Tim Youd retypes novels live at the Atlanta Contemporary

Visual and performance artist Tim Youd is on a mission to retype 100 novels across the United States and parts of Europe. He doesn’t do this on a computer but on a typewriter. After he’s finished, he turns the pages into works of art. He’ll soon finish retyping Tayari Jones’ “An American Marriage,” making it his 82nd retyped novel.

Youd opened up to “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes in a recent interview about his creative process. “What I’m really trying to do is be a good reader, and so anything that I retype, I’ve read at least once before,” he said. “I marry that to the idea of the literary pilgrimage, and I go to locations that are somehow related to either the novel itself or to the author’s life or to the setting… something along those lines.”

His experience typing out novels has changed over the years, as has his goal with the project. Youd shared that “The evolution [for him] internally has been, ‘Hey, I started out retyping novels that I grew up with as a young man. And now I’m retyping novels that are expanding my worldview.’ It’s been a purposeful evolution on some level, but also just this accidental kind of journey that’s led me into some new territory.”