Walking Contención Island was my response to the onset and course of the Covid-19 pandemic in England, specifically to the three periods of lockdown. The work evolved over the 15 months that spanned the start of the first lockdown to the end of the third lockdown. In the first lockdown I created Contención Island – my island of containment – by walking from my home. In the second I walked the shore of my island. In the third I walked to places and recorded the island sounds. I recorded each walk in a sound recording, as a trace on a map and in text, writing a poem a day (using mesostics, haibun, haiku and scripta continua). The text was presented as three scrolls and three scripta continua, each in exhibition laid on the gallery floor. The longest scroll, at 15m and the longest scripta continua, at 17m, effectively divided the gallery space in two. Placing text works on the floor removed the constraints of a support and gave them a physical presence within the gallery space. They become metonymic of the walk(s) in the gallery. To be able to move within the gallery they invite being stepped over in the way that a walker might step a stream or a ditch. Readers were obliged (and free) to see the forms of the letters or read the text, to move across and over, back and forth along the lines, back and forth along the text, and forward and back in time.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Martin.P. Eccles, An example of two days from the first scroll (800x20cm).
2. Martin.P. Eccles, Detail of two scripta continua (1700 x 3cm and 1200 x 3cm), exhibited as Walking Contención Island a 15-hour 34 minute, 3 channel sound installation with six, floor placed, text works presented in The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, during Mycelium (MFA Summer Show), 20th August to 3rd September 2022.
3. Martin.P. Eccles, Composite image of Walking Contención Island a 15 hour 34 minute, 3 channel sound installation with six, floor placed, text works presented in The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, during Mycelium (MFA Summer Show), 20th August to 3rd September 2022.
<< Martin P. Eccles
My practice uses sound and text to present time, distance and movement in the landscape. Whilst sound flows from my body, foregrounding the embodied, the physically experienced, time and motion, it is through my use of text that the integrated play of my senses is distilled. Individual poems tend to be short, condensates of some essence of my act of walking, being in a place and my being in the world. They offer a distillation of my experience, each a momentary crystallisation from hours of walking, offered up to a reader’s imagination. In this sense they step away from the directness of my embodiment to an intellectual consideration of an act or occasion. My text is often a combination of prose and verse. I use a variety of poetic forms – haiku, haibun, mesostic – along with continuous text and these relate to the physical forms that I use to present my texts. I use paged, concertina fold books, scrolls and scripta continua, often placed on the floor of an exhibition space in a way that is metonymic of my movement and that encourages similar movement in an audience.
Evidentment is a poem by the Chilean artist Pía Sommer, based on Catalunya. The poem highlights its graphic and phonic levels. It is possible to conceive it as a concrete poem based on repetition and graphic disposition. The marking of the absent /t/ and the replacing of /e/ by /a/ in the Catalan pronunciation, highlight the reflexive character of the linguistic interfaces within Spanish. What is that so evident and constant for two languages, so similar and tensioned as poetry and music? The instructions and the evident vertical disposition suggest a score or performing-guide function. We didn’t want to obey its structure, but to concentrate on the /t/-absence-presence problem, bringing sound to the foreground. In a sort of mimesis we put in dialogue the /t/s of the voice with the percussive pointillism from the bass strings harmonics. The vocal rhythm smoothed by the strings, equalising it as different graduations of being absent and present. Dialogues and tensions between the languages are translated as the inter-artistic distances between sound poetry and music. The possibilities of instrument sounds being like the voice (because of the different modulatory capabilities) are found here in consonants transients, along with the part of the voice assumed as non-musical (that part that can’t sing, but that is essential for the structure of speech). The poem is a map of evidences: its sonic realisation as a translation from graphic to sound rhythm; an underlying synchrony of the interstices of our practices and instruments.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1.Pía Sommer, Evidentment.
2. Pía Sommer and Federico Eisner, Evidentment, Mataró, Catalunya, July 2021, video
LINK TO – website of collaboration between Federico Eisner and Pía Sommer
<< Federico Eisner-Sagüés
My work is based on my double practice as musician and poet. My interest in sound poetry comes from both traditions - from music composition and its sonic and performative strategies, and from the poetry that have left the page but is inevitable always related to it. In this sense, my musical strategies have a literary affiliation of sound poetry, with its always communicative intention (semantic or not), understanding that the vocal practice of sound poetry has its own history, hybrid and delocalised, but never completely disconnected to the idea of a poem. However, what music does is another thing, because its sonic referent is not linguistic, but aesthetic and conventional, and all that has its limits, traditions and rudiments that have to be known in order to generate new knowledge from them. Sound poetry writing has its own tension, even (more) when there is no such writing: something in sound poetry keeps a deep relation with writing, differentiating it from other arts.
Discovery of Fire is a sound poem of the Uruguayan poet Luis Bravo. The original poem was written by the experimental poet Clemente Padin (1967), and has been set in voice by Bravo since 1989. This one was our first performative collaboration with Bravo, and the most spontaneous. Although the poem itself suggest a fluidity from the asemantic to the word “fire”, it is what turns around the phonic flux of the voice as part of the assemblage that explains this collaboration in particular, rather than the material characteristics of the poem by itself.
The influence from the electric bass looped and passed through effects produces a notorious effect on Luis’s vocal practice, different from the solo practice he is used to. Luis’s voice tends to sing in a certain rearrangement of the phonic material. A segmentation different from that suggested by the text of the poem, accentuating hemistichs (crik crill / ik cris), or separating phonemes according to the pattern of the bass (ignnnis / ignibusss / flAAAmma). This segmentation becomes very noticeable during the first column of the poem. After that, Luis’s voice begins to be released, both due to the characteristics of the second column of the text (less phonetically diverse), and due to the subsequent superimposition of sound layers of the electric bass that begins to blur gradually the initial loop, always present, in permanent flux and rediscovery.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Discovery of Fire/Descubrimiento del Fuego, Clemente Padín, 1967.
2. Discovery of Fire/Descubrimiento del Fuego, Luis Bravo, Federico Eisner, Clemente Padín. 2019, Santiago de Chile, December 2019.
LINK TO – collaborations between Federico Eisner and Luis Bravo
<< C.C. Elian
My work seeks the expansion of literacy to include the ineffable information that we receive from our senses and intuition; this perceptual receptivity is in combination with the conceptual skill of generating information via words.
Literacy is as wonderful as it is limiting, not only from the degree of literacy one achieves but from the way that we must write and read a given system. The specific form of the world's two main writing systems, the Latin alphabet and Asian logograms, each favour the development of one hemisphere over another in our brains.
The standard Latin alphabet sees units as individually meaningful and thus fosters the left hemisphere and its emphasis on individuality and sequential logic, whereas Asian logograms foster holistic perception since these are essentially standardised drawings, and so favour the strengthening of the right hemisphere and its distinct ways of processing in terms of tone and gestalt.
In essence, our writing system's formal demands cause us to prioritize either the relevance information has for the individual (Latin alphabet) or that which it has for the group (logograms.)
The writing systems that I've created either combine the merits of both of these systems (Elian script) or else offer a completely different literary paradigm (the chromatic alphabet).
Both of these enfold the Latin alphabet into another form, each of which is structured as a simple logical system that takes but a few minutes to grasp and from there, can be put to use.
LINK TO – C. C. Elian’s website
LINK TO - Audio interview with art critic Julia Morton.
Elian script is an example of an alternative writing system that I have developed. It is a way for anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet to write in lines and dashes similar to Asian logograms, and thus experience writing words as drawing. In the links below, you can access a downloadable PDF tutorial from my website that enables people to teach themselves the system. Many have done so, and have since posted images and tutorials of their own online (please search for "Elian script" to see what others have done.) There are also links for additional information including a video on the calligraphic potential of this script that is similar to Asian calligraphies, and one on the graphic evolution of the script itself; both are on my website.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. C. C. Elian, Elian Script (video)
LINK TO – Details of the system, a PDF tutorial.
LINK TO – video on the calligraphic potential of Elian script.
LINK TO - Video on the evolution of Elian script: from code to calligraphy.
The Chromatic alphabet is another alternative writing system that I have developed. Its structure is the Latin alphabet distributed over the visible light spectrum and transformed into 26 sections with equal widths of wavelength, starting with the red end. As the wavelength sections progress along the spectrum, the colours naturally change: the letter A is a deep red and Z is violet.
To represent the letters of a word, one can either display the absorption spectrum whereby black lines appear at each letter's corresponding location over the colour spectrum, or else, the emission spectrum whereby each of the letters' locations appear as a vertical line of colour over a black band (examples of each are in the video).
This particular system is ongoing as I look into its application for comparing so-called synonyms, or translations of words. This latter research is particularly interesting given that by the frequency of specific letters in a language the words will tend towards the cooler end of the spectrum (for example, German, with its abundant use of letters from the second half of the alphabet) versus the warmer ones (Spanish or Italian, for example, with their abundance of vowels, most of which occur in the first half of the alphabet).
CREDITS AND LINKS
1.C. C. Elian, Chromatic alphabet (video)
According to Brazilian performer and author Eleonora Fabião, a performative program is a "compositional procedure" or "an engine for experimentation" that comprises actions in a dramaturgical order, assigning and operating with meanings of objects and gestures. A specific program was formatted for this experiment, consisting of a script of language-based games. Language is here understood as a game: a playful, inventive, and social practice, in which individuals are granted agency not only to comply with the rules but also to transform them.
The images in this publication were captured during a video call between two friends, on March 31, 2021. At a certain point, I asked Marcelo to propose images for the camera in response to a list of words. This was a contingent list created by me, under the general theme of “labor.” His propositions should be gestural translations of each term, using only his own body, the space, and, eventually, objects he had at hand. All images were improvised under a strictly limited time. These gesture-scenes, or image-translations, are not intended to be definitive nor complete definitions of the words from my list. On the contrary, they are spontaneous insurrections within the context of that encounter. Instant revelations of the conventions of meaning we embody, added to the inventions and subversions we came up with together in that match of the language game. In summary, this project maps the transitions between saying and showing across images, gestures, and words.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1 - 4. João Emediato (in collaboration with Marcelo Castro), Brief Atlas of Labor, Finland / Brazil, 2021
LINK TO – website for Brief Atlas of Labor
Imagine speaking with somebody else’s tongue in your mouth. A Foreign Tongue is a poetic essay on cultural othering and a migrant's experience. It is also an archive appropriation and an investigation into how we read neighbouring images and how they can be affected by words. The publication reflects the complex power dynamics between aliens and natives. Throughout the pages of the book, images are paired with a recurrent verse structure to illustrate aspects of fear, curiosity, sexualisation, imperialism, estrangement, and empathy. Playing with the ambivalence of the terms, cultural clichés are presented through actual clichés plates, bridging the context of the early printing press technologies to our current ordinary speech. The term cliché was adopted as printers’ jargon to refer to a stereotype, electrotype, cast plate, or block print that could reproduce type or images repeatedly. Later, clichés became expressions, ideas, or elements of artistic work that have become overused to the point of losing their original meaning or effect. Typically pejorative, clichés may or may not be true. Some are stereotypes, but some are simply truisms and facts. All the images used in this publication currently belong to Aalto University's block print archive. These were obsolete and abandoned printing plates, with no reference to their origins, authors, purpose, or context. The project proposes intuitive associations that ignite them with new meanings.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1 – 4. João Emediato, A Foreign Tongue, Finland, 2020
LINK TO – website for A Foreign Tongue
<< João Emediato
With a background in performing arts and visual design, I have come to understand language as the underlying thread that connected my different works and interests. In most of my projects, I am interested in exploring the tension between saying and showing, and how these two verbs can be activated by different narrative strategies. The saying/showing formulation has revealed itself to be a vast source of inspiration concerning the nature of mediation. It renders interpretative practices, devoted to multimodal operations of meaning. It is also keen on challenging the interactions of form and content, playing with context and expectation, speculation and abstraction. This formulation became the pulsating heart of my artistic research, energizing the formulation of different creative procedures. I am usually drawn to repetition procedures, such as collecting, listing, and the appropriation of everyday systems. I am interested in looking at the mundane language habits that make up ordinary life in a way that restores them with value. In my works, language is usually a framework to approach topics such as labor, migration, colonialism, identity, and alterity, exploring ambivalences and disseminating productive disagreements.
LINK TO -João Emediato’s website
<< Kate Fahey
I am a practising artist based between London and Kilkenny. My research based artistic practice broadly concerns forms of knowledge production that interrupt calculative and linguistic logic and is informed by feminist new-materialism. Specifically, my artistic research fits into the context of the feminist reclamations of holes, flows, leaks and pores as a marker of material and bodily agency. I work across a number of media; writing and artist publication, sculpture, print, photography, moving image, sound and digital aided making. In my installations, this manifests as an exploration of the vitality and unruliness of the materials I employ such as metal, wood and glass, along with the voice, text and imagery as technological codes and pixels.
