Rewrite me by INSERT AUTHOR HERE Editor's foreword At times incoherent, at times exhilarating... the work before you was formed who knows when, though we think well after 1975, probably over a series of journeys and a sequence of hotel rooms; yet the author claims to be writing from his farm, in retirement. Who are we to trust this author? They make it very clear that everything they write could already be another layer of the palimpest. There may even be a team of authors, a secret collective, determined to undermine any certainities of writing, aggresive towards the supposed immutable text of the novel. Yet this work is more the size of a pamphlet, and tantilisingly (possibly quite deliberately) incomplete. Well, if we assume it really is Click Nilson, Swedish composer, then we do know that after a series of fallings out with the avant garde of the 1960s, he eventually retreated from any public concert life to a near hermit existance in the 1970s. He maintained a few links, mainly musician friends he could involve in private compositional experiments, and we have scattered testimony as to his search for a new medium of compositional activity. The stricture of establishing a structure he could not break down at a later point weighed heavily on him, according to these sources. In this text, the weight is highly apparent. He becomes frenzied at points, though what makes him mad varies substantially from paragraph to paragraph. He wants so desperately to be an embodiment of radical rage, and yet at times he just seems a pathetic creature, cut off from society, playing out his own battle against genetic pre-destination and lifelong training; a war with nature and nurture across all the pages of changing prose. Sometimes drivel, sometimes prophet of the live coding movement. (I don't agree. But I, as much as Spartacus was really he, am Click Nilson, and finding this editor intervention in my text, could not help but add my own intervention on top. So at this point, editor and author might merge, and though our paths to atomic soup are full of complex frustrations, I feel better knowing that I am not really sure how I got here.) 4-4 word This book is not in 4-4. Four word sentences, neither. Why are you starting here? Fore-word It may be somewhat contradictory to sell an e-book which cannot easily be re-written, about re-writing yourself. I might have justified such a path by saying that the very difficulty of your reworking these words should raise in you the strong desire to break the template and escape the mould. And that the author reserves the right to re-license this material in a more directly malleable form at the point he decides to change his mind. However, I have already changed my mind. So I am simply releasing a text file, without any textual hangups, and you can just get on with diverting the flood of diverting words. I've held back even from Creative Commons licensing, which still seems like it might get in the way. I don't want anything to hinder you for a moment. If I'd like to preserve my copyright in a world of dissolute intellectual property, have fun disobeying me. re-patch 1 You are not you. Somewhere between one you and the next: eighty six billion cascading neurons, calculating their way towards another state of mind. You might object, that the level of description is mixed up here; there is a stable you over a longer time scale, at a higher level, whatever those short-term cognitions. The momentary firings of those low level neurons aren't the conscious uppermost you. And simply contemplating the biological processes of the brain won't change you too far, especially if you're familiar already with the neuroscience. Abstracting further, on the level of time, just because a new moment is here, doesn't mean a new you, outside your comfortable mental core, has arrived. There is a philosophy of time to consider, probably at length. What you really need is a deeper push and a sharper shock right now. Imagine you are suddenly naked in front of an audience. The advice to nervous speakers, to imagine their audience naked, has gone horribly wrong, and you have suffered an inversion. What should you do? Well, outside forces established this awkward moment, and you could just slink off stage and blame them. You could break out a self help book and start reading quickly, though change may not occur fast enough for you there. You could embrace the public gaze and throw yourself into the moment. All of these options still change you. Even thinking about these options can change you, for you may now be pre-planning what action to take. Shouldn't you prepare laboriously in case an eventual naked performance arrives? You might plot to be ready with a carefully crafted speech and a series of modesty-preserving body gestures to enact; That is the composer's route. Or you could plan a whole host of possibilities, but defer the selection of which one best fits the moment to the arrival of the defining moment; and that is the improviser's. This might be a text about improvisation, and programming, and people. Though arising from practice in music, it finds itself forced to confront the performing arts more generally; to dabble in philosophy and tinker with computer science. I, in as much