CUT
creative writing for architects
Architecture is already saturated in images. To properly articulate the digital cosmos of today what we need is writing and code.
The problem addressed in this course is how to allow the digital cosmos to find its voice, and how you as architects can inhabit this voice to speak both freely and carefully, both playfully and seriously, from word-building to world-building.
No creative writing experience is required; you can forget everything you have learned. We will use experimental writing modes, movements and exercises to find ways to develop agility and grace in writing by testing the motility of concepts such as light and matter, gravity and grace, night and day.
You will form your own voices, forms and styles. We will all start with the initial theme of SATURATION. The digital cosmos is saturated. Saturation is extreme. Saturation is overwhelming. Saturation is beyond what is required.
Each week there will be a lecture followed by a group discussion. There will be a short text to read each week, and a short writing experiment to do. Readings will be provided online.
The task of the architect-writer here is to inhabit and write with this saturation; to find voices to properly articulate the saturated world. This requires skill and balance; gravity and agility; humour and lightness. During the course you will be guided through the process of writing texts which playfully inhabit the styles of the following: fragments of ancient epic poetry, Renaissance sonnets, modernist avant-garde poems and contemporary voices.
Provisional program
Online format, Thursdays, 10-12
1. Thursday 14 October -- Tables
Reading (before the session): Pleasure Beach Schemas 1 and 2.
Writing exercise (after the session) EITHER write a short story or a poem and render it in tabular form OR choose a short story or poem and render this in tabular form.
2. Thursday 21 October -- Code
Reading (before the session): Selection from Digital Architectonics text by Ludger Hovestadt
Writing exercise (after the session): build a text using xenotheka
3. Thursday 28 October -- Elements
Reading (before the session): Selection from Digital Architectonics text by Ludger Hovestadt
Writing exercise (after the session): tbc
4. Thursday 4 November -- Voice
Reading (before the session): OXEN OF THE SUN
Writing exercise (after the session): Pick three writing styles or voices, and write one paragraph in the style of each of them.
5. Thursday 11 November -- Synaesthetics
Reading (before the session): SIRENS
Writing exercise (after the session): Sensory experience prompt: write a short synaesthetic text
6. Thursday 25 November -- Baroque
Reading (before the session): Gilles Deleuze, selection from The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque; Selection from Digital Architectonics text by Ludger Hovestadt
Writing exercise (after the session): Write your own contemporary version of a description of the Baroque house
7. Thursday 2 December -- meme / sample / glitch / remix
Reading (before the session): PENELOPE
Writing exercise (after the session): Pick one short section from a text you have already written and subject this to one of the processes discussed: meme-ification, sampling, glitch or remix
8. Thursday 9 December -- The lyric: ancient and contemporary
Reading (before the session): Selected lyrics
Writing exercise (after the session): Write your own lyrical poem
9. Thursday 16 December -- Mechanics of the sonnet
Reading (before the session): Selected sonnets
Writing exercise (after the session): Write a sonnet in the Petrarchan or Shakespearean format
10. Thursday 13 January 2022 -- Aleatorics: aleatory rhetorics
Reading (before the session): CYCLOPS
Writing exercise (after the session): tbc
11. Thursday 20 January -- The artifice of the literary conceit
Reading (before the session): John Donne, The Flea; Kathryn Bond Stockton, Making Out; THE LOTUS-EATERS
Writing exercise (after the session): Write a poem or prose poem using an extended metaphor or a conceit.
12. Thursday 27 January -- Writing workshop: present your texts for feedback and discussion
Assessment
You will build your own digital epic using the texts you have developed throughout the course.
Provisional reading list
Selections from Homer, Odyssey
Fragments from Sappho
John Donne, selected sonnets
William Shakespeare, selected sonnets
Kae Tempest, selected poetry
Margaret Cavendish, selections from The Blazing World
Isabella Whitney selections from A Sweet Nosegay: One Hundred Philosophical Flowers
H.D., selected poems
Gertrude Stein, selected poems
James Joyce, selections from Ulysses
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Caspar Heinemann, Novelty Theory
Sam Riviere, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage
Ludger Hovestadt, selections from Digital Architectonics text
Helen Palmer, selections from Pleasure Beach
