spam! spam! spam!

Spam. We all get it and we all delete it with extreme prejudice whenever it makes an unwelcome appearance in our spam folders. But just now I decided to read one of those strange messages and what follows is a small sample:

"SIR,

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I suddenly realised that this spam was generated by the cut-up technique. This means that Brion Gysin and Williams S Burroughs are turning in their graves. Or are they?
Burroughs' last three novels, including Cities of the Red Night, explore his concept of language as virus. Throughout these novels, the narratives and traditional novel structures disintegrate under the weight of the cut up technique to create new forms of language use and meaning. Like a virus, language destroys its hosts but these destructions are always the creation of new forms that go on to create further new forms and so on. Spreading the virus that's constantly mutating.
What could be more like a language/virus than email spam that attempts to use cut-ups to slip past Bayesian Spam Filtering?
All of which is Gysin's and Burroughs' fault.
Thematically linking to my post on Eno, literary cut-ups are a particular style of generative art, I reckon. Just because the materials involved are under the control of the organising system, doesn't mean the artist somehow recedes into the background. The creator of a generative piece of art still has the capacity to manipulate the organising systems in ways that capture the effects they are trying to create. Or they want the system to create.
The text above is a cut up of passages from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, by the way. Literary pharmacologists selling cheap viagra? Dostoyevsky gets randy.


now playing: !!! - must be the moon (the only good tune on their new album mythtakes)