It was good being back at Kettle’s Yard for another concert with Tom Hall, Richard Hoadley and Katharine Norman. This time the theme was Luddites and ‘Framebreaking‘.
For my piece ‘Bookmachine’ I took the phrase ‘a book is a machine to think with’ from I.A. Richards literally, using the book to make machine noises with my nails and a bic.
In a Luddite spirit the book was then attacked (with my Mum and Dad’s breadknife, a hole punch and some selotape). Mmmm, selotape makes a nice noise.
Andrew Nightingale helped out by typing phrases from Richards into the Speech programme (running on a ‘Beeb’ emulator). We also used the Mac’s inbuilt text speaker to read out extracts from the advertising for print-on-demand bookmachines. This text was perverted in amusing ways.
The third source text was from A Thousand Plateaus. I still don’t understand this theory but it did lead me into some useful ideas for gestures, for example trying to speak while covering my mouth with torn out pages.
I enjoyed this performance though afterwards several people said how worried they’d been that I was about to cut my fingers off.
Jussi has written a nice rambly review of it on his Machinology blog. Hopefully I’ll have an mp3 up here before too long.
May 11, 2010 at 7:12 am |
It was a wonderful concert and you’re right – sellotape makes a great noise (as did the stapler / hole punch). I took a bunch of photos and put them on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dumbledad/sets/72157623907216119/ (though there were people there with better cameras taking photos too). Where is the I. A. Richards quote from?
May 11, 2010 at 9:13 am |
Thanks for the pics! I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). “A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive. This book might be better compared to a loom on which it is supposed to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilization.” (opening paragraph)
May 11, 2010 at 7:18 am |
It was a wonderful concert and you’re right – sellotape makes a great noise (as did the stapler / hole punch). I took a bunch of photos and put them on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dumbledad/sets/72157623907216119/ (though there were people there with better cameras taking photos too). Where is the I. A. Richards quote from?
November 17, 2010 at 4:58 am |
[...] Katy has a blog post about this piece at http://katyprice.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/bookmachine/ [...]
January 7, 2011 at 1:15 am |
[...] Katy has a blog post about this piece at http://katyprice.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/bookmachine/ [...]
April 18, 2011 at 10:57 am |
[...] creative writing. Already before you have been interested in your word art (see for instance here) in working with sound, and creative music technologies, but what specifically makes working with [...]