SKIP

I used to write a zine called Rivers + Radiators. When you're 25 and still trying to figure out who you are...

One day I was sitting at home, and felt like writing down what happened to me during the day. I didn’t have my journal on me, and anyways, my journal is supposed to be art related only. So I did a diary entry on my computer. I go half-way down the page when I realized that what I wanted was the act of writing down my experience, and that I had no need for the piece of writing after I was done.

So I took the control key and selcted multiple little areas at random, and moved them around until it looked like a poem. I stopped, read it, and couldn’t stop laughing.

Immediately the idea appealed to me. The process is a lot like memory: you think about your experience rationally at first, but then after time you forget details, and random little bits remain like reminders, which are conjured up by dreams, cut and pasted with one another, and gradually reform themselves into memories you don’t remember. So I made more of them.

Surrealist writing was a way of getting at weird combinations of meaning by “not thinking about” what you’re writing. (It’s a difficult task, not thinking about something and still at the same time doing it.) Dada poetry used the cut and paste method to abstract words, and the beat generation picked it up.

I like collage, but I don’t care for appropriation. I’m more on the side of self-expression rather than trying to define your generation by mining popular imagery or text.

So these pieces cut and paste together texts which no longer exist—my diary entries

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