A fitful but fruitful night. Several ideas regarding the construction of exhibition works presented themselves. As importantly, I now better understand what not to do and what cannot be done well within the constraints of the time-frame for completion. I’m also, as a consequence, more aware that this forthcoming exhibition represents a conclusion. The proposition that I first considered in 1999 has, now, been more than adequately explored. The future inquiry into Bible-text translation will be in the direction of sound, and that alone. Which leaves my visual practice looking for something else to do. As one electric guitarist sagely put it: ‘An end is a beginning’. One thing is clear, I want to execute images more quickly — to narrow the temporal gulf between conception and realisation. Another thing is far less clear, but beckons: the images must proceed from my engagement with sound.

9.00 am. I wrote an impromptu A4 description, and requested at the eleventh hour by the university’s Director of Postgraduate Studies, outlining viva arrangements for our PhD degrees. 10.00 am. On with the first of today’s two verses: Matt. 19.24. In the middle distance, I began processing files of all the podcasts from Art/Sound with a view to compressing them, temporally, into a one-minute compendium representing the entire sound profile of the module up until the final lecture. This will be an appropriate finale, one that encapsulates a number of the salient sound processes described in the lectures. I anticipate that the compression process will take a whole day to finalise. The total file size is over 20 GB:

The piece will be called ‘Revision’. This suggests the idea that the original material has been changed, as a result of the process of recomposition and re-presentation, in order to be studied again. By lunchtime, the second verse of the day was complete. Four more to undertake before I reach the end of the verso page.

1.30 pm. I reviewed materials prepared for tomorrow’s REF monitoring meeting before opening the folder of a project that I’d begun a few years ago, to which I never conceived a resolution. The technique of vertically stretching words, deployed in The Floating Bible project, could be applied to the individual Greek letters that make up the text on which the former project is based: (King James Version: ‘Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand’ (Gal. 6.11)):

Sometimes, one has to wait very patiently for an answer. Often it comes at precisely the right time. And that is now. All forty two characters required equalizing for contrast and tone.

3.30 pm. Attendance at our last parents/ teachers meeting at the local secondary school. 4.30 pm. Back to letter recalibration (phase 2) and sundry correspondence. 6.15 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. I returned to the final Art/Sound PowerPoint, in the hope of getting most of it finished by the end of the evening. Almost …