Undertime
A study in footnotes

 

Useful notes from the writer, for the reader:

On context:
In the winter of 2019 I took three visits to the underpass beneath the Mancunian way. My hope being, that its architecture could act as a visual aid, helping me to consider theorems I had been considering on the subject of time. During each visit, I took an audio recording. These recordings were only intended for personal use, a way for me to document encounters and observations with immediacy and efficiency. However, after relistening it occurred to me the audio files were literal illustrations of duration; the length of a recording denoting the length of my stay within the underpass.

On content:
After realising the temporal, diagrammatic qualities of these recordings I decided to transcribe them. The aim being to obtain a visual depiction of my visits. The bulk of the text you will find within this book consist of these these transcripts; quite unapologetically tangential, casual and stilted. 

On form:
For the transcripts to remain illustrative, as well as textual, it felt important they should somehow accurately replicate the experience of the audio. Consequently, I have used line breaks to indicate breaks in speech, spaces between lines to indicate pause and hesitation. It’s my hope that by disrupting the text this way, dragging the readers eye down the page, it injects some of the time-based experience back into the writing.
I felt the form of the writing should also reflect its criticality of presentations of linear time. Uninterrupted, flowing prose would do nothing to communicate the a real experience of living within time. This is where the tool of the footnotes became invaluable. Use of footnotes allowed me to push and pull the reader’s attention; switching from spacious, drawling train of thought, to dense edited composition and back again. I wanted to emulate the way that thoughts are nonlinear, running away with one another, in parallel, at different speeds and frequencies. The footnotes generated a conversation within the text, creating differing experiences and realities for the reader to be tossed between.

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The final, most important indication of time is that spent by the reader. It is your interaction that activates the text, your time that makes it real.

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I hope you enjoy.