Nothing to report tonight. Actually lots to report, but I’m going to leave this video rendering overnight, check the audio in the morning and then I’ll post it online for you to see, you unidentified second person you.
I found a shop selling tennis balls, and bought a couple of squash balls, shuttlecocks and ping pong balls too for good measure. They were helpful — the ping pong balls in particular because of the way they ping against the wall. But as I was editing the ping pong video I flicked through some previous videos and found the tea strainer did better things than the ping pong ball. It rearranged itself in flight; it was shocked when it hit the surface; it had a complex outline that kept changing. I’d wanted to try the setup using a ball because I thought its formal simplicity would be a good thing; turns out something was lost.
So I threw other things at the wall instead. I’m hoping to get the new video up by around lunchtime. In the meantime, this picture’s a CLUE.
Tomorrow I’m buying tennis balls, flour and black paper.
My studio’s come over all symmetrical. I got lights today and a tripod, and a projector now I come to think of it.
This afternoong after an unexpected walk to the station carrying a large cardboard box and feeling a bit disreputable in crumply painty trousers (a long story), I did some good things in the studio.
I’ve been watching the projector and the throw of its light, and imagining the pencil throwing marks onto the page in the way the projector throws light onto the screen. I’ve been trying projecting onto A4 or A3 paper, sometimes with the paper vertically held 4-5″ from the wall, and I want to see how I can emphasize the throw of the projector — and its relationship to drawing — through the video it projects.
I spent a couple of hours throwing things at the wall and filming them, sometimes in slow motion. Here’s an example below. The tea strainer’s just a practicality, to see how this kind of thing works on camera. I chose it because it’s small, round, unbreakable and in the studio. Really I’m interested in things that leave marks on the page – I tried some pencils but they came out overexposed because I was holding them immediately in front of the lens and dropping them from there. I’m hoping to remedy that tomorrow.
Still haven’t been up to see that castle on the hill. I keep nearly going (I’ve found out what tram you need: the Number 50) then have some bright idea and want to try it out straight away in the studio. One of these days.
Finished.
At 3am this morning, but finished nevertheless.
A couple of striking things emerged while I was writing. First, it turns out I really am more productive in the early hours of the morning. It’s happened three nights in a row now. There’s a phase of sleepiness around eleven, but by half one something kicks in (alarm? despair?) and my brain cuts straight through all the nonsense, looks brightly at the matter in hand, and networks of ideas and observations begin to fit together in ways that are worth writing down and keeping. Hence finishing at three.
That’s one thing. The other is that my writing tends to get tight. I do it on purpose a lot of the time: I knot words together across paragraphs so that when they recur they tug at their previous contexts and their thickness builds up. It makes a lot of sense to me to write like this: you end up with a text that’s heavy with thought. Trouble is it’s heavy. It isn’t always a pleasure to read, or it’s hard to read, or it takes a couple of readings to enjoy. For most contexts, this is no good. Meanwhile some of the clearest and most engaging passages among my drafts for this article were written fairly swiftly and spontaneously, without too much thought of which words might be tugging at what. And I think this is the kind of writing I tend to do early in the morning..
So, the two things are connected are they. Perhaps in the early morning I’m so tired and so in need of getting words together that I let them loose to roam a bit. I let them go poking around the matter in hand to see what comes up, and I just note down what they report back. It’s a nicer process; more openly connected to the whatever it is I’m writing about, rather than connected in to itself.
The thing to do would be to get this kind of work happening at more reasonable times of the day, so I don’t have to sleep in til almost lunchtime.
Anyway, the thing’s done. No more writing for a while. Tomorrow I’m borrowing a projector and a couple of lamps, and I’m going to see how these videos I’m making look on the surface of the wall.
I’m trying to finish this article and I keep thinking about how you put up tents. You lay the whole thing out flat on the ground so it’s more or less in the right shape, then you can get it standing, and then once it’s up you have to go round again tensioning all the pegs and lines until there’s no slack.
The trouble is I’m still laying out bits of my article on the ground this evening while other bits are quite nicely driven in with pegs. I’m hoping to get the whole thing up before bed tonight, then tomorrow morning I can go round tightening everything and checking the lines are taut. There are certain tensions I want to string up between words and images that recur in different sections of the text. The article would stay together without them, but it’d be a bit saggy.
There. An extended metaphor.
I’m exhausted tonight. All of us in the studios have had unproductive days for some reason, not for want of trying. It’s horrible being stuck at my computer when there’s all of Linz to explore. Once this article’s out the way I’m going to go up the hill I can see from my studio window and visit the castle at the very top. Apparently there’s some kind of grotto up there, and a train.
