Today I am treating field recording as performance. The performance is that nothing happens.

I am spending the day living my suburban life in a hum drum manner. Breakfast, admin, a possible walk to the shop, the kettle, the bins. The recorder runs from the moment I get up until I go to bed. No starting and stopping at the interesting bits. One continuous take of an ordinary Saturday.

Nobody is watching this performance

Performance art usually wants a room and some people in it. This has neither. No poster, no door charge, no audience. If a neighbour clocks me at all, they see a man with microphones attached to him shuffling down the corridor.

That suits me. A performance with a crowd in front of it turns into an image of itself, and then the image is the work. This one has a microphone, and a microphone cannot applaud.

The recorder changes me, and I am leaving that in

I am not going to pretend the day is untouched. Knowing the machine is on makes me self conscious. I close a cupboard door with more care than I would. I hear my own footsteps and correct them.

That is part of the piece. There will be a gap between an ordinary day and my performance of an ordinary day, and it will be audible. Being normal on purpose is a task you fail at all day long.

One stick, one buyer

At the end I will master the recording and put it on a USB stick. One stick. An edition of one.

No download, no stream, no page with a play counter on it. Whoever buys it owns the object and the recording together, and nobody else has heard either.

I am not keeping a copy

This is the part I keep turning over. When the stick goes, my Saturday goes with it. No backup on the hard drive, no safety copy in a folder called masters.

Someone will own the only record of a day I lived, and I will never hear it back. I keep my memory of the day, which is a much worse recording and the only one left to me.

Why bother

Because most of what I am sold is a record of an event rather than the event. Debord got there first and said it better. I would rather make one object that behaves like the day it came from: it happens once, then it is gone, and you had to be there or you missed it.

The difference is that this time you can buy being there, after the fact, from a man with microphones attached to him shuffling down the corridor..

If you have made anything like this, or you think it is a daft way to spend a Saturday, leave me a comment. I would like to know someone read this before the stick leaves the house.