Premonitions following a weekend speech
Consciousness. Magic. Language. Romance.
Birmingham Design Festival you were bostin. Thanks so much to everyone who came to my talk and asked such insightful questions afterwards. Sometimes you can spend half an hour talking about writing, time and consciousness … and then the questions afterwards are mundanities about how to deal with clients. At Birmingham the crowd was trippier than I was.
The slide posted below is something I mentioned early on in the talk. A way of looking at different types of writing. A few people highlighted in various drinking dens over the three days that it was something they hadn’t considered before.
The point of the slide was that we so often think of writing as a ‘thing’. We talk about a ‘piece of writing’ and – certainly in commercial spheres – regard writing for headlines (by which I mean ads such as my Design Museum piece below) as being the same as longer form writing.
Instead I think it’s the time someone takes to *read* a type of writing as being the primary factor we should consider. The consciousness experience one has over three seconds is radically different to what it can be over three minutes.
The blue highlight on the slide is to indicate my personal sweet spot. Poetry and commercial writing that takes someone on a temporal journey of between 45 seconds and three minutes. Ups and downs of emotions, continual refocussing of conscious attention, fireworks of qualia inducing sentences.
Thinking about time. In the mid-90s it was the 100th anniversary of cinema. Forty directors were invited to create a short film using an original Lumière camera. It could only be 55 seconds long (that was the amount of film stock it could hold), it had to be a single, continuous shot and they were only allowed three takes to try and get it.
Ingeniously David Lynch built a box around the camera so he could open and shut doors, giving the appearance of cuts even though the 55 second film below – Premonitions Following an Evil Deed – is a single shot.
I have an idea for a film by the way. If you have money, equipment or a chain of art house cinemas, get in touch. It’s about four minutes long.
Another thing I presented at Birmingham was a breakdown of a poem. I did the breakdown first, before showing the poem, which seemed to work. In literary discussion we’re often hit with a piece of poetry and then made to feel stupid because the subsequent exploration reveals all the things we didn’t notice.
Temporal breakdown below. The poem is about Lucifer, having been cast out of heaven and now moping around in hell, really missing God’s eyes. Not sure it’s strictly biblical but in my poem our fallen angel has a *massive* crush on the big beginning-and-the-end. It’s called Rue the dire event, a line from Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The breakdown explains how I mapped out the temporal experience I want people to have. We start with some ambiguity, move on to prettiness, music and beauty, before coming across a few unsettling words to foreshadow the traditionally dark second act. A brief respite to lull us into a false sense of security before ending on a note of horrid.
The poem is at the bottom.
I don’t usually write taglines. Not sure I believe in them. But the gnomic nature of my ‘Sculpture doesn’t do. Sculpture is.’ has been getting some love from a few people recently. Maybe the koan should be a guiding influence for more brand writing, rather than spree killer’s last words?
I have one A3 version of this poster to give away to a reader. The best invented corporate koan posted in the comments of this post by the end of the week wins …
I felt that last stanza in my solar plexus