2019
Live Word Processing is a performance technique in which pieces of animated text and short videos are dragged into a word document in which the performer is actively writing out a prepared text before an audience. The microphone is on the keyboard, providing a rhythmic sound track, and the text is occasionally punctuated by gestures and facial expressions inspired by the physical vernacular of miming. Multiple compositions converge, as one poem takes up a spatial relationship to another. Two forms of writing are simultaneously conveyed—one spontaneous and improvised, the other premeditated and looped.
The unstable basis underscores the subjective nature of language. Address as an implicit component of composition. The language shifts its address, operating outside the restrictions of the page to become something like a textual film. John Cayley, a theorist of experimental digital literature, characterizes the writing process as between image and language, a text caught in the act of appearing. Live Word Processing has been performed in New York as part of Baby Castle’s Wordhack installed, at Brown University’s Granoff Center and at the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2019 exhibit at the Glucksman gallery in Cork, Ireland.