WSB:Prosody and Junkie
works inspired by William S. Burroughs on his centenary, 2014
From 2012-2014 I spent time in Lawrence, Kansas, working with the Lawrence Arts Center as a curatorial consultant for the Free State Festival. The 2014 Festival coincided with the centenary of the birth of iconoclastic American writer and artist William S. Burroughs. With the help and advice of James Grauerholz, Tom King, Yuri Zupančič, and Ben Ahlvers, the artistic director of the Lawrence Arts Center, I created a work called WSB:Prosody that re-imagines the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up technique for the computer age. Using a hidden Markov model and an unreleased audio recording of Burroughs reading Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, I created a software engine that remixes Burroughs' text, with particular care taken to preserve his extraordinary vocal nuance and his singular vocabulary. The work is installed as a projector mounted under an Hermes Rocket typewriter, such as the one used by Burroughs in the 1950s, when he wrote the novel. Output from this software was used to create twenty-five compositions of concrete poetry, titled Junkie, that capture the essence of what I find so compelling about Burroughs use of language. These works were then typewritten out on the Hermes Rocket and are exhibited as works-on-paper to accompany the generative piece.
