Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams

In his introductory essay to TCR 2-50, Artifice And Intelligence: New Writing, New Technologies, guest-editor Andrew Klobucar outlines the major themes covered in the issue. An annotated version of the “In this issue…” section of his essay functions as a reading tour through Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams:
Klobucar: Kate Armstrong tells us more about the […]

What happens when there are (as there frequently are, and as the etymology of “amanuensis” suggests) inequities in the relationship? Foucault notes that all relationships are on some level agonistic – there are always imbalances of power, and there are always struggles, even between the best of friends.
In the descriptions of the Toronto Research […]

In his essay, Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group, Darren Wershler-Henry looks beyond the roles of the individuals - in this case bpNichol and Steve McCaffery - toward a fuller understanding of the nature and outcome of their collaboration:
Because my concern is not to determine with which subject the Toronto Research […]

From the relative beginnings of the typewriter, the same major elements appear in any typewriting assemblage. There is a dictator – the source of the words that are being typed. There is a typewriter – that is, an actual writing machine of some sort. And there is an amanuensis. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, […]

Toronto Research Group is a collective pseudonym for the Canadian poets bpNichol and Steve McCaffery. In his essay Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group, TCR 2-50 contributor Darren Wershler-Henry argues that the TRG is an author in the sense that Foucault describes in the essay “What Is An Author?” in Language, […]

Darren Wershler-Henry opens his essay Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group with an ostensibly straightforward description of the process of collaborative typewriting: Someone dictates; someone types. Sometimes they trade places. Sometimes the typist transcribes the dictation faithfully; sometimes the typist edits and emends the words as he types them. The compositional process […]

“There was a flipping sound every thirty seconds from the vcr as it was continually trying to eject a videocassette which was not, in fact, in the machine. Through some glitch of artificial unintelligence the malfunctioning vcr kept trying to eject nothing for days. The tuner part of the unit was working fine so it […]

I wonder how many people remember the Church of the Subgenius. It was around the time that the wave that crashed with The Industry Standard was just starting to form with Mondo 2000 that I coincidentally began to hear less and less about the Church, a mock religion that at once lampooned institutionalized salvation and […]

Since the industrial revolution we have struggled to reconcile the now twined notions of progress and obsolescence. Consider Rilke’s 18th Sonnet to Orpheus, written in 1922:
Do you hear the New, Master,
droning and throbbing?
Its prophesying promoters
are advancing.
No hearing’s truly keen
in all this noise;
still, now each machine
part wills its praise.
See, the Machine:
how it spins and […]

In the early 1990s, in San Francisco, where I was living at the time, the characteristically cold, fog-drenched air was laced with an outpouring of fin de siècle technopagan optimism. Oh, how the internet will open up new liberating avenues of communication! Fast-forward a few years, to the late 1990s – said “communication” is finally […]