Impossible to work

I decided to go to the 9th experiment in the Red Rover Reading Series (co-curated by Jen Karmin and Amina Cain), Gnoetry, at the Spareroom’s new home, Locus, on Saturday night. I wish I could say that it was great (I was intrigued by their process and wanted to know more). Instead, it was a highly problematic reading with aspirations of being performance art. Still, it wasn’t all bad”^a1a”. Gnoetry (pronounced with a hard G, like GNU”^a2a”) is a piece of software designed by Jon Trowbridge that takes source texts (ebooks in the public domain), analyzes them and then produces a poem by randomly selecting words and putting them together with other randomly selected words that fit together according to a statistical analysis. That does a bit of a disservice to the software (which is pretty cool in its own right) but it’ll have to do.

So we have this nifty software and we have these freely available texts and then we add a human to the mix and the whole concept goes down the drain. How quickly? Very quickly. The Gnoetic Manifesto states that in Gnoetry, “Language is moved away from the tyrannical subject of human cognizance, away from the analog and into the digital.” If that’s the case, then why were people making all of the decisions regarding the work? People decided (according to their very analog personal caprices) what texts were to be put together, what type of poem was going to be created, and what words would be removed and replaced by other words”^a3a”. I don’t think that letting people take part in the process works against it, but the way in which it is done does not “release language from its usual human-inherited enthusiasms,” as it is those enthusiasms that decide what will happen. Had there been a clear set of constraints the human actors in this process were bound by, thereby making the human interaction with the work a more mechanical action”^a4a” perhaps this would have been less of a let down for me. As it stood, the manner in which humans interacted with the creative process was directly linked to their conscious (and subconscious) minds. They made snap judgements about certain words (automatisme psychique pur) and then allowed the generator to create new words for ones they had removed. The work, therefore, is not “at a remove from…pre-conscious governance, psycho-historical flux, conscious-mind narration” but locked into those very notions through the wholly subjective interaction of a subject with a (barely) semi-autonomous process. The idea is that the people are collaborators with the software, when it reality, they’re the editors of the computer’s work”^a5a” Some of the poems were very good, but their status as “Gnoetry” such as its manifesto defines it, seems questionable at best. In the end, Gnoetry is a one-trick pony, but it’s a pretty good trick, and with time it could develop into what it claims to be.

Personally, I think it’s ridiculous to actively remove the role of the creative mind from the writing process, but am open to hear the product of such an automated process. I simply didn’t see a process where the role of the creative mind was removed. I saw something we’ve all seen before but with a computer added to the mix and an inaccurate manifesto attached to it. This wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t even really experimental.

What was really troubling about the performance wasn’t the lack of rigor in the compositional process but the fact that it didn’t work as a performance at all. When you go to a reading, you generally expect the act of reading to be the performance. It’s not sexy. It’s not glamorous. It’s just language speaking itself (to steal a line from the Gnoetic Manifesto). Here, the Gnoetry folks thought they’d be super cool and make this an interactive performance, only it wasn’t very interactive, and it made the people involved look like amateurs.

They were going for an office atmosphere (somewhat difficult for academics”^a6a” to do, since they generally have had little to no experience with actual office environments). So there was an inbox, an outbox, a reject box, a time clock (used to stamp the individual poems with the time they were “approved”), a bank of computers (one of which was hooked up to a projector, allowing the audience to watch the process unfold) and a coffee maker. So far, so good.

The users”^a7a” were dressed as office workers, though one wore coveralls adorned with “BOURGEOISIE” in a circle with a line through it on the back”^a8a” I liked him the most, because he didn’t visually fit and that was actually interesting, though there was no follow through on this very obvious difference, which was a big loss for them. There was one person stationed at a separate desk, reading and approving texts based on the audience’s response (or his or her own tastes, I couldn’t really tell). These roles changed multiple times over the course of the performance. Additionally, there was a supervisor who timed the work and blew a whistle to start breaks. The audience was encouraged to take poems from the outbox and eventually was asked to join in and write some gnoetry.

