CTM ReReading & ReWriting Preparation NOT PUBLIC

14:00 - 14:05 waiting for people to arrive
14:05 - 14:15 intro Jon + CTM  / Varia;
14:15 - 14:25 stretching exercises;
14:25 - 14:50 reading & annotating eve & ursula
14:50 - 15:00 reading it out loud
    [break]
15:30 - 15h30 intro w/ jon
15:50 - 16:00 questions and conversation
16:10 - 16:40 generating text, arranging on pad, adding magic words, break in your own time
    [break]
16:40 - 16:50 reading it out loud: different ways to read out loud:
        - each person chooses to read a snippet from the text, can be your text contribution or from another participant.
16:50 - 17:00 closing reflections and sharing

"Machine generated texts that I've seen can be interesting but intimidating to read / intepret - on some level you don't want to invest your attention into something so machinic. The presence of magic words bring out marks of humanity, makes you feel that you have fellow travellers aiding you ..." - Jo (audience member).

*･゜ﾟ･*:.｡..｡.:*･*:.｡. ☀️ Warming-up ☀️  *･*:.｡. .｡.:*･゜ﾟ･*

• • Stretching activity 1.1
  • → Look at your fingers. Starting from the little finger on your left hand, massage each fingertip. You can move on to the right hand now and do the same. If you feel any tension on the way press for a few seconds and release.
  • → When you are done shake your hands freely.
  • → Press a random key below:
  • Stretching activity 2.1
  • → What is your screen's width? Fill one entire line with your colour. You can press space or use any other key.
  • Stretching activity 3.1
  • → Fill in one line of the pad with your preferred (nick)name, your pronouns, something about the sounds you hear right now, and anything else you would like to share with the group about yourself.
  • Stretching activity 4.1
  • → Change your pad colour using the colour wheel on the top right.
  • → Open as many browsers as you can and access this pad url from different locations. You can also use Incognito Mode for this in the same browser.
  • → Finish the following sentence:
  • writing together with a machine makes me feel like ...
  • Stretching activity 5.1
  • → Now we will experiment with "pad listening" and "pad speaking".
  • → Form groups of two by writing your nick/names next to each other below.
  • → Choose one of these two actions:
    • - Start with the first few words of a sentence
    • - "Listen" to what the other is writing and step in if you think you can continue their sentence.
  • → Switch up these roles.

* 14h20 - 14h25 (5mins) intro and generation of magic words;

Now we are going to think about
*    .  *      .        .  *   
  ..    *    .      *  .  ..  *
 *    *            .      *   *
.     *  Magic Words      *    
   .        .        .   *    .
 .      .        .            *
   .     *      *        *    .

Magic Words were brought into the software ecology of Etherpad by Michael Murtaugh, a member of the Brussels-based arts organisation Constant. Magic Words are used to enact certain commands; using __PUBLISH__ on this pad indexes it on this page: https://vvvvvvaria.org/etherpump/ (every hour, so at 13:00 it will be indexed)

We would like to think together about Magic Words as scores that invite for modes of re-reading, re-writing, voicing.
What kind of relations between text & reader, reader & reader, place & text, place & text & reader could the magic words provoke? If we see magic words like small instructions that can be activated during a collective reading experience, how would that affect our being together?

We will be adding, using and reusing new magic words during the reading time that will follow.

..   -    * Spellbook for Reading through Magic Words .  -  * .. 

Here are a few examples of what the magic words could look like. Think of them as launching a specific kind of interaction with the text fragment that it sits next to. This will be our collective spellbook that everyone can add, edit or use at will, even while reading the text. 
We will take some time now to add our own magic words to the list below.

• • • __CANWEDISCUSS__ If a sentence or paragraph is raising questions or you would like to know what others think about it, we can use this incantation to take it with us into discussion.
    • __ALOUD__ This magic word is used to encourage those encountering it to read aloud the text fragment that it sits next to.
    • __REUSE__ This magic word invites the reuse of the text fragment that it sits next to in an unexpected context.
    • __TWICE__ Read this sentence twice. Read this sentence twice.
    • __MAGIC__ invite others to turn something written into an incantation?
    • __ADDYOURMAGICWORDSINTHISSPACE!__
    • We're going to read excerpts from the essay Oral Space and Oral Time by Ursula K. Le Guin, an author best known for her works of science fiction and fantasy.