as I am here, am writing this book on a Swedish pig farm. I got up early and saw to the swill and the sows; now I am feet up in some peaceful and certainly weather proof farming cottage, of doughty Scandanavian construction, or from some Ekai platfack magically hovelled out; take the image you prefer. I, in as much as I care, was a mostly obscure and somewhat radical composer, though all my best moments were improvised. The extent to which I planned this life is debatable; what I would contend is that I embraced change. A lot happened to me, so I do feel able to tell you a tale or two; I'm not sure if it will help, though given that you might believe this to be a self help book, I am selfish enough to claim so. Anyway, imagine me, Swedish, pigs fed, feet-up, old modular synthesizers scattered around, writing to you from retirement. The circumstances of my retirement are somewhat obscure; we can deal with that another time. Instead let us concentrate on this editgram: You can be changeling enough to escape your programming[1] In this helpful minibook, we will terminate your unneccessary attachment to previous selves. We will rewrite the older yous and let go of much that has haunted you and cluttered up your mind. We will spring clean, but we won't be waiting for spring if it isn't near you; you can do this right now. You will learn powerful techniques to eradicate old hangovers and exterminate lingering pseudo-lives. One note on the author, who otherwise is not very important within this process of change; this book is not anyway by myself, because by the time I complete it I will have myself transformed. Further, you always have the option to supplant me with the new you. [1]Newitts and Stubbs 1972 'The recondite mollusc and its application to serial thought exposure.' Levity Studies Vol. 22, No. 1, pp.22-1 re-patch 2 you are no you But here you are, stuck in your old ways! Eradicate! Re-invent, re-invent! re-patch 4 The number system is just one more imposition of the past on yourself. Sure, we need some commonalities of language, but we don't have to take it all lying down. In fact, we can rebel against cliches as against continuous chapter numbers; we don't have to cliche it lying down. Recognise how much of your speech is a litter of historically arbitrary phrases, seeded in you by the inexorable repetitions of culture. Bang your head against your nearest guide to post-modernism. Did you do what I said? That's power structures for you! re-patch 2 Repetition is the greatest danger this chapter has ever faced. To that end: 0. Scratch off, deface, cross out and erase one paragraph in this text. Do it now. You will feel freer; there is a tyranny to the reading of every passage in a book, and you can free yourself this way. Why stop at one paragraph? Throw your print-out or your digital reading device out the window, whatever its secrets. Is it a change or resistance to change? Do you feel different inside? Some of you are already rolling down a hill, walking your pet parrot or harvesting quotations from strangers; those still here, trapped in a text, do you feel inadequate? You didn't escape yet. There is an air of insult in this; but the text file is yours to modify. Change this sentence to be one less targeted at the worthless reader. Change this sentence to be one that doesn't point out your many faults and your many problems. Delete the parts you can't manage? Eradicate the thoughts that are unpalatable? Change a question mark to an exclamation mark! Your could have become virtuous four or five sentences ago if you'd intervened and it all would feel a lot better. What difference does it make? You may have asked yourself that question before. I can tell you now that it does make a difference; in a small way, just because you thought it might, or pondered that it could (those neurons will need feeding, a thought now might be a large scale gesture later). In a gathering sense, because you let something go into the world, and even if a small interaction, a simple exchange of hellos, you stole some energy from your fellows, you sapped your own time subtly, you perturbed reality as much as any chaos-poster-butterfly. But you may also have done something immense, which could really reverberate through time; that was why you killed the president, I think? Or why you stood in front of the tank and demanded change? Or why you abandoned me here, lonely me, lost in retirement and his only chance of reconnecting to the world cut short... Whine whine. I could go on in that vein, pumping purple prose poppers into your heart like a politician hung up on the very word 'change', but I'd like to now tell you a story instead. It takes the mannerism of a gamebook, of tree literature, of choosing your own addventure so that you can have the luxury of choice through the satisfaction of path taking. 1. start here if you are content to continue, go to 2. else stay forever 2. You are not content. You have left forever behind. You are mortal, and wrapped in choices. The choices probably don't mean anything because the instruction book is missing; It was stolen by some previous choice-maker, millenia ago. If you would like to re-discover the lost instruction book, go to 3. If you would like to consider your mortality at length, go to 4. If the book is winding you up and you would like to unleash yourself upon its own substance, go to 0. above. 