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My most recent post for the or-bits.com blog is here. (See also this post.) The text of this post is copied in full below as it has something in common with the Pigeon Wing project I’m working on.
The person at 298b has only a very small window offering almost no view at all: just the top of a brick wall and a few inches of sky. This is inadequate. At times he feels like staring into the plotless scrolling of people and things you get through proper windows, but there’s nothing to see. The view’s blank.
So at times like these he’s started building the view himself. Read the rest of this entry »
In John Smith’s Girl Chewing Gum (1976) a set of stage directions works as a pivot for the representation of the actions of the people, vehicles and camera operator in the film. It’s a straightforward conceit: the actions were filmed first and the descriptions were added afterwards, but because they’re announced as directions the words appear to precede and cause the actions. Read the rest of this entry »
The text I described earlier this week has 554 words and 39 of them are “can”. In total there are only 173 different words in the text, and all the others are repeats. Whenever it was possible to use a word I had already written, that’s what I did.
The high incidence of functional words is unremarkable in the text. There are 31 instances of “the”, 29 of “to”, 16 “and”s, 15 “them”s and 14 “a”s. They don’t particularly show.
Most of the other repeated words do pretty much the same job each time they come up: “tell” (10), “each” (9), “inhabitant” (9), “rhythm/s” (10), “tap” (3), etc. But I’m interested in the words like “make” (11), “part” (9), “play” (6), “pause” (6), and “you” (37), which from time to time shift their referents in significant ways.
My Resonance FM broadcast next week will be called Musica Practica, which is also a working title for the text I wrote about yesterday. Below is the full text as it stands at the moment.
The materials you need to commandeer the frequencies of short-wave radio stations are things you probably already own. You can make the transmitter part small enough to carry with you to somewhere high up above the buildings. Then you can turn the transmitter on and the people in the buildings you can see can hear you. First you can tell them there are certain materials they probably own or can find in the buildings they are inhabiting, and that while you give them a fairly small pause they can collect them.
fork as art
person as person
green line as
We can draw a line from the tip of our pencil to our piece of paper and we have a dot.
We can draw a line from our piece of paper to a person we love and when the person dies we can still have the line that touched the person.
We can draw a line from our piece of paper to a person we love and then move the paper and the line is still touching the person.
We can draw a line from our piece of paper to a person we love and then move the person and the line is still touching the paper.
We can draw a line from our piece of paper to a person we love and then move the paper and the person and the line is still touching the line.
We can draw a line from our piece of paper to the tip of our pencil and we still have a dot.
WE NEED:
a sharp pencil
a person we love
a piece of paper
This afternoon I drew the tip of my pencil with itself and the nib of my biro with itself. I drew them in my line drawing book, which makes them the first traditionally representational drawings on its pages. They continue my exploration of the line as a representational tool that joins word to thing, and here the pencil and biro use the paper as a pivot for representation. Read the rest of this entry »
On Saturday I presented a new work at the Stanley Picker gallery during the Writing Exhibitions symposium. Here’s an outline of my work, which I called Genuine Smiles:
A sheet of paper is attached to one wall of the gallery, and attached just below it is a long piece of string with a sharpened pencil fixed to the other end. Visitors are invited to hold a pencil and do whatever they need to do to muster a genuine smile. Read the rest of this entry »