* 14h25 - 14h55:

Now we are going to do some experimentation with Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's text Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You and Ursula K. Le Guin's writings; Oral Space and Oral Time, and Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose, incorporating our magic words into all of them.

We will paste excerpts of these texts intermittently on the pad, we will remove our colours so it's easier to read, and so we can see better our annotations.
As we go through the text, we will use the magic words to annotate our thoughts, feelings, considerations and reactions to what we read.
We will read in whatever pace feels good for us, and follow some kind of collective rhythm on our way.

• • • • (...Ursula)
      • Sound signifies event. A noise means something is happening. Let's say there's a mountain out your window. You see the mountain. Your eyes report changes, snowy in winter, brown in summer, but mainly just report that it's there. It's scenery. But if you hear that mountain, then you know it's doing something. I see Mount St. Helens out my study window, about eighty miles north. I did not hear it explode in 1980: the sound wave was so huge that it skipped Portland entirely and touched down in Eugene, a hundred miles to the south. Those who did hear that noise knew that something had happened. This was a word worth hearing. Sound is event.
      • Speech, the most specifically human sound, and the most significant kind of sound, is never just scenery, it's always event.
      • (...)
      • When you speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act. And is a mutual act: the listener's listening enables the speaker's speaking. It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other. Both the amoebas are equally responsible, equally physically immediately involved in sharing bits of themselves. The act of speaking happens NOW. And then is irrevocably, unrepeatably OVER.
      • Because speaking is an auditory event, not a visual one, it uses space and time differently from anything visual, including words read on paper or on a monitor.
      • (...)
      • Oral performance is irreproducible.
      • It takes place in a time and place set apart: cyclic time, ritual time  or sacred time. Cyclical time is heartbeat, body-cycle time, lunar, seasonal, annual time: recurrent time, musical time, dancing time, rhythmic time. An event does not happen twice, yet regular recurrence is the essence of cyclic time. This year's spring is not last year's spring, yet spring returns always the same. A rite is performed anew, event year, at the same time, in the same way. A story is told again and again, and yet each new telling a new event.
      • /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading;

Now we're going to read excerpts from the book Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who worked in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory.

We will repeat the reading and annotation exercise from just before.

• • • • • (Eve)
        • Unmistakably the essays pointed toward a book. But excited by the force, the originality, and in many cases the beauty of these pieces, I still found it difficult to articulate more than a negative sense of what kind of a moment they might collectively represent in queer theory or in literary criticism. Clearly and queerly enough, they share a relaxed, unseparatist hypothesis of the much to be gained by refraining from a priori oppositions between queer texts (or authors) and non-queer ones, or female ones and male. In fact, the list of damaging a priori oppositions to which these essays quietly, collectively find alternative approaches is very impressive: the authors transmit new ways of knowing that human beings are also machines, are also animals;(...)
        • (...)
        • Aside from the deroutinizing methodologies of these essays, what seems most hauntingly to characterize them is how distant many of them are from a certain stance of suspicion or paranoia that is common in the theoretical work whose disciplinary ambience surrounds them.
        • (...)
        • How did it spread so quickly from that status to being its uniquely sanctioned methodology? I have been looking back into my own writing of the 1980s as well as that of some other critics, trying to retrace that transition- one that seems worthy ofremark now but seemed at the time, I think, the most natural move in the world. Part of the explanation lies in a property of paranoia itself: simply put, paranoia tends to be contagious. More specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, and in particular symmetrical epistemologies.

• • • • • /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading;

We return to Ursula K. Le Guin, this time the essay Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose:

• • • Movement is the first word. Rhythm is a mode of time.
    • (...)
    • Rhythm is a physical, material, bodily thing: 
    • the drumstick hitting the drumhead, the dancer’s pounding feet. 
    • Rhythm is a spiritual thing: the drummer’s ecstasy, the dancer’s joy.
    • Beginning to consider the rhythms of writing, my mind wandered about among the world’s beats: 
    • the clock, the heart, the interval between the last meal and the next meal, the alternation of day and night. 
    • Trying to understand how and why writing is rhythmical, 
    • I thought about mechanical, biological, social, and cosmic rhythms; 
    • about the interplay of bodily rhythms with social regularities; 
    • about the relation of rhythm and order, 
    • rhythm and chaos.
    • /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading;

