Unnecessary Roughness

‘Unnecessary Roughness’ was a project combining two parallel streams of writing - a series of found poems by Lizzy, made from commentary from the NFL 2018 season, and a series of passages written by David in response to the poems. The text focuses on themes of violence and masculinity, and the differing perceptions of rules and boundaries involved with these things.

For the podcast episode we recorded computer-generated voice software ‘reading’ Lizzy’s found poems, and David reading his text. These readings were interwoven with clips of NFL game commentary. The episode was released in two versions - Part 1 included a condensed version of the audio/text, and Part 2 featured the full version.

To accompany the podcast episode we produced a spiral-bound ‘playbook’, featuring the text, alongside images of American football play diagrams.