Appropriation writing in a post-production context

Abstract

Increasingly, it is possible to see texts which are not the product of their authors, but rather an appropriation they make of excerpts or even whole pieces of another author’s work or other sources such as radiophonic broadcasts and newspaper issues. In 2007, the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud proposed the term “post-production” to group together artworks following Marcel Duchamp’s concept of “ready-made”. In 2011, the poet and artist Kenneth Goldsmith, who is also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, formulated the notion of “uncreative writing”, thus moving a similar idea into the textual milieu. Based on these assertions, the aim of this paper is to find out where such practices point to and how they can be conceived in a wider context of contemporaneity, in a dialogue with the Internet and the colossal amount of information it makes available.