"The flow of ideas flashes directly on screen. No need to ponder or sit on an idea - capture it on the fly! But the honeymoon fades and the dark side of computing descends upon you. The romance with computers shows its pathological aspects: mindless productivity and increased stress. Your prose now reads - well - differently. You no longer formulate thoughts carefully before you write. You think on screen. "Partially I think he is absolutely right, but I wonder whether this means the end of spiritual honeymoon and leads eventually in mental poverty. I also wonder whether he thinks on screen or whether he thinks that other people think that he thinks on screen, and where and how he determines the difference between the value of thoughts arising from paper or from the screen. Before I was thinking on the screen I was thinking on paper. I was doing exactly the same think as I do now. I wrote, I read it over, I cut the sentences out that I didn't like, I rewrote them, I chopped whatever I felt wasn't fitting, kept the sentences in stock, kept quotes in stock, I lined up the paper and then I put everything with sticky tape or glue stick together. I worked on huge pieces of paper to create small texts. I created these handwritten manuscripts that I would sell as drawings today if I still owned them. I would work from a first layer my way up to a multilayered text. I'd take transparent paper (butterbrotpapier) tape it over my text and put outcut sentences over the ones that I had doubt to use. I cut the sentences apart and put new sentences to paste into the old ones. When I was ready I usually had five or six layers of paper and then had to go to my mother to get it typed or I read everything loudly on a tape recorder and sent her the tape. It was a complicated way and when I got the typed pages I wanted so many things to change, sort of shocked about the sudden presence of a text, broken apart in groups of letters, that I once had written and now was supposed to be and looked official. My palimpsest sculpture was suddenly a flat text and it often felt banal upon the first shock.
Writing a text took me weeks and I am not quite sure whether the things were better. Maybe, they were a little more profound but the English language has such a huge expectation of clarity, that I think my products would have been untranslatable, just because they were so German.
Fortsetzung folgt...to be continued tomorrow