We return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's text:

• • • • • (...)
        • Some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge. They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly. I'd like to undertake now something like a composite sketch of what I mean by paranoia in this connection - not as a tool of differential diagnosis, but anyway as a tool for better seeing differentials of practice. My main headings will be:
        • Paranoia is anticipatory.
        • Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. Paranoia is a strong theory.
        • Paranoia is a theory of negative affects. Paranoia places its faith in exposure.
        • (I) That paranoia is anticipatory is clear from every account and theory of the phenomenon. The first imperative of paranoia is "There must be no bad surprises," ... "Surprise ... is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate, but it is also what, in the event, he survives by reading as a frightening incentive: he can never be paranoid enough."
        • The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because to learn of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.

The full texts are available here - https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1003678/1629909863-sedgwick-1997-paranoid-reading-and-reparative-reading.pdf

We return to Ursula K. Le Guin, this time the essay Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose:
    

• •   (...)
    • One way to start thinking about such things is to try to listen to your own
    • body’s beat.
    • Many kinds of meditation begin, and some go on, by concentrating your awareness 
    • on breathing, nothing but breathing. 
    • You sit and you pay attention,
    • full attention,
    • constant attention, to your breath as it goes in your nostrils and
    • comes out.
    • When your attention wanders, you gently bring it back to your
    • nose and the sensation of breathing.
    • (...)
    • To sit and be fully aware of the air going in and out of your nose and nothing else,
    • (...)
    • Rhythm is pulsation. So is life.
    • If they want to know if you’re still alive, they feel for your pulse, no?
    • Find your pulse where you can feel it easily and attend to it, its evenness and irregularities. Heartbeat changes a lot, it’s seldom metronomically even for long.
    • And also,
    • attend to the interval between beats,
    • thinking of the pulse as a boundary between intervals.
    • Event and interval, like figure and ground, can be reversed.
• /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading;

We return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's text:

• • • • • [jumping to the reparative part of the text now, so this is a very fragmented reading of the full text. We will share a link to it later if we want to fill in some parts]
        • (...)
        • At a textual level, it seems to me that related practices of reparative knowing may lie, barely recognized and little explored, at the heart of many histories of gay, lesbian, and queer intertextuality. The queer identified practice of camp, for example, may be seriously misrecognized when it is viewed, as Butler and others view it, through paranoid lenses. As we've seen, camp is currently understood as uniquely appropriate to the projects of parody, denaturalization, demystification, and mocking exposure ofthe elements and assumptions of a dominant culture; and the degree to which camping is motivated by love seems often to be understood mainly as the degree of its self-hating complicity with an oppressive status quo.
        • (...)
        • The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to be able to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternate historiographies; the "over"-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions ofpresent with past, and popular with high culture.
        • (...)
        • I would want to add, practices -that can be divided between the paranoid and the reparative; it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices. And if the paranoid or the depressive positions operate on a smaller scale than the level of individual typology, they operate also on a larger, that ofshared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse.
        • (...)
        • The vocabulary for articulating any reader's reparative motive toward a text or a culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary that it's no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives. The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself. No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture-even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.
        • ///////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading;

Exercise Voice #1: (inspired by ❤ Rebekka's) We will read out loud all texts together, without interruption. We will listen to our polyphony, our different paces, our different stresses, our interconnecting rhythms. You may include magic words and other annotations. We will start from the first text we 'Sound signifies event.' Remember to unmute on our BBB link.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [now we are having a short break] * * * * * * * * * * * * [we meet back in BBB in 10minutes!]

During this second part, Jon will introduce how to run the interactive Jupyter notebook in Google Colab. After that we come back to the pad for more reading and writing!

??h?? - ??h: Reading & Annotating: 
    After generating our texts, we will copy them to the pad.
    You can format the text in which way you want (like a poem, essay, series of tweets..).
    Then we can annotate the algorithmically generated text with our Magic Words from before, or new ones.
    When we are done, we can read other text submissions in the pad. We can add our magic words to other peoples additions.
We hope to experiment, respectfully, with algorithmic co-authorship!

??h?? - ??h: Exercise Voice #2: We will read out loud all texts this time, one by one. We will follow on when we feel like it, and can read for as long or as short as we like. Like last time, you may include magic words and other annotations. Remember to unmute on our BBB link.