You Always Know When You're Being Watched is a story influenced by Surrealism, Dada, and the Beats, with art influenced by Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and 60s Underground Comix.
The story began in 1980 as a short experiment in writing by choosing random words from a dictionary. The story was about four typewritten pages in length, had no title, and was almost incomprehensible. It was immediately placed in a binder and forgotten.
The story lay dormant and almost forgotten until about 1990 when it was resurrected and used to test an OCR software application I was considering buying. The digital text was only about 90% accurate and I decided to see how long it would take to fix. As I corrected the text I found myself starting to edit it, correcting some grammar and making a few changes so that it would read a little better. I was starting to see some possibilities for it but didn't pursue them at that time.
The digital text was archived and remained unused until 1994 when I was looking for some text to use in some images that I was creating. Several paragraphs were pulled from the text and added to the images. The results were interesting and I was beginning to see the possibilities of combining the text with abstract images. One of the images was titled "Somehow You Always Know When Someone Is Watching You" and I adopted this as the title for the text. Sadly these early images were lost when a hard drive crashed, and the project stalled for several years.
When my web site, tomruley.com, came online in 1996 I began to look at past projects for content that I could use on the web. "Somehow You Always Know When Someone Is Watching You" was not really what I had in mind, but it brought it back to my attention as I searched my archives.
Around this time I was using a QuarkXPress Xtension that generated nonsense text for mock-ups of design work I was doing for commercial clients. This Xtension randomly picked words from lists of nouns and verbs to form simple sentences. I was amazed by how many people wanted to read this text, even though after the first few lines it was clearly very repetitive nonsense. One corporate manager even had me sit quietly and wait while she read eight pages of babble. This made me to think of "Somehow You Always Know When Someone Is Watching You" and to consider developing it. I spent an evening doing some additional editing and rewrote one section that I thought was overly offensive. I then asked several friends to read it, but then tried to stop them after the first page. All of them insisted on reading the whole thing.
After additional editing, "Somehow You Always Know When Someone Is Watching You" was combined with ten images and place on my web site in 1997. It remained there for about a year until I decided that it needed a lot of additional work and removed it.
As it turned out that I did not get back to working on it for almost four years. In 2002 I decided to that a complete reworking was in order. This included not just editing and new images but a complete rewrite based on entirely new concepts of what it was to be. At this time the name changed to "You Always Know When You're Being Watched." I decided to break the text into four line verses, as this worked well when using it in images. I added a bit to the text and it grew from 54 verses to 72 verses. Although I now used a computerized random word generator, I was much more selective and in the words I chose. At that time I was also thinking about the possibility of a nonlinear story, where the reader could choose how the story was told. Based on a compass, each frame offered eight possible directions the reader could go. This version went online in 2003 and remained online until 2005.
I continued working on "You Always Know When You're Being Watched" and it continued to grow and evolve. As the text grew from 72 verses to over 150 (with still more in the works) I decided to break it into 64 verse sections, of which "You Always Know When You're Being Watched" is part one. A completely new set of images has been created for this version to go with the completely revised text. This version came online in January 2006 as part of the tenth anniversary of my web site. The story has returned to a linear form, however the influence of the nonlinear version can be seen in the "Random" link. I hope to have part two, "Tonight Your Dreams are Sponsored by Exxon," online later this year.
I hope you find this project interesting, or at least amusing, it seems to have a life of its own, and just doesn't want to die.