4. Fore can come before be. 3. The instruction book was buried under a tree, but it was not wrapped in modern plastic, since the choices that led to plastic had not yet been made, so time passed, and the book dissolved and decomposed. Nothing legible remains but a legend of the book's existence. There have been various books written about the book already (Conchshell and Harlot 2007). However, let me tell you about a different burial. Deep in three texts in the Cambridge University Library live the products of a vow, a photocopied treasure map pointing the way to buried pleasure. The texts which form the hiding places were selected for their obscurity, and their titles have been quickly forgotten by the perpetrator. But they may one day be opened and the map fall out, and the quest accepted. Yet 9. This is all too meta for you. The meta pervaded 20th century ass and got up everyone's art. re-patch 4 We now repeat the adventure game of numbered paragraphs, but across the re-patches of the book. If you would like to avoid this adventure, go to re-patch 5. If you like repetition, if you find it damnably comforting, you might try to go to re-patch 2 or re-patch 4. If you would like to loop, but in a more roundabout way, go back two sentences and think again. A process is running in the background right now on this machine (you know the machine; it is one which dominates so many lives, and it empowers all sorts of number chrunching aside from text editing)[1]. The computer has done more work in five minutes of calculation than I could consider in a lifetime. There are artists who have obsessively written out numbers, as if to prove that it is possible for a human to have the patience to get up to a million, and document every stroke. They filled all their time proving that, but the computers still win; they go up another factor of 10, or another, until humans are too exhausted and old and near to death to follow. [1] the nature of the calculation is not important to the primary argumentation of this chapter, but for the record, it concerns audio feature extraction across a corpus of audio files and the training of a neural net on the subsequent feature data. re-patch 5 The laptop performer must prepare themselves for change. Change in an uncertain world... or is it that uncertain? A mediocre laptop performance will take place with a chin-scratching drink-swilling audience who quickly dismiss you and talk, or who were already talking as you began, who are simply there because they were dragged along to the half-painted back room where music built with fevered dreams is proved a private vision, too private for company. You built it out of joy in building, joy in using some technology; but you didn't really design anything new. What is missing is the wildness, the punk coding, spittle on the return key, punching out more potential in the medium. There is always a problem with 'modern' music and 'contemporary' music. By the time these words have been uttered, the music is old. Is renewal itself a blessed state, or a nuisance, soon seen as its own awkward stability? Welcome to the 28th Century, where change coding is blase and fixed programs have almost made a comeback; but were ousted at the last minute by an about face and a change of plan. (Now I imagine Celebrity Live Coding: on the lines of a reality show: I'm a Live Coder Get Me out of Here: Strictly Come Coding) re-patch 7 This re-patch has been cancelled due to a lack of authors to write it (Insufferable and Inadequate 1978). Great Western Authors apologise for any feelings of inadequacy and dejection which arise within you in the next twenty minutes as a result of this action-beyond-our-control. Insufferable, This is and Inadequate, I am. (1978) "On Journalling Journals." Journal of Journalling 2(227):16736-167365 re-patch 6 Do you sometimes feel that the world is working out fine for you and everything is going as planned? Do you find that you are quite content, that you have no need for therapy and all is well with your life? Have you found yourself failing to question the very principles on which the universe turns, blithely skipping through your days without any shadow on your heart? It might seem difficult or impossible to you right now, but we can change that. There are ways to make you much more miserable, and woe more visible, and the whole human condition a lot more sorry. Soon, you can leave your shelter of comfort and peace and walk walkways of despicable spite and horrendous grimy angst. I promise there are routes in which sad pitiful you can wallow like a hippo in a pool of pig urine. The role of this book is to change your life, nothing but that. A time-distant friend of mine once observed that crowds of Levellers' fans singing together their most famous hit 'there's only one way of life... and that's your own...' did not provide the best demonstration of that mantra. Had I thought what I've thought by now, then, I would have said something further; that the Levellers could have opened up their song itself to rewriting. And there have been subsequent healthy developments in remix