Feeling inspired and even a little intimidated by the breadth and depth of yesterday evening’s presentations. The evident scale of imagination and the commitment to practice led me once more to wonder how long I can continue as artist and educator. I think that the difficulty is the ’and’ rather than either ’artist’ or ’educator’. Currently I am trying to be two distinct things at the same time – or at least in the same week (and by currently I mean in my day-to-day life in Sweden). I want to change this and I feel that I am on the way to doing so – this residency being a part of that change. That is perhaps why already the experience of being here seems so important. I am being reminded of what being an artist is.
I am writing these sentences to make sense of my jumbled thoughts and almost as soon as a sentence begins to form in my mind and on the page I start to edit it – consciously re-writing from (and in) a positive position. I say page, but I am typing on my laptop and the words on the screen. The delete key erases the words. If I were writing in pen on paper I would cross the words out and there would be visible traces of how I am shifting things. On screen is the result of thinking and writing rather than the process of thinking and writing. I rarely if ever use the strike-through function that sits quietly beside the b, i, and u functions – what is a keyboard shortcut for strike-through? The others I know by heart.
The morning’s workshop, the second with John, made me realise how result driven I am. The task is to create a game and I feel myself wanting to see things take shape … things are not taking shape. As a participant … collaborator(?) … how much to I voice my needs, how do I find a place for my needs in the evolving collaboration, how much do I let go of my needs? What is my contribution, and what is my contribution’s relation to other contributions?
I made two very concrete contributions/suggestions: the game should incorporate as much as possible, and each of us should ask a friend/contact to send us an instruction. We now have 20 instructions that range from the abstract to the specific.
What do I take from yesterday – both the workshop and the presentations? The importance of acknowledging process … truth to process … truth of process … truth in process(?).
