This work documents an afternoon’s walk through the town square of Oxford, edited that evening in my apartment. Rather than screening it as a video, I've used it as a score for live performances. As such, the video has been a dependant variable in my research into the poetics at stake in performing (this) video under the historical sign of the Poetry Reading. My initial investigation was into transcription as a means of developing a symbolic parallel to the video (with the attendant ethical friction of what sense data beyond visible and audible language was to be edited into or out of the text). In the first performance of Reading Palm (9.7.05, at Critical Documents - Oxford, Ohio) I read from the typed transcription in the light of the projection, letting the energies of its rhythms feed into my own. A fragment of that performance has been edited back into this version, particularly the moment when I ripped through the typed transcription with my face.

What proved a more sustained investigation was improvising against and in response to the video; this is a mode of engagement I used twice in Buffalo (Dept of Media Study @ SUNY-Buffalo & Rust Belt Books), once at the 2005 Electronic Poetry festival in London, and twice in Oxford. The video’s construction of time is significant regards to performance: I learned that high-speed editing effectively deferred the crystallization of performance habits, since multiple responsive engagements with a text institute regimes of familiarity with it. This claim betrays a romanticism underwriting the occasional development of the improvisation as an ethical momentum. Included below is the fourth Reading Palm improvisation, performed at post_moot (Oxford, April 2006) and filmed by Josh Strauss.

The original version of Reading Palm and a transcription were published January 2007 at Midway (eds Rebecca Weaver et al).

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