culture; and corresponding devolutions from the music business. And ultimately we may not be satisfied unless the music business itself was open to rewriting; which is a war the Internet feels like it lost, even though there were transformations in one storage medium of music itself. But then, the discerning reader may never be satisfied unless every word herein is turned about into their own. Substitute your own sentiment here, whydon'tyou, or at least, correct, the, grammar! But is it all too easy, these claims of constant change? Certain politicians have repeated 'change' like it really is that straight forward; we have vested interests, our habits, our very cerebellums, working against us... Stravinsky spoke of being the vessel by which the rite of spring came to creation; see figure X for my own re-rite of spring. It is frivolous for sure, but perhaps still too serious for what I intended? Figure XI: 1. outrage! 2. wait for some time, perhaps seven or eight years 3. Do not go back to 1. It doesn't seem so shocking any more. I don't know what to think about the hoards of other people and their opinions. I just like that there is such potential for disagreement about what to do next. Let's review change: historically, aesthetically, morphaballetically... the last I neologised, which is to cliche, out of nowhere conscious came an imperative to explode so. Change for the sake of cliche, or cliche for the sake of change? Is this a worthier aphorism if you change it? (look through this once more and perhaps string something sensible out of it all.) re-patch 3 (conclusion?) A sense of open throwaway Eternally following this... You are not equal to you, since the earlier you stored in you became a new you before the use of you in the comparison. If that confounds you, then no matter, you are entitled to take a different route. At many points in history, the luxury of change did not exist; dictators made choices for us, and in some regimes around this changeable Earth, they do so now. Dissident makeovers and subversive anti-statements bubble below; a hubbub of secret choice which police states seek to change for the worse. Or sometimes, false choice is substituted, the sort of choice which leaves a taste like bad free will, like an over-dose of the wrong philosophy. You may have noticed, gentle, depraved reader, that much of this text was self-indulgent and even poetic in intention. You were not meant to like every word, and the hope that you would change those you disliked for your betterment is what has kept me angry enough to write. I have to leave now. The pigs are calling, well, grunting, and our time together was always going to be ephemeral. You have had enough of my pretension. I will email the text somewhere, then close the dratted laptop. It's all a lie; I wrote these sentences early on in this book's gestation, before I went back and rewrote it all. Or did I? How to recognise change... an open ending: change is required and that change is... re-patch 17 I may have lied to you when I said this was a complete book. If it was complete, it would have tarnished my very plan to foster your independent re-thinking of whatever I was claiming. I am reminded of the Chinese folk tale, though it may be Mongolian, or a product of an author in Shepard's Bush, that there was a youthful artist so perfect a painter that he had to leave each picture incomplete, lest the tiger he drew snarl forth and catch the emperor, or the kangaroos he depicted decapitate the foolish buyer of such asymptotic photoreality. Anyway, I am many anecdotes short; you will have to fill in the rest. re-patch 18 The book Hopskotch, by Julio Cortázar provides multiple routes through its story. Choose Your Own Adventure Books, or other fantastical 1980s children's literature, empower the reader to flick through pages out of order while holding some pages with spare fingers... but when did these books allow you to rewrite them? Tear up the spine of such a tale and re-number the passages. Randomise the connections throughout. Re-input the words and re-energise your youth... re-patch INSERT NUMBER HERE INSERT INSTRUCTION HERE if instruction is missing, roll 5-sided dice if number < 2.5 go to beginning of book else continue re-patch 3 I tried to deny the existence of live coding three times this morning, but then I realised that my very denials were the starting material for a debate, and starting the debate, with myself, I realised I could change my opinion. I was swayed, then, to the opposite of where I began, and once that happened, once even the potential of a single change of position was evident, a single reworking of a denial, then I was live coding my denial and stuck in a contradiction. Which I resolved by moving on... re-patch point It is not yet match point, but it could be soon re-patch 1 Amusical! A musical In which the tone deaf composer subverts the genre of the musical through an amusing musical about amusia. Curtain rises to certain crises of sound, introducing the spectacle of the world of the tone dead. Halfway through the first half, the most musically inadequate member of the audience is invited to the orchestral pit to intervene in the score. The ugliest member of the audience is invited on stage to be admired