creative endeavor is essentially a mashup. Faced with a limited number of elements, we nonetheless manage to fuse them in novel combinations, to reinterpret and represent, be it with subtle allusion or garden-variety piracy, and that’s what we’ve tried to do here.
ITERATION 4: During our performance, we asked our classmates to stand in the center of the room and make a new text, providing them with scissors and glue and a blank sheet of paper to work with while we read. Ten minutes later, we had sixteen very different results (pictured below), though all but one used only the words we provided and the majority respected word boundaries. In the discussion that followed our performance, people commented that our dress, our demeanor, and our (physical) positions of power within the room combined with the obvious cues provided by the glue sticks and scissors at each station to make it almost inevitable that people would cut up the text we’d provided unquestioningly.
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