Liam Donovan is a PhD Candidate at Queen Mary, University of London and developed a method for a 1930s German typewriter to type directly from a laptop keyboard. So the question was could a poem typed in American type out in real time in central London? Liam tells more… When John approached me with the idea of using the typewriter to type out a poem by Nancy Esposito live from across the Atlantic he hadn't realised that I had found it discarded in Kensington, that it had a German keyboard and that it dated from the period of WWII. He hadn't even seen or (more importantly heard) the typewriter in action, so he didn't know that the charging of the capacitor bank used to power it creates such suspense-filled periods of silence between the surprisingly loud impacts of the solenoids that type the keys. The way the typewriter fitted in with the themes of the event was almost too good to be true. The challenge for me with the event was technical, and not small. The typewriter had never been shown in public before and required a lot of work to get it up to scratch - I spent much time in a small underground windowless workshop, often alone and in the early hours, fiddling with the mechanism and the electronics in a Silent Cacophony all of my own. The night before the event I had to recode the software to transfer Nancy's typing from Boston, with my deliberate but perhaps slightly unwise decision to neither allow Nancy a cursor nor the ability to correct herself with a backspace (which, after all, you don't get when you're typing on a typewriter) almost ruining the day (see Nancy's blog post for that story [click]). But it was all well worth it, and a great feeling to be part of such a powerful and widespread event. My thanks go to John for getting it all together!
Video: PhotograFae and poem read by Alain English
Poem written and typed by Nancy Esposito
Typewriter developed by Liam Donovan 2013