The aptly named British publisher Information as Material serves as a prime outlet for so-called conceptual writing with a focus on "work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and re-framing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things." Editor Simon Morris is, himself, a practitioner of what has come to be known as "conceptual poetics." His book, "Re-Writing Freud," is the product of a computer program randomly rearranging every word in "Interpretation of Dream," while "Royal Road to the Unconscious" documents Morris's process of cutting out every word form the same Freud text and flinging them from a moving vehicle. Both projects produced nuggets of nonsense that glistened with accidental poetry. Morris and Nick Thurston replied to some of Ross Simonini's questions about Information as Material via email.

Do you consider your publications collages?

They are not involved in the early twentieth century game of re-framing extant material in a bric-a-brac assemblage. These works appropriate other works whole and are then involved in a process of rewriting, allowing others the potential to read differently.

How would you define "conceptual writing?"

Conceptual writing is a fusion of art and literature. This process-based practice involves works where the idea is the writing and the writing is the idea. It is a non-expressive poetry, a poetry of intellect rather than emotion. Non-conceptual writing involves old-fashioned 'creative' prose and there's more than enough of that material in the world already. Conceptual writing appreciates the wealth of text in the world — from the highfalutin to the everyday — understanding that new meaning can be generated through re-framing extant material. Conceptual writing produces a critical relation to non-conceptual writing, and in so doing opens a space of possibility for new forms of readership. We write through the work of others, comfortable in the knowledge that all writing draws on a host of influences. As James Joyce famously remarked: "I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description." In conceptual writing the references are explicit rather than implicit.

Is there writing that you consider to be conceptual, which is not widely considered to be so?

Conceptual writing overtly engages with a broad genealogy of influences and precedents, much of which has been historicized for reasons other than its conceptualism. (Gertrude Stein and Georges Perec are remembered for their conceptualism, even if their conceptuality is historicized as formal game-playing). For people coming to this genre of conceptual writing for the first time, we couldn't recommend a finer place to start your research than Craig Dworkin's "Anthology of Conceptual Writing" on ubu, which clearly identifies works of conceptual writing from the past and the present.

Do you find that when you cut up a text you are engaging in a transgressive act?

We think you have to have a pretty sound rationale for developing bibliocidal tendencies. So, for example in Simon Morris's book "The Royal Road to the Unconscious," he didn't actually cut up Sigmund Freud's celebrated text from "The Interpretation of Dreams," he got his students to cut up enlarged photocopies of the text. Freud's books had enough unwarranted attention from the Nazis and Simon had no intention of damaging his work. We would agree with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin that "cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands."[1] They allow one to find new poetic connections in an existing text. But, it's not a particularly current technique, you could trace it all the way back to Tristan Tzara and his infamous cut-up poem in 1927 and Ivan Ward, director of education at the Freud Museum came up with a statement by Sigmund Freud from 1897 that suggestively prefigures Tzara's methodology and leaves open the possibility that it was indeed Freud himself who anticipated the cut-up as a process natural to human thought:

"The whole spatially extended mass of psychogenic material is in this way drawn through a narrow cleft and thus arrives in consciousness cut up, as it were, into pieces and strips. It is the psychotherapists business to put these together once more..." [2]

Professor Craig Dworkin from the University of Utah found further material that supports this assertion:

"If I say to a patient who is still a novice, 'What occurs to you in connection with this dream?,' as a rule his mental horizon becomes a blank. If, however, I put the dream before him cut up into pieces, he will give me a series of associations to each piece." [3]

The importance is not in the methodology which is just an inert technical procedure — the transgression will depend upon the site of engagement, what the technique is mapped onto. Nick Thurston in his radical text "Reading the Remove of Literature" didn't write his way through any random publication, he specifically chose Maurice Blanchot's "The Space of Literature" and the clarity of the idea is what creates the power or transgressive potential. So, for example, one artist we know of shredded William Shakespeare's sonnets, which seems to us a fairly meaningless activity, a little bit silly and pointless. Is there any legitimate reason to subject Shakepeare's poetry to shredding rather than a telephone directory for instance? Where as Jen Bervin in her book "Nets" writes her way through the existing text in Shakespeare's sonnets, without adding a single word of her own — a much more engaging work. As Bervin says in a working note:

"I stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the 'nets' to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible — a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems we do it with or against this palimpsest." [4]

This is a much smarter work. The problem for the art historians is going to be sorting the wheat from the chaff!

How does displaying a book in a museum change the way we experience it?

It makes the links and divisions between art and literature more explicit, drawing attention to the potential of interdisciplinary work. But we're just as happy if people discover these "bookworks" in other contexts where the encounter may be even more surprising/disturbing.

How are your books meant to be read?

These books are not necessarily meant to be read at all in the conventional sense. We know people do read them and seem to get something from that experience, but it is not essential to their function. Like any other traditional artwork they are propositions to be engaged with and thought about. Take Simon Morris's latest bookwork, getting inside Jack Kerouac's head. The work involves re-typing Kerouac's "On the Road" (specifically the original scroll edition from 2007, edited by Howard Cunnell), a page a day for almost a year. This was a slow reading, taking one page a day, chewing on Kerouac's road. In stark contrast to his own sweaty 21-day literary marathon. Kerouac had this continuous 127-foot scroll, and the resulting flowing prose, whereas Simon had narrative disjunction — one page at a time, as he blogged his way through his novel. The work examines the idea of copying a work as a form of writing in its own right. However, the idea is put in the world to invite people to think about that proposition but is definitely not there to be read. If you want to read the story, we'd strongly advise you to buy Kerouac's version. Although Simon's work contains exactly the same words, it functions completely differently. This is an artwork, not a novel. And the cheapest artwork you'll ever buy at £8.99, maintaining conceptual rigor by keeping the price exactly the same as the Kerouac edition. Truman Capote famously quipped about Kerouac's work: "That isn't writing at all, it's typing." But this work seriously proposes that the act of typing is a form of writing in its own right. We would happily rewrite Capote's comment to say: "That isn't typing at all, that's writing." And we think this proposition is pretty interesting if you're prepared to give it the time. Walter Benjamin, for one, would concur:

How do you feel about new novel, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" as a form of textual collage? Is this, in any way, similar to the work at Information as Material?

We certainly empathize with the strategies of appropriation and the reworking of the existing cover. And interpolation is an excellent technique for creating something new from extant material. "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" sounds like they are still being a little 'creative' with the insertion of the Zombie narrative. We favor an uncreative approach. But it sounds fun, with its canonical zombie movie plot. Plus zombies are a clever way of aggravating the romantic, idyllic world that Jane Austen has been made to represent by the literary canon. What is interesting is the reaction of the literary industry to the book's gesture of appropriation: applauded as a new, naughty maneuver, and represented as a game that can be accepted; subsumed, contained, and put to work against the strong challenges posed to the industry's principles by other more radically appropriative writing acts.

[1] William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, "The Third Mind" (New York: Viking P, 1978).
[2] Sigmund Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams" ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1985) 377-378.
[3] Ibid. 16.
[4] Walter Benjamin, "Reflections" (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 66.