Respondent: Florian Cramer

With so much language available in the digital age, does anyone really need to write more? Why not just process what exists? This is the position of the uncreative, embodied by Kenneth Goldsmith as one of the most important figures of conceptual writing: Writing driven by the perception of language as matter that can be endlessly repurposed. The uncreative writing paradigm asks if techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering and intensive programming can inspire the reinvention of writing. The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented quantity of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate and reconstruct those that already exist.