Working with the Machine

Last week, I described the Anthelion Projects as one of the natural possible evolutions of the Corona Lectures, so perhaps that’s where I should start.

Though they’ve been reimagined as the first Anthelion Project, when the Corona Lectures began, I had little idea what they were. With one unpublished novel under my belt and unfinished drafts of several others hanging around, I had been trying to work my way into yet another one when COVID-19 hit and the stay-at-home orders were issued. Among the factors contributing to the change in format, the isolation of novel writing, compounded by the pandemic, has to be one of the prime motivators. The Corona Lectures ended up being twelve videos, released monthly, that roughly covered the period of greatest isolation—from the issuing of the stay-at-home orders through my vaccination.

For various reasons—some addressed in the earlier videos of that series—I wanted to surrender a degree of control over what I presented in the Corona Lectures. So I came up with the idea of first building what I called a Machine and then giving the Machine the responsibility for determining the content, the form, duration, and perspective of the writing, what materials other than my own writing I included and when I included them. One way of thinking about this kind of Machine is that it is a set of constraints and possibilities for combining material which would employ chance operations to create a sort of blueprint for a lecture. 

Another way of thinking about a Machine is as a procedure for creating a series of small containers—into each container I would input content, always within the constraints determined by this operation of the Machine—and also determining the relationship of those containers to each other and the lecture as a whole. The control I had over the structure of the piece would be restricted to how I built the Machine: whether I could create a Machine that would, once it was run through its processes, create an interesting structure.

Guiding Principles

In the process of making these lectures, I came up with a set of principles that would, I hoped, both lay out the track and keep me on it. Here are the original principles:

1. Build the Machine before inputting content.

2. Incorporate chance operations into the Machine’s processes.

3. Build a Machine not to serve content but to process it.

4. Foreground unconscious material, in as raw a form as possible.

5. Make every sentence true, or as true as possible.

6. Accept that a given lecture may not succeed, in part or as a whole.

7. Make all Corona Lectures available free of charge.

Let me discuss the principles one by one, both in their formation and in how they relate to my work on the Absence collaboration.

1. Build the Machine before inputting content.

The Machine had to be built before the content was input in order to prevent me from manipulating the Machine’s processes to achieve a content- or form-related result I might desire. While I followed this principle in the Absence project, the Machines themselves became quite a bit more open, perhaps because a greater percentage of the material did not consist of my own writing.

2. Incorporate chance operations into the Machine’s processes.

This is so central to the project that it’s almost surprising to see that I felt the need to include it among the principles. With Absence, randomness continued to play its central role. With the Corona Lectures one or several six-sided dice were the agents of chance. In the later Absence videos, I began using three coins flipped simultaneously.

3. Build a Machine not to serve content but to process it.

Over a particular sequence of the Corona Lectures, I discussed the topic of meaning and meaningfulness, and the distrust I discovered in my ability to distinguish between them, most importantly in my own work. Since meaningfulness is a disease of form, restricting my ability to manipulate form was meant to inoculate me from this danger.

With the Absence videos, it was much more challenging for me to simply process content. This was due to a feeling of responsibility to the artist. It felt incumbent on me not to misrepresent his painting. That’s being a little easy on myself, though. Certainly pride played a factor.

4. Foreground unconscious material, in as raw a form as possible.

In the Corona Lectures, this primarily took the form of dreams and quotations of other writers. These are some of the raw materials of writing, and I wanted to substitute the Machine’s processing of them for my own. Collaborating with Holmberg, his (unscripted, unrevised) voice memos and painting videos became the most important raw materials of the project. They are certainly foregrounded and for the most part still quite raw in these videos.

5. Make every sentence true, or as true as possible.

Above I offered the image of the Machine as creating a series of small containers. Among other goals, it was my hope that if I made the container small enough—say a single sentence—I might be able to make it wholly true. Of course this is impossible. There are infinite reasons falsehood creeps into our sentences, due to the nature of language and our own shortcomings. It is really very difficult to write even a single true sentence, never mind a series of them.

With the Absence series, I did my best and came up short. Having a goal is one of the most serious challenges to remaining true.

6. Accept that a given lecture may not succeed, in part or as a whole.

This was crucial to tell myself when I was making the Corona Lectures if there was to be any chance I’d release them to the world. They didn’t all succeed, as it turns out. Not by my reckoning. This became a lot more challenging in my collaboration with Holmberg. It’s much harder to accept failure when you’re potentially taking someone else down with you. 

7. Make all Corona Lectures available free of charge.

This is both self-evident and complicated. I would of course be happy to earn money from this work, but I remain committed to offering my videos at no cost to the viewer. It seems to me essential to the spirit of the project. We’ll see where future collaborations lead in this respect.

Where That Leaves Us

Let’s say each of the initial principles of the Corona Lectures still applies—as is or with some slight modification—to the Anthelion Projects. In addition to these principles, the Anthelion Projects are collaborative. There are any number of ways these collaborations could work, but at their heart should lie a conversation between creators. There should be room within each video for the creative work of each individual involved. They should serve each of the artists’ needs.

In my next post, I will imagine some possible forms collaborating on an Anthelion Project might take. It is my hope that these thoughts might spark the interest of a potential collaborator.