ELEVEN MINUTE PAINTING. READING MODULE v.0.1: by Tan Lin. (dub vers.) A SIDE. What are the non-forms a reading might take and what are the forms a non-reading might take? Poetry equals wallpaper. Novel equals design objects. Text as ambient soundtrack? Dew Champ wanted to create works of art that were non-retinal? It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be look at like placemats. The most exasperating thing at a poetry reading is always the sound of a poet reading. The poem you are about to see, dub version, is executed in Director and plays independently of any intuited reading [voice] practices. It takes place in real time, and like a feedback loop it is different each time it is played. The poem you are reading is in b/w, because b/w is more soothing than color. Half way through, a color randomizer has been utilized to provide a greater sense of visual permutation, change and pleasure. One word, then another, and finally a third follow each other in a kind of slow-motion, time-lapse photography. B SIDE. Poems to be looked at vs. poems to be read vs. painting to be sequenced vs. painting to be sampled. Everything that is beautiful is a code for something that is already known. Nothing should be unknown. The program [ ] code you are watching generates 16.7 million different shade of color backgrounds. Some of these are suggestive. One of them functions in place of memory. Memory cannot be sequenced. Memory is usually non-designed. You are about to enter: Three rooms. Mirror balls. Roving wallpaper. Disco. Home furnishing. Lifestyle. Getting up [ ] and having a drink. Of course, in some novelistic vein, sequencing is highly absorptive, and so at subliminal i.e. non-designed levels, the sequencing allows reading itself to become [bracketed] hypnotic, and [mesmerizing.] The problem with most poetry, like most design and architecture is that it is a little too bourgeois. For this reason, the poem should never be turned off. Like a thermostat, it should regulate the room’s energies. This allows the piece to constantly erase itself. As we all know, poetry should aspire not to the condition of music but to the condition of relaxation and yoga. A lot of people think great poems should be memorized. As anyone who has ever read a poem will tell you poems, are most beautiful [and least egotistical] at the exact moment in which they are forgotten like disco and other Four on the Floor Productions. Each sequence or sentence, i.e. word set, runs 7.2 seconds or the amount of time it takes to pronounce each word, one word at a time. 7 is generally thought to be the number of things the human brain can readily remember. George Muller did pioneering studies on this and his theory is called Muller’s Number Seven. Hence most phone numbers are seven digits in length. 7.2 seconds is hopefully just long enough to get reader/viewer into a groove. It might suggest a strobe light going off at timed intervals. The interval can be beautiful because the interval can be dubbed relaxation like non-designed home decor, has no real bounds. It supplements that thing known as real life. That is why it is so pleasurable to read. Someone (I think) said the time for poem written with words and the era of reading poems with feeling in them is long gone. Today, no poem should be written to be read and the best form of poetry would all our feelings disappear the moment we were having them. This sequence of ‘events” constitutes a code more uncrackable and soothing than anything we could actually see. “Painting to be read” ≠ “poems to be looked at.” A beautiful poem should re-write itself one-half word at a time in predetermined intervals, with their numerous circuit boards, televisions and computers do this; together, they enhance the micro production and sequencing of feelings and heretofore thought, inaccessible or purely entropic. If all poems could just be codes projected onto a wall, those names(accessories) for things canceling the wall would be more beautiful than anything we could feel. Nothing that is negative is simple. Everything that is artificial is related to everything else in the room.