Tamarin is talking very FAST

Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg documented today’s 10 Performances event with a live feed they updated throughout the day. By the time my performance What To Do begins they’re halfway down their third page. I love their occasional attempts to type out variations on everything I was saying. You can read what they’ve written here.

The text of What To Do is available to download as a pdf from the 10 Performances website, but I’m not sure I recommend you read it: the effect of reading the text on a page or a screen is very different from the effect of the performance itself.

Word Play at the Whitechapel Gallery

Tomorrow evening from 7pm antepress are hosting an art writing event at the Whitechapel. Here’s a bit about us from their website.

Continuing the series of playful and participatory events exploring language and its parameters, writers collaborate with artists to produce games and scenarios that challenge the audiences’ relationship to language.

This Word Play event is hosted by imprint and project platform antepress. The audience is invited to create six unique ‘artist books’, each based on a famous work of art. The books will be published on the night and will be downloadable from the antepress website. antepress was set up in 2008 by Julia Calver, Patrick Coyle, Cressida Kocienski, Claire Nichols, Tamarin Norwood and Gemma Sharpe.

Describing Genuine Smiles

This evening I’m going to describe to some friends the following work, which is the same work that appears in the diagram I drew last week. We won’t be able to put the work into practice because we’ll be at someone’s home and we won’t be able to draw lines all over its walls, and so once I’ve described the work as it should be, we’re going to try to find ways of replicating its effect but within the constraints of the domestic space: no lines on the walls, no lines on the floors.

Genuine Smiles uses a faint pencil line in place of writing – an attenuated, quietened form of language drawn between signified and signifier: between the thing described and the description of it. But once the line is drawn, the thing it started from isn’t there any more.

A sheet of paper of any size is attached to one internal wall of the cube, and attached just above it is a long piece of string

Genuine Smiling

I’ll say the people holding it

Something You Can Do On Your Own

1. Find that the plastic light pull at the end of the cord can be screwed apart, and find that there is space inside.
2. Cut a thin strip of paper, write your name along it, roll it into a tube and insert it into the light pull.
3. Be in the room a few years later when someone who knows your name finds that the light pull can be screwed apart and that there is paper inside.
4. Look at the person when he or she opens out the paper and looks at you and nods slightly but does not say anything to you.
5. Do not say anything while the person rolls up the paper and puts it back and closes the light pull.
6. Do not say anything to the person subsequently about this, and do not expect that he or she will say anything to you about it.

Bricks

Yesterday we made some straight lines.

Word Play at the Whitechapel Gallery

Two Thursdays ago I went to the Whitechapel Gallery for an event called Word Play. We all stuck together lines and words and phrases cut out of two texts, and from these fragments and agglutinations we built a kind of play in three parts. Some of the agglutinations were exquisite.

I made one particularly nice sentence which I tried to steal and keep for myself by sellotaping it in a line to the table where I was sitting, but then I moved to be better positioned for the scissors and when I got back it had gone.

antepress at FormContent

Tomorrow from 12-6pm I’ll be at FormContent with antepress. Here’s a bit about them:

FormContent is a curatorial project space, initiated in 2007 by Francesco Pedraglio, Caterina Riva and Pieternel Vermoortel in London’s East End. Its mission is to create a space in which to experiment with ideas and exhibition formats, to foster an active collaboration between artists and curators while challenging their roles.

… and here’s a bit about what we’ll be doing there:

Listen to How Things Began

How Things Began is a conversation between Adrian Rifkin and Tamarin Norwood in response to the 1950s children’s radio programme of the same name. How Things Began was first broadcast on Resonance 104.4fm on 20 July 2009 as part of Digestives, the antepress art writing series.