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Homologue is changing. Five print publications are coming together in a series called TEXT AS.
While you write, imagine a piece of writing as a piano.
A piano makes some kind of sound. The point of a piano isn’t the piano itself, but the sound it can make. Nevertheless, the shape of the piano is determined by the shape of the sound it makes, and the shape of the sound is determined by the shape of the piano that makes it. The shape of the sound causes the shape of the piano, and the shape of the piano causes the shape of the sound.
While you write, imagine a piece of writing as a piano, and imagine that the piano comes first, and the sound follows. Every moment of the production of the piano calls for the sound.
Yesterday VerySmallKitchen announced my new publication:
Tamarin Norwood’s TEXT AS TOOLKIT: A Practical Handbook is the first in a series of e-chapbooks developed from the Art Writing Field Station.
Tamarin’s text was first devised as a presentation for the field station event at Five Years Gallery on 7th February 2009. As Tamarin observes in her introduction:
TEXT AS TOOLKIT proposes a methodology for reading and hence for writing. The purpose of this methodology is to identify and extract from texts certain metatextual tools that might be used to examine the practices and products of writing. Mining texts for their tools is a consciously interventional strategy that considers texts as provisional and active material participants in a cumulative art writing field. 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.
A short text I’m working on at the moment ends like this:
Then you can start to group the amended inhabitants into a number of parts and tell each part the names and orders of certain musical notes part by part, and you can tell them how many beats they can have in each second. Part by part you can count each group briefly and very quietly back into the general song and when you have told everyone to play there can be applause.
The text is a set of less than explicit instructions that repeatedly uses the form “you can” to explain how to commandeer the frequencies of local short-wave radio stations and then how to instruct the listeners at home to communally play a piece of polyphonic music using constructions they can make from household objects.
fork as art
person as person
green line as
My book DO SOMETHING is now available to buy online through the (un)limited store website. Click here for more information.
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 »