In my work I explore the disruption of language and text through various embodied processes. One previous project, titled If language was a piece of wood, in collaboration with the artist Elisabeth Molin, explored Barthes’ notion of the grain of the voice, through a collaborative reading performance. Another project, titled I could feel that my eyes were open, explored the concept of the stutter as a mode of reconfiguring systems of control and ideologies of seamless interaction between humans and technology through an immersive audio-visual installation. It was produced with the guidance of a speech and language therapist. I also work with artist publication; a recent project titled I could smell the damp rising explored, through riso-printed image and text, the first sounds that emerge from the mouth after long periods of not speaking, the dampness and the dampening of vocal utterances in these occurrences. I see these varied explorations of linguistic interruptions as markers of bodily agency; through my work I understand the mutation of language into non-linguistic vocal utterances as an affirmative mode of embodied unruliness.
1.And out of the vague and limitless body sprang a central mass.
1.2.1 And from its mouth unspeakable things leaked.
1.2.3.2.1. out...into this world...
1.2.3.4.3.2.1. And The stoma moved. The stone moved…..ahem….
1.2.3.4.5.4.3.2.1. moved-Shhhhhhhhhhhh SHHHHHHHHHHHHHssssssssshhhhhhhhhh
1.2.3.4.5.6.5.4.3.2.1. Unbounded. Unfiltered. Unfibbered. I moved down dow- fell into the deep hole.
1.2.3.4.5.6.7.6.5.4.3.2.1. Into the split. Into the- er-ha-AAAAHHHHHH
1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1. tt Mmmm jumped up - Mmmm looked on- Hhhhhaaaaa carried on.
8.Uhhhhh…oowwwww….A dark gap echothrough-uh
8.7.8. spilled out of me words…and again!
8.7.6.7.8. dum dumdum…pushed out-broke-out tunneled
8.7.6.5.6.7.8.leaked..... spillllllll-llllllips....drips...
8.7.6.5.4.5.6.7.8. out of my unstoney face- gObblers
8.7.6.5.4.3.4.5.6.7.8. HnnnnnnNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnNNNNNNNnnnnnnn
8.7.6.5.4.3.2.3.4.5.6.7.8. then- spat
8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.then eeeeeeeee----uuuuuuuu
~
This project’s starting point is An Cloch Labhrais (The Speaking Stone), a huge glacial erratic made from conglomerate puddingstone rock. Located in Co. Waterford in Ireland, it is known as a ‘truth’ telling oracle stone. According to legend, the dramatic crack in the stone occurred after a woman perjured herself in its presence – her untruth causing it to split in two. Mouthnotes reclaims the stone’s split, and reimagines it as a mouth from which a multitude of utterances and un/speakable things leak and spill. In this disorderly form of self-expression, non-conforming vocalisations flow up to her mouth and out through her tongue.1
Through the logic of the the vocal warm-up, the work simultaneously stutters and echoes the order of language, numeracy, and structured behaviour. Breaking away from preconfigured expectations and narratives, mouths and voices separate and reunite, unearthing an imagined enunciation.2 In the work, these plural erratic agencies emerge through a series of sculptural, textual and audio-visual Mouthnotes.
1. Ann Carson, The Gender of Sound in Glass, Irony, and God, (New York: New Directions Books, 2005).
2. Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary, (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
CREDITS
1. Kate Fahey, Mouthnotes (installation image), single channel moving image with stereo sound, 2022.
2. Kate Fahey, Mouthnotes (installation image), single channel moving image with stereo sound, 2022.
3. Kate Fahey, Mouthnotes, 2022.
<< Rob Flint
My practice is led by a distracted curiosity which seems random in the moment, but retrospectively turns out always to be about the appearance (and the experience) of failed connections and missed or re-directed communication.
A neurodivergent diagnosis drives me to explore personal connections to ideas of dysfunction and diversion both at a neural level, and in the world of social experience, where my exaggerated articulacy in one realm is partnered with extreme occlusion in another. Language either fills the gap where the occluded thing should be, or it performs the occlusion.
