The Writer’s House at AWAY DAY

Below is an update on The Writer’s House, a three-day series of writing residencies this weekend at Wandle Park as part of the POST event AWAY DAY. The event is open to all and runs 29-31 May, 12-6pm daily.

The Writer’s House is curated by VerySmallKitchen. From the VSK site:

“The Writer’s House invited five practitioners to devise day long projects that utilised the house/ tent as a studio for a writer in residence, yet  also took account of the public and interactive nature of the AWAY DAY event. What happens to the writing when it takes place in the social and natural environments of Wandle Park? What – where – who- when – how-  if – then – was/is/will be writing?

Projects – by Bram Thomas Arnold, Rachel Lois Clapham (in collaboration with Antje Hildebrandt), Marianne Holm Hansen, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson, each begin as a score with varying relations to what might happen in the park itself.

HOW TO: Easter egg hunts for one

• Shut eyes and fling eggs around room. Look for them.
• Look for leftover eggs not found last year.
• Disguise eggs among similar things. Look for them.
• Look for eggs that are there anyway (ornaments, boiled, etc.)
• Hide eggs all year round. Forget about them. Look for them.
• Go to sleep with eggs in bed. In the morning look for them.

Art on the Underground

This month the six of us at antepress are compiling the outcomes of our art writing residency with Art on the Underground, as part of their 2010-2011 Jubilee Line projects.

Now that all the writing’s complete, we’re working with designers to settle the order and layout of the publication (my sketch above is one muddled attempt), and with AotU curators to write an introduction contextualizing the project.

Copies of our booklet Timepieces will be available at Jubilee line stations in the spring, with additional material online.

Listen to Musica Practica

Below is a recording of the broadcast made on Monday 1st February and repeated on Friday 5th February. Because the work of the work was dependent on being heard communally by a number of listeners at the same time, the version below is in a sense deactivated. The sound of the recording is the same as the sound of the broadcast, but the broadcast isn’t the sound of the work.

Repeating Words

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.

There Can Be Applause

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.

Everybody gets the Pentatonic Scale

The materials you need to commandeer the frequencies of short-wave radio stations are things you probably already own.

WE NEED

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

Listen to MAKING IT SOUND LIKE I AM MAKING ART FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES

If you missed me making it sound like I was making art for fifteen minutes on Resonance FM the other week, you can hear it again below. It was originally broadcast on November 16th as part of the antepress art writing programme Digestives.

My next Digestives programme isn’t until early February. In the meantime here’s a sneak preview of what I’m looking at in preparation:

Domes Without Looking

I’m practising for the 26th.