Performance & book launch with Brendan Howell & Guests

// Location: General Public, Schönhauser Allee 167c, 10435 Berlin

// Date: Saturday, May 11, 2013

// 20:00 Book Launch

// 20:30 Performance with The Maggot and special guest writers

// 22:30 Performance - Text 'n FX

Heroic Real Estate Otter of the 21st Century is the latest collective novel from the exquisite_code project. The book was written by seven writers, in one day, the process delegated by a brutalist-brut software edit machine, known as The Maggot. The book is available here: www.lulu.com/spotlight/excode

The Maggot is a bastard editor. It is a software worm that ruthlessly delegates and mediates the work of a group of writers, simultaneously composing a collective text. Proceeding in timed rounds, the editor automatically forces the participants to submit their work regardless of the level of completion or author satisfaction. The worm then chews into the corpus, making holes between existing chunks or picking out existing texts in need of further editing. These newly inserted empty passages are then sent out arbitrarily to the writers for another 10 minute round of labor. The text is automatically printed out on an old line printer, leaving an endless paper record piling up on the floor.

Text 'n FX is a DJ mixer for text.. It is a prototype machine developed in the 80's for the emerging practice of Hip-Hop. Instead of a DJ mixing two records together, the designers of the device proposed the idea of a Text-Jockey (TJ). The TJ acted as a machine-assisted poet mashing up lyrics read from two floppy disks in real-time using statistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and cut-up techniques from experimental literature. The product never made it to market but it exists today as a media-archaeological curiosity.

Invited by Graw Böckler