Using a typewriter, I transcribed the automatically-generated YouTube subtitles from a short film used to train typists during World War II.

For the posterity of this automatic discourse (slowly erased by the “progress” made on this function launched in 2009), I painstakingly followed the original text, disregarding any grammatical and semantic transgressions, up to its erratic line breaks. My only intervention was to cut up the text into strophe-like fragments. During the manual reproduction of a text produced by a machine, the typescript was also submitted to a second layer of error, this time human-generated.

While ostensibly meaningless, the subtitle text is anachronistically contaminated by contemporary geopolitics, with its cryptic references to Obamacare, a pro-Israel lobby, and various Silicon Valley corporations – all of which is punctuated by gleeful nonsense, comically poetic declarations, and a few examples of wordplay worthy of the Marx Brothers.

The Remington Pampered

Performance in collaboration with Maï Ito Delhomme. Écran Voisin, July 2017.

For this reading accompanied by a synthesizer-and-cassette sound piece by Maï Ito Delhomme, I selected excerpts from Basic Typing I: Methods to produce a second typescript that switches between English and (Google-translated) French. The French-language excerpts are read by both performers.

Photo: Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos.

The Remington Pampered

Performance in collaboration with Maï Ito Delhomme. Écran Voisin, July 2017.

For this reading accompanied by a synthesizer-and-cassette sound piece by Maï Ito Delhomme, I selected excerpts from Basic Typing I: Methods to produce a second typescript that switches between English and (Google-translated) French. The French-language excerpts are read by both performers.

Photo: Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos.