I was excited to read about this project - TBT [Time Based Text] made by the free software programmer, media artist and activist Jaromil and conceived by Jaromil and the artists group JoDi.

"The emphasis of the software is on the process of writing/typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. It reveals additional information on digital poetry, because the speed of typing and reading it, are visualised... The software has been kept as basic as possible, is free to use and users are encouraged to add functionalities."

In the Nettime list archive there's a short interview with Jaromil about the software which for points the way to a dynamic exploration of writing processes, especially those of editing and rewriting which I've been pursuing to a certain extent, and by other (much less technical) means in projects like Long Relay and City Changes. TBT [Time Based Text] (open source and licensed GNU GPL) can be downloaded from the TBT project page here. I'll be curious to give it a go.

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Meanwhile a week or two back Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I was enthusing about greatly back here in January. There's a short interview with him at the Amazon blog plus an excerpt from the sci-fi novel he's now writing titled Dark America.

Watching Jim do the performance of Sight is the Sense... last night, really loving to see him there, feeling his way, negotiating the space between himself and the audience, through the eddies, flows, loops and spirals of the text.

I even liked (in a certain way!) watching him blank and seem to lose his lines a few times, which he never once did in rehearsals. On these occaisions the longer he stood there in silence the more I began to think he was in trouble. So tricky with this kind of performance text (a  long list - associative, non-narrative, slightly and confusingly repetitive) when oftentimes your ability to get from line to line rests on the place each has in the flow, and where once the flow gets broken you're left stranded. Having some kind of intellectual/anecdotal link - a word association or stupid story to summon one line from the ending of the previous is about the best (and only) insurance policy against these stuckness situations - allowing as they do a kind of retrieval that should be possible from cold, outside the rhythmic flow of the text. In the event of the performance even this method failed Jim at two points and he had to fish the text from his back pocket, consult it, then continue. What was very beautiful to me was seeing how well he kept his cool with this - keeping contact with the audience, taking time - pulling even the almost-rupture into a place inside the economy of his performance, making it part (somehow) of the line he was drawing in time before the spectators. No denial I guess. What is happening is what is happening.

Speaking to people about the performance I realised something I'd only half clocked before - that I really gave myself permission in this piece not to build an explicit dramaturgy in the writing. At a local level (sentence by sentence, clump of lines by clump of lines) it certainly switches things around, swapping, shifting, changing, redrawing it's parameters. But on a broader level there are no sections, no chapters to it, no revelations of new attitude or approach, not much you could call development at all, beyond a deliberate tightening around certain topics and rhythms in the last page. (I guess there is a dramaturgy in there of course... but what there is is very flat and very fluid at the same time, a dramaturgy that arose by accident (or intuition, or habit, or process) of the writing rather than by some grand design or intention.

J. describing learning lines for the Sight is the Sense monologue, during a camping trip in Mexico. Lain sleepless in the desert, in the pitch darkness of a tent next to his daughter, using his cell phone to highlight the text - each brief illumination of the phone's screen enough time for him to read just one line, after which he'd lie there and repeat the phrase again and again, before pressing the keypad once more to find the next part. Piece by piece, the whole emerging, in green insomniac light, and silent repetition.

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A friend wrote:

The meeting was a little strange, they all seemed to be really tired and half ill from all the work..

(The idea of traveling far to a meeting and on arrival finding the place very odd – the people pale, listless, the windows shut. The managing director comes out briefly but the light seems to hurt his eyes. The presentations by his underlings are nervous, distracted, unfocused. On leaving the traveller sees that the secretary has fallen asleep at her typwriter table.)

(Thinking for some reason of Herzog's Heart of Glass with all the hypnotized performers.)

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Excerpt from forthcoming M.E. Smith autobiography Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith at The Guardian here. No doubt The Fall are the greatest band since war-time living memory etc, and as lyricist/all round difficult bastard Smith has few rivals. Perhaps because he long ago applied the cut-up technique to his own brain means that as an interview subject - or here as supposedly relaible/ 'realistic' self-portrait artist - he's not always as sharp or as insightful as his persona/s. Might trust Roman Totale's version more than this one. Some great touches though, esp Smith's childhood game 'Japanese Prisoner of War Camp'.

Vlatka and I are showing our collaboration To Bring Down a House at Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, from April 12th - May 31st. It's a part HOME WORKS IV: A FORUM ON CULTURAL PRACTICESwhich includes exhibitions, lectures, panels, dance, performances, film and video screenings, and publications. Sfeir-Semler is open 11am - 7pm. Closes on Sundays and Mondays.

Starting as an almost bare space, the room for To Bring Down a House is slowly growing into an unruly archive of proposals - some simple and enactable; others more far-fetched, absurd and playful - all suggesting different ways to destroy, attack, or otherwise 'bring down' a house; ways of destroying it, hauting it, making it unhomely. As an installation the piece is 'performed' or animated from a distance, as Vlatka (from New York) and me (from Sheffield, Vienna, Essen etc according to my ludicrous travel schedule) continually send new material by fax and email to be added to the work. The installation changes daily as more than a hundred collages, drawings, instructions and texts are added over the course of the exhibition, pinned to the walls by gallery staff. A couple of the new collages I've done are included above. I'm really liking a certain scrappy devi-may-care photoshop approach - more an attitude than a techique! I love the scraps of random background/noise copy-pasted by accident and repeated/left in place in the second image for example.

To Bring Down a House in Beirut is a new incarnation of a project originally created for the Protections exhibition in Kunsthaus Graz, fall 2006.

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Coming soon. Jim Fletcher and I are heading to Vienna on Saturday where we present the work-in-progress/monologue piece Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First which I wrote about briefly here and here. Performance is at TQW/Halle G on Saturday night at 20.30, full details are here. The performance is preceded by a video screening I've organised including great work from Vlatka, Jakup Ferri, Neil Goldberg, Mladen Stilinovic, Ivan Moudov and Anna Witt.