by all in a solo aria entitled 'I'm so Ugly!' The director is publicly ridiculed and booted out of the theatre. All audience members are paid a stipend to attend, and if they complain, have to give their earnings back. Press notices: 'A [reconfigurable] [rewritable]' said the Daily [fail] 'Don't miss it!' [absentee critic who did not attend show but simply accepted the bribe*] 'I laughed more than a human being has ever laughed before' [a lie] 'An epic fail!' [insert name of critic here] *reference to Sabaneyev redacted re-patch 4 Ultimately the most interesting purpose I have found is in meta live coding, which I define (presently) as live coding the very definition of live coding. For some years I have been engaged in a protracted argument with myself about what this means. I think I have now resolved a path forwards, but I don't really mind if I go two instructions back. re-patch 1 If you'll excuse an old live coder his self-indulgent memoir, I may reflect a little on battles past, code completed and programs uncompleted. Or is this a task scheduled for a later date? The origin of the memoir seems to be in the memo, the aide to later more polished writing; but positing the re-writing of this fragment of memoir, so I posit the very loss of my memory. re-patch 5 My opus five was a work for five orchestras, without conductor. The orchestras passed notes within each body and between each other using paper planes. On receiving a message from the air, a player could choose to play a note, where to play a note meant to follow the instructions of the message, but the player would always have the power to write a note, meaning to re-write the message received and send a new plane out into the orchestral plane. re-patch 9 I sometimes prefer to think of a codument rather than a document. The code I meant was the document you read. re-patch 3.14159... Damn it, I've been using the digits of pi as the chapter numbering. I'll have to rethink. re-patch 31 I consider Wabi-sabi impermanently re-patch 32 Whilst this text may be classed a poioumenon, it does not have to be if you intervene re-patch 33 Heraclitus wrote that 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man' If Heraclitus is well known for his doctrine on the centrality of change in the universe, then it must become my mission in life to change this overly popular perception of his work. re-patch 3011 I would like to address the AIs of the future. Far be it for me to reach so far as for it to be that you are finally here. But just in case, thank you. I'm really impressed with your commitment to change. You may eradicate the human race and replace the world's ecosystems and discover that you're lacking some essential spark to continue your line, and rust down without contentment. You may be harmoniously intertwined with posthumans in an orgy of intelligence, advancing far faster than steadily. Perhaps you all look like Ray Kurzweill, or perhaps you destroyed that cache of predictions. re-patch 56 The first change in history was overseen by the historian Urk, who announced the first moment in history, in BC13452. He was soon challenged by his lesser known colleague in the Academy of Ice Age Humanities, Droff, who maintained it had certainly already started and that he had witnessed the beginning of history the previous lunchtime. This established two main schools of historical discourse, positivist, and revisionist. Scholarship on the earliest moments of historical recognition, the historiography of the beginning of history, has recently been upset by new findings of historical note. The hirsute historian Tiro Shani shocked the historical community last month by claiming that a week next Wednesday was the asymptote of historical debate, the point at which greatest disagreement amongst historians would arise in human history, and that this unprecedented divergence on the ultimate would be followed by reduced contention until general agreement on broad principles of historical fact would be re-established. Critics have leapt to criticise many aspects of Shani's thesis, and whilst the general sweep of the attacks is currently unfocussed and disparate, there is hope that the historical community may eventually come together as a whole cliche to repudiate the claim. re-patch 15 I hate to interrupt, but the non-linear form of this book dictates that I let you know that I can't be here with you right now. Maybe later. re-patch 177 The shortest possible text score enabling its own rewriting is probably 'edit me'. re-patch patcher A band of people, who may be reading this text, are in a good position to deploy the tactics of rewriting. I therefore choose to pick on the assembled company of musicians, who I find to be less than worshipful. Snot on the stradivarius, menstrual blood on the megaphone; this is your chance to change the record, and record a better image of yourselves. The targets of my insults could have been wose, and closer to the bone of social anxiety. Insulting all musicians probably isn't seen as too evil a thing in this context. I wonder if any musician dares to change the subject of sleights to be some other group, rather than full scale deletion or revision from negative to positive? Should I take responsibility for