Collage Artists

I just stumbled upon an interesting little piece by William Gibson in the current edition of Wired. Gibson, of course, tends to be "out there" at times, but you can make the case that he has also been prescient in some ways. Anyway, it's worth a quick read. In reflecting on his early days as a writer ("Confessions of a Cut-and-Paste Artist"), Gibson writes that "I already knew that word processing was another of God's little toys, and that the scissors and paste pot were always there for me, on the desktop of my Apple IIc. Burroughs' methods, which had also worked for Picasso, Duchamp, and Godard, were built into the technology through which I now composed my own narratives. Everything I wrote, I believe instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data." Later in the piece he argues that "our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all -- it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital."

We had the collage aesthetic on our minds during Cathy's presentation (e.g., with the discussion about the collages that are created on bulletin boards, when flyers for missing children compete with post-it notes, concert posters, for-sale signs, etc.). The multi-genre essay borrowed a bit from the collage aesthetic, too, no? Gibson's language and thoughts also tend to pick up some of the ideas in the plagiarism and "patchwriting" posting below. And certainly these are ideas that are capable of rattling we writing teachers (for better and for worse, probably!).