Like many, Tim Youd ’89 goes to work and types at a desk. However, the desk varies depending on the state or country he’s in, and when he types, it’s not on a desktop or the newest MacBook: It’s on a typewriter, technology of the past that proves instrumental to his work.
He’s two-thirds through his ambitious “100 Novels” project, a years long creative endeavor in which he retypes beloved, controversial and groundbreaking novels as performance art over the course of numerous days on the same model typewriters on which they were originally created. Each novel is retyped on a single sheet of paper, backed by a second sheet, which together are repeatedly run through the typewriter. By the end, one sheet is near-battered and often torn, having been typed on for hundreds of pages, and the other likely stained with ink that bled through the top page. The two are presented side by side as a diptych, mirroring an open book.
