FOR an all-too-brief, child-free hour last weekend, I was a servile poet.

In a plain room plastered with posters bearing slogans like "You will not question authority" and "You are here to work", I sat with 10 other red boiler-suited workers in front of rows of retro manual typewriters.

As part of a performance art exercise, we cranked out poems for customers who would supply a mandatory word to get our creative juices flowing.

We also donned headphones which delivered doses of live noise-art by local musicians.

I am happy to report that I was a most model worker. I pounded on my typewriter keys so hard that the Olympia machine almost leapt suicidally off my desk.

I murdered the English language with weird punctuation, severed it with unconventional line breaks and maimed it with witticisms that I suspect were funny only to me.

By the end of my shift, I had churned out six poems. I could have worked more shifts but, as reminded by a concerned factory colleague, I had a toddler at home who needed me.

Meanwhile, the young woman sitting next to me was hitting the vodka bottle a little too often and getting progressively more drunk.

I think I would have made a very horrible proletarian. The kind who would claw for every productivity medal given out by party leaders and squeal on comrades for the smallest transgressions just to get ahead.

Luckily then that the poetry factory I was in was merely for art. It was great fun, though; the frivolity of the enterprise undercutting the mock-serious Communist setting deliciously.

A friend arrived to buy a poem from me and I promptly typed up the ingredients list of my canned drink for her.

Then we were off to catch the 1966 British-Italian cult-film, Blow-Up, at a National Museum screening.

Blow-Up is about a murder, that may or may not have occurred in a park, that may or may not have been captured on film by a selfish and arrogant photographer.

It is, as some critics have pointed out, about the chasm between memory and reality; the unreliability of signs and perception.

Break it down even further, and the film is read as a commentary on how random elements - like the bromide molecules or pixels in a photograph - can be arranged into some kind of narrative.

Sort of like how 1,000 monkeys bashing away at 1,000 typewriters can come up with a Shakespearean masterpiece after 1,000 years - theoretically.

And so, in a random manner, I hobble tomy point: That everybody needs some random act of nonsense in their lives sometimes.

Make something up. Escape into the silly depths of your imagination.

Get mired in one mode of being, one type of reality, and you might as well be a robot or cog in a gigantic wheel.

And that's something the artists understood to be horrible - be it in 1966 or 2008.

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