Information Prose :: A Manifesto in 47 Points :: Version 1.0

by Jeremy P. Bushnell, jeremy@invisible-city.com

9. You can learn a lot about a person from a mixtape.

10. When at someone’s house for the first time, you tend to look at their bookshelves.

11. Fiction which builds characters without taking this into account has its head in the sand.

12. The primary goal of the information prose writer is to document the contemporary mind and environment in a way that takes the contemporary importance of media and information seriously.

13. Many contemporary fiction writers are afraid or otherwise unwilling to do this. I submit as evidence the large numbers of contemporary novels set in environments which lack informational richness: rural areas, the past, "magical realism" worlds.

14. Information prose does not attempt to depict a simplified version of the world. Information prose attempts to contain as much of the complexity of the world as possible.

15. "Do you understand how tremendously dense? A minute in a room, together." — Don DeLillo, Valparaiso

16. A fictional American present in which no one watches TV, listens to the radio, or checks their e-mail is sentimental and false.

17. Information prose writers should not aim to write work which is timeless. The value of documentary work never lies in its timelessness.

18. When writing about characters who inhabit dense fields of information (both remembered and newly-experienced), the value of quoting, sampling, and appropriation rapidly becomes apparent.

19. Creative work utilizing techniques of appropriation has been produced with regularity for nearly a hundred years now, in all forms of media. Information prose writers should no longer need to defend these techniques against charges of novelty.

20. A partial primer, organized in a rough chronology: the Comte de Lauteamont’s Maldoror, Dada collages, Tristan Tzara’s cut-up poems, William S. Burroughs’ cut-up and fold-in novels, Robert Rauschenberg’s media silkscreens, Bern Porter’s found poems, Situationist detournement projects, the poetry of John Ashbery, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, the novels of Kathy Acker, the albums of Public Enemy and Negativland, and the films of Craig Baldwin.

21. All evidence indicates that much of this work is of lasting merit.

22. All evidence indicates that these techniques of appropriation are exactly the ones necessary to create a recognizable picture of the contemporary present.

23. "As artists, our work involves displacing and displaying bites of publicly available, publicly influential material because it peppers our personal environment and affects our consciousness. In our society, the media which surrounds us is as available, and as valid a subject for art, as nature itself." —Negativland’s Tenets of Free Appropriation

24. Information prose writers should not be afraid to plagiarize. It is not their duty to write citations. Our memories and experiences do not usually come attended by complete bibliographies.

25. Information prose writers should not overlook the technique of the fragment. Our experience of the textuality of the surrounding world is largely fragmentary; information prose should strive to reflect that.

(to be continued)
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