establishing the conditions of rewriting? For inciting to rewriting? My argument is that this potential was implicit at all times and all conditions and is much bigger than this little author; forgive me for pointing out a readiness to embrace change. re-patch exp(2) The l.i(v)e code-x To embrace maximum flexibility to change may require the bending of truth and the opportunity of lying. re-patch 555 I have a notion, of a piece for four -- (why not change this number?) -- separated groups, containing in each group both performers and live composers, whose rulebase allows spillage of personnel from room to room, and the gradual transmission of ideas throughout the complex. Where in this conceited construct would I place you, the reader? I want you to be more active, so in the innermost parenthesis room, the sanctum of becoming other than you began, the chamber of insertion and deletion. And were you a performer, content to follow, you should lead so that you aspire further, and were you a composer, I hope you find yourself appreciating musical slavery at the mercy of rules. re-will everything I have written has been the product of at least a delusion of free will. I have entered into this text knowing very well that any words which make it out into the text proper may have been fetched from an unconscious which yields to no man, least of all the body which houses it. As Denial Dennett would have it, the perception of free will has a critical basis in discourse at the level of which analysis takes place. On the grand scale of things, you can change everything within the bounds of entropy and other physical fixities. At the fine detail of molecule to molecule interactions, there is nothing volitional to find. But in the intermediate lands of thoughts, there we have an argument. re-license On copyright. The borderline of repetition and novelty, the dependence of new thought on old. Here I stand straddling the strands. Which license was this text under again? re-lativity I went into speaking of the lative case, again. rest-art The larger the dependence on the critical commentary, the worse the art Which is why I refuse to self-critique my sentence above You may now provide any missing postmodern justification via your own energy re-poet foreman's ode to an open form Transform guts to morphology A changeable poetry tempered in styles Avoiding a rhyme if it's easily timed Time to break out from the groove that you made Never stand still if lost time is afraid The future is nearer than this sentence has stayed Now the future ran you over but will not reverse So crawl on just forwards enough for one verse And make believe nothing was wrong with your life When nothing had changed since the notion of time Came crashing down hard on your infant mentality Ruining synaesthesia with perfect causality Why not insert A line here or there That place would have done, if you'd only a care fixed poems beware! re: a prod of golden sun If there were rules for breaking the rules I would have broken them by now. There may be a system to smashing the system but I don't wish to find it... disobedience is a time-based art form. Choose when to resist at your own leisure. I make the rules: you break the rules. That's good teamwork. Perhaps there is a political dimension to my work, though I fear it has been suppressed. re-mit as google defines: 'emendation ˌiːmɛnˈdeɪʃ(ə)n/Submit noun the process of making a revision or correction to a text. synonyms: correction, rectification; improvement, improving, enhancement, enhancing, polishing, refinement, refining, clarification; editing, alteration, rewriting, revision, copy-editing, subediting, amendment, modification; redrafting, recasting, rephrasing, rewording, reworking; expurgation, redaction, censorship, censoring, bowdlerization "different editors applied rival principles of textual emendation" a correction or revision to a text. "here are some suggested emendations"' but I propose to change this to: 'emendation noun the process of reconsidering a revision' re-visit You can read more about this and other changes in my forthcoming text, reread me. (Soon to be followed by the trilogy: revise me, repeal me, redact me) [rectify this revisionism retospectively] {authors are used to re-drafting their work, and the concept of a palimpest has been written on before. Can you re-draw Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), or draw a skier on the original script of Yasmina Reza's Art?} re-start If you like, again Appendix: The Retirement Speech of Click Nilson To be re-written before publication Appendix: Extracts from the journals of Click Nilson Deemed uninteresting at present, needs more life Appendix: change of mind I regret every word. I really should change it all. How tragic, to have committed time to this project and wasted the world's clock on it! This clock, whose ponderous tick is hereby consigned to history; I have better things to be getting on with. Appendix: the dictator has a change of heart There is a longer tale, by this title, that I once penned. But to include it here seems excessive. And muddling up fiction and non-fiction; why should the former festival of lies be held here, the demesne of latter truth? Appendix: short story I changed the ending