Clean~Room Exchange

Making expression without content from content without expression and vice versa.

About Print CRE

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Adapted from print edition of CRE:

Clean~Room Exchange is a bit like:

  1. Clean-room design, a way of bypassing copyright law.
  2. Those "The Cars movie without cars" videos if you haven't seen the source material.

Clean-room design involves reverse engineering an intellectual property and having someone without exposure to the original design recreate it from the reverse-engineered copy.

In CRE, reverse engineering means sweeping, arbitrary edits to texts, turning them into "X but Y" style pieces. Imagining the originals, after reading the edits without context, serves as the re-creation.

Edits are gimmicky and text-spanning to inhibit them as "found art". Doing this to unpublished texts aims to preserve the symbolic value of the originals.