1145 Experiments



Besides looking at digital writing from the outside, we want to look at it from the inside as well. This means participating in the process of making our own t texts. I call these writing exercises "experiments" because we really don't know what kind of writing some of these processes and ideas will produce. It's like planting a unknown seed from a strange continent; maybe the seed will produce a rare and beautiful flower that blooms only in the moonlight, or maybe it will grow into an ugly plant that smells like the sewer department. It doesn't matter. Here,we are more concerned with the process that with the product. These assignments are more or less S/U. I'm looking for two things: that you have gone through all of the steps and done all of the things that exercise calls for you to do, and that you have made an intelligent, interested, and thorough effort. If one of the steps is missing or unsatisfactory, you will receive half credit. If more than two of the required components are missing, the whole thing is unsatisfactory. Have fun with this.

*All due dates are on the syllabus, this must be typed, and no I won't take it late*

Experiment #1


Go into a chatroom and pretend to be someone that you are not. If you don't know of a chatroom try www.yahoo.com or talkcity.com. Here are some ideas. Change some combination of basic traits about yourself such as your age, gender, geographic location, race. Make yourself into the person you'd love to be for a day. Try to pose as a famous person. Claim to be an expert on something you know nothing about. I need these things:
1) A one-page ds page telling me
the address of the chatroom,
the name or type of chatroom,
and what you changed about yourself and/or how you portrayed yourself.
Give me some examples of conversation
and an overall reflection about the experience. Was it hard? Did you get "busted?" Did you feel bad, or was it fun?

Experiment #2


Sand Loves

This is a story made using storyspace. In this story, you decide where to go next: there is no definite beginning or ends, and there is no "right" way to progress through the story. Clicking on at least ten different links, move through the story. Click on "reach" on the left-hand side to start. Compose a one-typed ds page describing the experience and/or what the story seems like it could mean. Don't worry if the story confuses you.

Experiment #3


This experiment works just like the last one. This time use this link: Michael Joyce's "Children"

or you can go to this site www.neopets.com, follow the instructions, and write page telling me about your neopet and your opinions about the experience of creating and maintaining a neopet.

Experiment #4


part one
For the fourth experiment, we'll use Beat Writer Jack Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and follow his methods for "spontaneous composition" also known as "kickwriting" or "wild form." Basically, think of a person, or a feeling, or a situation, a story, or whatever you want, and fix it in your head. Just concentrate on the "thing" for a minute or too like a dragster reving its engine before a race. Then, start writing. In fact, like a dragster, move fast, don't look behind you, and don't worry about what comes out. Write down whatever you are thinking as you are thinking it. Don't worry about capitalization. Don't worry about grammar with its "false colons" and "timid usually needless commas." Don't worry about punctuation. Kerouac says, use "the vigorous space dash" if you need punctuation. Go for ten minutes and set a clock so you don't keep stopping to check the time. Don't stop. Don't answer the phone. Don't answer the door. Don't scratch yourself. If you've run out of things to write about, keep writing about how you've run out of things to write about. Eventually, something will surface. You can always write about your surroundings or what you see or hear at the present moment. The only person reading this will be me, so don't worry about getting personal, or offensive, or silly in your writing; shut off the internal editor. Type it. Pull up your Word Processor and write it out directly into your computer. Type it fast and furiously, not worrying at all about typos or misspelling. In fact, don't back up or correct anything while you're writing this. Just get the story out of you and into the computer as fast as possible.
For this assignment, I'll want to see two things:
1)Your ten minutes of typed, spontaneous composition.
2) Your spellchecked spontaneous composition.
3) A typed double-spaced page about the process and what you wrote about. Rereading your work will help. For example, you may started off thinking about your parents and ended up writing about gambling on Mars. Why? What's the significance?
This third page should not be spontaneously composed but should be thought out, edited, and revised if need be.

Experiment #5


For the fifth experiment, we will look to William Burroughs and his cut-up method. With this method, one literally cuts up text and rearranges it. When one cuts and reassembles pieces of text, startling, and often odd, word combinations are formed. Burroughs felt that the world suffers from what he termed "word virus," that is to say that much of the world's oppresiveness and repressiveness originates in fixed, static ideas that are preserved and frozen through the unchanging medium of the printed word. To disrupt these patterns is to upset the concepts that they represent. Thus, new ideas and messages emerge from a cut-up text. Sometimes these new words can reveal the hidden agenda of the original text. Sometimes the new text makes little sense upon an initial reading. Use an electronic cut-up engine.
cut-up machine Scroll to the very bottom; you will need to enter text into both boxes
another machine

You simple type or paste some text(s) in the screen, hit the button, and you're ready to go. While there may be some text ready to load on the website, you must choose text(s) to place in the generator not available on the site;You may use any text(s) you want. Don't forget that with any of these methods, you are not limited to a single page; you can use this method for multiple pages or stories. Choose a least the equivalent of half a page of text.
I want three things:
1) a copy of the original text(s)
2) a copy of the cut-up text after reassembly. Some people try to "smooth out" the syntax and so forth so that the text is easier to read.
3) a typed, double-spaced page explaining two things: why you picked the text(s) you picked and what the new text seems to mean; Think creatively and do not tell me that the new text doesn't mean anything. Look for ways in which the new text pulls against or reinforces, perhaps both, the ideas of the original text.



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