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This paper centres on William Burroughs’ writing and ideas, which changed the course of literature, and his multi-media collaborations, which generated new directions in music and film. Although primarily known for his involvement with the Beat Generation, he is one of the most prominent figures in the emergence of the postwar counterculture, a transgressive author with an absolute dedication to experimentation in narrative form and structure. He defines a literary evolution of the self in his rejection of American conservative society. Introducing the cut-up and fold-in techniques, he produces unexpected conjunctions and challenges a common understanding of the world. Much of his narratives are a working through of his thesis that the word – language – is a virus. The virus notion is accompanied by the concept of power and control defined in terms of drug addiction. Burroughs claims that dominating systems degrade us and reduce us to a level of totally repressed human beings that do not question the existing sociopolitical order and live in the accepted constructs of reality. These hidden mechanisms are also present in contemporary mass media. For this reason, he creates a new world, which liberates readers from the dominance of the established society, allowing them to form all their perception anew. His truly revolutionary ideas have inspired and creatively exhilarated many writers, musicians and artists who undertook a variety of collaborative multi-media ventures with him. These collaborations were, again, attempts to escape from authorial constraints and shape art production towards “making the words talk on their own.” They alter the complex interweave of creativity in the (post)modern age.

The current discussion on virality derives from early molecular biology and information theory of the 20th century, butgained actual metaphoric influence and virulence onlyin the 1960s and is becoming very popular in Postmodernity with the dramatic appearance of AIDS and the discovery of HIV as a retroviral phenomenon. It is suggested that the virus as a medium for change be regarded in relation to the technological conditions of preserving and transforming cultural information. Especially in the context of Dada and Fluxus, artistic demands of modernity such as opening up, permeability, interaction and participation are interpreted and analysed with the help of “infectious agents" as visions of biologically inspired intermediality. It seems that viral models of interaction and transmission have contributed to the current digital participation culture and to the supposed convergence of life and art of today and eventually shaped it in the course of cultural evolution. Thus a larger picture is evolving of the virus as a cognitive figure representing interaction, transmission, interdisciplinarity, connectivity and the interdependency of art and science in the 20th and 21st centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After successfully completing her literary apprenticeship with 3rd place at the 2005 German International Poetry Slam, Lydia Daher has continually sought new and often experimental platforms for showcasing the potential of language. Among her major projects, she has published several volumes of poetry, a number of music albums, and most recently Daher applied an innovative method of 'sampling,' reminiscent of HipHop producers such as DJ Shadow or The Avalanches to produce a volume of text and picture collages entitled Und auch nun, gegenüber dem Ganzen - dies (2014). Each collage relies on the textual (and pictorial) material of just one literary review taken from the literary supplement of the most recent edition of a German weekly newspaper. Although Daher is aware of each text as the most recent part of sequence that stretches back through the literary review, the reviewed novel, and the novelist's source material, she recognises that this structure is mere illusion. To describe the completed collage, I invoke the theoretical framework of the palimpsest, for the collage is less a succession of parts than it is a structure of co-existence. Like the influential cut-up artist, William S. Burroughs, Lydia Daher further recognises that the surface structure closely mirrors the palimpsest of human perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]