Rare Book School Lecture: From text to .txt: Making Material Messes in a Sloppy World

By the turn of the millennium the word text had become a verb. Three and a half years ago ChatGPT was released into the wild, decisively severing the link between writing and human expression. In 2025, Merriam-Webster‘s word of the year was “slop.” Matthew Kirschenbaum (Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence & Professor of English, University of Virginia) will offer an attenuated archaeology of what someone we know once called the textual condition. And not to give away the game, but that condition is not good: today, text functions as something much more like a fossil fuel or other extractable resource than a medium for communication and expression. Nonetheless, the talk also asks how we can still make some good old fashioned material messes in a world of slop. Examples will be provided. Refreshments will be served. There may even be a book or two.

This lecture is also available by Zoom livestream.