To better understand this, I want to bring together areas of my practice that occupy different public contexts of art and music. In art/performance contexts I have often used words and text to create grouped choral events that use linguistic form (a spoken text ’score’) to create rhythmic unity in speech and a ritualistic blurring of participant and audience (see link below).
I also have an audiovisual practice more closely associated with musical performance (see link below) Often wordless, this uses media technologies to connect projected light, image, pattern and sound in ways that can properly be called synaesthesic, since they simulate or synthesise causal relations between different sensory modes, exploiting the arbitrary and ephemeral nature of these audiovisual relationships.
Now I want to introduce words into this space, using electronic voice and text to articulate a different ritualised and immersive misdirection of meaning. The term “ideasthesia” helps me here to think about connected concepts as well as perceptions.
As Catherine Malabou has shown, the connection between recombinant media technologies and the emerging neuroscientific recognition of the brain’s capacity for the migration of functions (“plasticity") is not accidental. Although the machine-brain metaphor is often reductive, the experience of the mediated effects of our technologized environment makes it easier to conceptualise our brains activity as a process into which we can intervene and re-wire, just as language intervenes in itself continually through the creation of metaphor.
LINK TO - Chorus (in Practice Sharing I, 2020)
LINK TO - Exploring the Immersive Sonic Through Deep Listening
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Rob Flint, Design Your Own Automated Response.
2. Rob Flint, Live collaboration at Iklecktik Art Lab, London, 2/11/2022.
LINK TO – Design Your Own Automated Response (online)
LINK TO - (excerpt) Live collaboration at Iklecktik Art Lab, London, 2/11/2022
LINK TO - Excerpt from a/v performance at Ealingextranormal 17/12/2022 documentation by Martin Lau.
<< Lynda Gaudreau
My work – which encompasses creation, research, and curatorship – examines the choreographic approach and involves a constant dialogue with writing, visual arts, architecture and cinema.
As an artist-researcher with more than 30 years of practice, I have often felt inadequate when trying to write during the years spent in doctoral seminars, with the feeling of having to address books and ghost authors. An artistic practice generates its own theory, just as it is possible to think while walking. Over the time, I finally opted for writing fictional letters to various individuals—artists, thinkers and characters. I studied how choreographic asynchrony (my research subject) was at play in their artworks.
Asynchrony implies that our perception is disturbed by a detail and operates through movement, whatever the nature of this movement may be. My writing process is based on my choreographic background, inextricably bound to movement, affective qualities and to a strong editorial inclination.
To my surprise, I continue writing letters. I pursued this reflection during my postdoc (2019–2021) and as visiting researcher at the Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Uniarts Helsinki.
LINK TO – Lynda Gaudreau’s website
Second Letter to Balthazar follows the first letter published in Practice Sharing I to the donkey Balthazar of Robert Bresson's film Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). Actually, I had forgotten to thank Balthazar. Thanks to the sound of his presence in Bresson's film, I was able to edit my film Out of Mies. The sound of his steps and the movement of his little bell became sound material during the editing. It was as if Balthazar had dubbed Karina Iraola, the dancer of Out of Mies. This letter underlines the origin of my research subject, asynchrony, and of the working method which proceeds from it.
CREDITS
1. Lynda Gaudreau, Second Letter to Balthazar
As part of the Duologie program organized by the artist-run center DARE-DARE, Lynda Gaudreau was paired with artist Michelle Lacombe. From Finland, Lynda Gaudreau documented the period of their exchange. Her project Kirjeita Suomesta / Letters from Finland brings together photographs, video recordings, drawings and writings around the body, the self-portrait and the still life. Three letters to three different women punctuate this document: Letter to Michelle, Letter to Helene Schjerfbeck, the painter, and the last one being addressed to the Prime Minister of Finland, Sanna Marin. Remoteness and the health crisis run through this film, which becomes a diary, a travel notebook and letters all at once. Here a 3 minute excerpt with one of the letter.