That sounds like an interactive performance, but it really wasn’t. Let’s look at one set piece used to create an office environment and how it was misused in the performance: the coffee maker. Structures Without Integrity used a coffee maker at Version>06 for the piece “Simultaneous Landscapes.” Here’s how we used it: we gave out free coffee to anybody who wanted a cup, actively asking people if they wanted any. What did this do? It made people stop and ask us what we were doing and drew many people into the work. How did it function at the Gnoetry reading? It was reserved for the performers and those in the audience who had very close ties to them. So not only was the audience not allowed to interact with this mundane (and very authentic) piece of the environment, but those who were allowed this interaction were part of a select group. The 4th wall, which is supposed to be nonexistent in an interactive performance, was actively built by the performers while a select few were allowed into the environment. Already we’re being held at a distance by the performers (unless we’re special), what now?

We add arbitrary breaks to the work. What did these breaks do? Not a whole lot. During each break, the writers and the approver traded places so that everyone writing eventually had a turn at approving the work. This was a silly distinction. The approver was the most subjective role in the process (consequently making it the least gnoetic) and also the role where the most performing could have taken place (as it was also the role of reader). It didn’t work though. Just showing that the role of the individual is irrelevant by moving people around”^a9a” isn’t enough to make a performance interesting. But I doubt these performers thought of that. I doubt that they’ve ever really thought much about the nature of performance. And I doubt they see much performance in the first place. If they did, they would know that shifts in your performance should be substantial. Things should change in an interesting way and by doing so show the audience something: performance shifts should have a point. Once I realized what was going on, I checked out mentally. It wasn’t all my fault, it was near to impossible to pay attention to what they were doing on the stage (because it was as boring as the biology classes I took in college). And then when it was all over, they showed their ignorance of the most basic of stage manners: they didn’t shut up when someone else was talking.

When you go to a performance and all of the seats are lined up on one side of the room facing the other side of the room, it becomes pretty clear that one side of the space is for the audience and the other is the stage for the performers. When you are invited to perform as part of a larger reading series, the organizers of the series are going to want to say something at the start and/or finish of your performance (it’s their show, no matter who the star of the current installment is). They are, after all, the ones who acquired the space, sent out press releases, and made the whole event possible in the first place. At the end of the Gnoetry performance, Jen Karmin and Amina Cain (the curators of the series) got up to talk. While they read a pair of poems defining the words Red and Rover, the whole gaggle of Gnoetry folks tittered away behind them on stage. This is beyond rude. This was ridiculously disrespectful to the women who made this reading possible in the first place. But I wasn’t surprised by it at all, they just didn’t seem like serious poets.

1. I think I learn more about performance from bad performances than from good ones. Regardless, I was shocked to dislike it so much. When it comes to experimental work, I think it’s ok to not be good as long as it’s interesting. Previous experiments have involved artists I respect. The series itself is curated by two women I respect. This was a fluke, as far as I’m concerned. The work sounded interesting in theory, but if there’s one thing I learned while a college student, it’s that theory can be less than useless in practice. Any rigid theory will quickly collapse while more fluid theories take longer to break down. aaa
2. In an interview, Elshtain explained that the word gnoetry is itself a recursive acronym, though no one remembers what it stands for. Lack of documentation can really kill a mood. aaa
3. This all works as a part of a semi-automated process. The user selects one or more texts to be used by the software. Then s/he makes a choice regarding what percentage of these texts will be used. The next step is to select a poetic form (Haiku, Tanka, Blank Verse, etc.). The software does some stastical analysis and creates a poem. The user then decides which words will and will not be included in the final poem. Those words that don’t make the cut are then removed by the software and replaced with other words that “work” according to the software’s textual analysis. aaa
4. The way I see it, if this is to be a true collaboration between a human and a piece of software, then the humans must be bound by constraints in much the same way that the software is aaa
5. Ezra Pound had a profound influence on the ultimate shape and content of “The Waste Land” but it’s not Pound’s poem at all, it’s T. S. Eliot’s. In much the same way, these poems are Gnoetry’s works, edited by humans aaa
6. Eric Elshtain, who is a graduate student at my alma mater appears to be the theoretical force behind this project aaa
7. we should really call them authors or editors, because they do the same work as one. I see little difference between what they’re doing and what Burroughs, Gysin, or any number of other writers before them did, save the use of a computer aaa
8. It felt like they didn’t really discuss these things before hand. Perhaps the anti-capitalist understood that they had to all be dressed as workers and he didn’t think office workers at all. It seemed like the people in charge hadn’t even thought of such a conclusion being drawn by a member of the group. aaa
9. It’s pretty obvious without the game of musical chairs aaa