C. M. Burroughs — My home having come to this

Process Note

I kept circling Shklovsky's warning that "Habitualization devours" what we think we're seeing, until perception turns into autopilot... so I decided to play with the music and the subtitles here.

Shklovsky's line—art exists "to make the stone stony"—is basically my design brief. I'm trying to keep the gap between what you hear and what you read from collapsing into a single, easy sense. Not an "equivalent," not a seamless overlay. I loved this piece and C.M. Burroughs reading she sent because it felt so intimate. I turned up the reading and you hear those single strident cords for the opening? I held the reader's eye on the images to try to bring to mind what I felt when I read it. There is a variance in the "textual" overlay in this one as well, a break in the expected that, I hope keeps a reader entranced.

Shklovsky defines the technique as making objects "unfamiliar," to "increase the difficulty and length of perception," because "the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself."

In practice: I delayed the reading with the sonic cords, I also delayed the or re-ordered what was "said" and what was displayed so the typeface becomes part of the project and not a "habituated", regular-old subtitle play.