Biro Line

In June I wrote a short audio play called Things Are Exact, which you can listen to here. I wrote it forwards rather than backwards: intuitively, to find something out by writing it rather than writing it to show something I’d already found out. It means listening to it remains a useful way for me to find things out.

The play draws to a conclusion around the idea of catching and joining together moments of time. Here’s part of the dialogue:

- Why do you always cry?

- I think we have to calibrate things. I think things have to be clear enough to mark differences between them. [...] I cry to mark things out.

- Do you cry because things are exact or so that things are exact?

- So that.

- Then it doesn’t have to be crying. It could be something else that joins things together. String.

Now then let’s get these pauses right

Below are extracts from my diary over the two weeks leading up to my What To Do talk in July. I had to write about the talk privately because I didn’t want anyone reading the blog to come to the talk equipped with too clear an understanding of my intentions.

Publishing this

I made this site “published” this week which means anyone can read it. It was public to begin with too, but then somebody actually read it and that terrorized me so I made it private again, and since then all the posts were written just for me, as a sort of hyperlinked notebook. Now that it’s public again I’m concerned that I might be writing differently, and less usefully, if I imagine other people can read what I’m writing.

But these bits of interim writing have a function in relation to the rest of my work because they bleed out of the edges of the finished artworks I make and stop them ending too neatly. The edges of artworks are always a problem for me:

Writing

Writing is the first thing I want to think about. I write a diary every day, but as I do more and more work online and on my god forsaken laptop I’m afraid I might be finding it easier to express myself at length and with care when I type.

Also the lines in my new diary are horribly far apart, so page-units feel disproportionately brief, and the paper is a little shiny. I will get a diary without lines next time, but either way I find it slightly troubling that all my research and thinking is bound up in page after page of unfiled, uncategorised notes.

And I use my diaries for personal, intellectual and emotional things, lists, plans and schedules. While there’s a lot to be said for not distinguishing between my artwork and these other things, I think my current relationship with my diary means it’s time for separation. I’m spending a lot of time wishing I were writing my diary, then I open it and write but to negligible effect, and it’s becoming an unproductive things insofar as my art practice is concerned.

So writing online does a number of things. It makes my writing searchable and it separates it from my everyday writing. I also want to see if the move changes my tone, and by extension changes my default impulse towards quiet introspection and making a pot of tea. Without trying to engineer what I write, I want to be harder on myself and make sure my writing is work not comfort.