This is my first Edinburgh Festival, and I find myself right in the bubbling middle of it.

I’m doing three things:

1. as part of the Fringe Design Informatics ‘Data Play’ program, my {poem}.py printer will be churning away in the most amazingly designed Pavilion space from 2nd – 26th August, along with a specially curated collection of poem-receipts. Robbie Burns, Jackie Kay, Frightened Rabbit, Hector Nicol and the Proclaimers… they’re all there… In fact as well as the other fantastic data play exhibits, it really is worth popping by just to see the incredibly intricate rope work by Pierre Forissier at Biomorphis and graphics by Peak 15. [free entry 11am-6pm 2nd-26th August, Bayes Courtyard, Potterow]

2. also in the Data Play program is a new piece which I’ve been developing with Edinburgh creative coders/technicians Ray Interactive. The piece is called NEWSPEAK (2019), and involves the whole text of Orwell’s 1984 being shown as a stock market ticker-tape, with the word prices fluctuating according to live data from Google Ads (formally AdWords). The monetised text will be projected from inside the InSpace Gallery on Potterow, and will be visible in the windows there after dark during the course of the Festival. A tally of the ‘price of 1984’ will be displayed in the window too, as well as communicated in social media #whatarewordsworth [free entry – visible from Potterow after dark]

3. as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, I’ll be taking {poem}.py in another different direction. Partners Ray Interactive have developed a voice recognition element to the project – which I have been wanting to do for ages – so we will be testing this out with a group of playwrights, asking them to create stories according to the economic value of the words they speak as they walk through and react to different surroundings. It’s the beginnings of a wider critique of the commodification of spoken language via digital assistants and VOIP. [not public access, but watch this space…]