Live Word Processing
I am a writer and performing artist who makes work in the intersection of those fields. The physicality of language, its existence in time, and the tension between speech and its documentation are central elements of my work. Fragmented writing, animated writing, and hand-painted texts which reveal traces of the physical through brush-stroke are some ways in which I’ve experimented with considering writing as an image as well as a semiotic code.
My writing has been published in Gulf Coast, Apogee, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Bomb and SF Moma Open Space. I regularly contribute to ArtForum and KQED arts as an arts critic. I am a graduate of the digital language arts MFA program at Brown University where I curated Interrupt V.
website: theadorawalsh.com
Abstract
Live Word Processing is a performance technique in which pieces of prepared animated text and short video are dragged into a plain text document while I simultaneously live-type a semi-improvised essay 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 dance. 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 digital literature, characterizes this performance 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 and at Brown University’s Granoff Center.
Live Word Processing
Live Word Processing is a performance technique in which pieces of prepared animated text and short video are dragged into a plain text document while I simultaneously live-type a semi-improvised essay 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 dance. 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 digital literature, characterizes this performance 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 and at Brown University’s Granoff Center.