Writing as art, the art of writing course with Sadie Plant

Writing as art, the art of writing, writing as artistic research: the "written element" of one's work poses some fascinating and challenging questions which we will discuss during these three days. All participants in this writing workshop are asked to submit one or two texts: the first should be directly related to your work, and the second, if you have one, should be the kind of thing you really love to write without any academic considerations and constraints. Both should be relatively short (up to about 1000 words), so that we all have a chance to read them and use them as the basis of our discussions. 

Originally from Birmingham, England, Sadie Plant studied philosophy at the University of Manchester where she gained her PhD in 1989. She taught Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham for five years prior to setting up the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit as a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick in 1995; She has also taught on the Fine Art MA at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design and is currently a Gastdozentin at Zürcher Hochschule der Kunst. 

She published three books in the 1990s: The Most Radical Gesture, which grew out of her doctoral research about the situationists; Zeros and Ones, which offers an alternative, feminist account of the history and nature of digital technology; and Writing on Drugs, which argues that the enormous influence of psychoactive substances on mainstream Western culture makes a nonsense of the so-called 'war on drugs'. In 2001 she completed a major research project for Motorola on the social impact of the mobile phone; in 2009 she was commissioned to write a short book to mark the fortieth anniversary of an innovative inner-city nursery school; and over the years she has written for English language newspapers and magazines as varied as the Independent, the Financial Times, Wired, Adbusters, and the New Statesman, as well as more specialised journals, books, and catalogues in the fields of architecture, the arts, and new technology. She has also made many appearances on radio and TV, including BBC programmes such as Newsnight, The Late Show, and In Our Time, and has spoken at a wide variety of conferences, festivals, and symposia in the UK and around the world.

In the last few years she has also supplemented her own writing by translating from German to English. To this practical work she also brings her interests in creative and experimental writing, a knowledge of other languages (in particular French and Arabic), access to the latest trends in UK English, and familiarity with Swiss German language and culture.

http://www.sadieplant.com/

COURSE READING LIST:

Vilém Flusser, Does Writing have a Future? 
Introduction, “Superscript" (pp 3-10), "Ways of Reading", "Deciphering", and "Books" (pp 79-102), “Scripts", "The Digital", "Recoding", and "Subscript" (pp 133-162)
http://ge.tt/1MCBrbK/v/0
 
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
letters 1, 4 and 6
https://kbachuntitled.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/rainer-maria-rilke-let...

Robin McKay (ed), The Medium of Contingency
Robin MacKay's intro https://www.urbanomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MoC-Intro-redaction...

Hélène Cixous, "Coming to Writing", in Coming to Writing and other essays
https://foretinterieureinteriorforest.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/cixous...