Week

by Alex Hetherington, 7 Feb 2008

It’s been a week of extremes as we keep ploughing through what I am beginning to see as the tiers of bureaucracy that you might come to expect on these kinds of projects. I am now wearing an I Am Not An Arts Officer badge, just to keep in mind of the ‘audience’ that we are not employed to be substitute arts officers but indeed artists who need all the time here to research, develop and make work.

I am writing this between times when I am rendering out pieces of edits from Olga. The Mac is ultra-fast and the clip is already made, before I even reached the end of this sentence.

Yesterday was a low point as the woman I was due to meet for the live Olga part didn’t turn up for our meeting in Edinburgh. And I am now thinking of just doing the physical part with Janie and the voice over with Lisa, so I gave Lisa the script this morning and hope she likes what she reads. I need a black box to film our mime of the work, so I need to discuss using a theatre or drama space somewhere in Falkirk unless that doesn’t exist and we have to do it in Glasgow. The other issue revealing itself is how much we have to organize here in addition to making work. I guess we’ll have to keep on with this ploughing act until we demonstrate that the continuity on the project is beginning to slip.

Janie is sighing deeply. We are in a container that has come to this place from another time. And now we see our software as a new emerging void. It’s like that weird camera action they use in horror movies where the background seems to begin to move backwards, the central character moving forward. Except it’s the other way round. Time is disappearing because we spend too much time with pink slips. The honeymoon is truly over.