CREDITS
1. A 3-minute excerpt out of 9 minutes, a film directed by Lynda Gaudreau
Year: March 2021
Color and Black & White
Length : 09'11 "minutes
Language : French, English, Finnish
Producers: DARE-DARE, Montreal, Uniarts Helsinki
With : Michelle Lacombe, Lynda Gaudreau
The voice, heard in chorus, recites a text about the straight sun, a solar event that occurs in the tropics twice a year, disappearing the shadows of dazzled objects. Dilated eyes observe the actions of bodies that amplify digestion processes. The green plantain, metaphor of the appearance of meanings due to the displacement of bodies, is fried in two times as an allegory of the sun, straight; of the light, heavy; and of the sea, which due to the distance has turned into stone.
Like the Suns is presented as a performative installation where language, action and image are deployed as tools for the creation of meaning, using metaphors that involve the body and its affective capacity in the imagination and speculation of a paradoxical world that places its center at the edges.
Everyday gestures: writing, observing or cooking; actions that are linked through digestion, the spatio-temporal axis of the work, are thought processes that resort to the inseparable relationship between time and space as a catalyst of relationships, condensing intuition, suspicion or even mistakes through analogies that orbit between duration and distance.
Based on these two terms, understood as a link or relationship, Like the Suns proposes the physical and affective displacement of bodies as a flow that encourages reflexive digestion.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya, Like the Suns (video still).
2. Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya, Like the Suns (video still).
3. Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya, Like the Suns (video excerpt).
<< Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya
In order to think of a place of enunciation, my artistic practice proposes, from an empirical and tropical reflection, affective displacements that contrast my personal experience with the collective experience of the world; stimulating spaces of critical exchange and speculating on possible ways of interweaving relationships between bodies and environments.
As I move, I move over surfaces that change with the action of the body and the word. Through language, I engage in paradoxical relations with the image, seeking to dilate and expand the limits of definitions and meanings through the use of metaphors and semantic constellations where the creation of meaning contests its formations and deformations.
Affectively located in the energetic center of the planet, I approach the tropics as a vortex in the configuration of a world in tension. My artistic research investigates the possible meanings of the tropical experience, which under a link with space, tries to rethink contingent forms of a time tinged by historical and peripheral issues that confront and question the hegemonic, imagining and materializing other possible collective realities.
Through verbal actions, sound devices and visual compositions, I question and propose scenarios of encounter where affection is presented as a catalyst for movement. Using methodologies that resort to processes of approximation and distancing, I elaborate strategies of thought and transformation with the intention of relating to matter in conditions where the edges of the physical and the emotional dilute their rigid contours. My practice is situated in this dissolution of limits, a place of exchange that relates me to a wide range of interlocutors through collaborative dynamics of conversation and affective reflection.
Understood as collective displacements, these collaborative dynamics question the passive observation of change through an expansive notion of bodies that by moving see the world move.
As elements of reflection of sensitive research, the amplification devices that I have developed during the last year have been a consequence of an interest in expanding, from the speculative exercise, the edges of the verbal act and its possibilities of reception.
This time, under the idea of contradiction, I have developed a device that allows listening to sound through bone vibration, detaching the act of listening from an auditive condition subject to the forms to which the body, normalized, has physically adjusted.
This performative action of reading and listening is presented through a medium-length video in which the image and the verbal act participate as means of reflection at the moment of thinking about the possibilities implied by the paradoxical encounter with the image as a listening resource in the search to find a way to describe the sounds stored in the memory.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya, Incisors, video still
2. Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya, Incisors, video excerpt
<< Sandra Golubjevaite
I am a text±sound artist working with code and digital technologies. I educate myself about this field at my own pace and practice continuous prototyping as a method to research and to think about digital tools that stimulate, empower, and amplify women's voices and narratives. Live digital/ audiovisual situations, web-publications and DIY interfaces lie at the core of my practice. In recent years I have been influenced a lot by ideas of autotheory, protocols of feminist hackerspaces and creative coding communities. These practices share a common goal to reject and act to break out from the conventional male dominated ideas about knowledge and/ or technology. They create space for more inclusive, personal, intuitive ways of learning and practicing within the field. Through my practice I seek to engender a bridge between language, autobiography and coding practices as an act of refusal to commodified and often masculine-imposed approaches to software development.
Before I started working with code on my own terms, I was often intimidated by the learning process and the idea of not coding sufficiently enough, because I was a visual artist and not a ‘real programmer’. Similarly, when working with language and writing, I doubted my rightful position as a ‘proper writer’. Deepening my research into autotheory - a feminist practice where autobiography is merged with the production of theory, has encouraged me to embrace the ‘auto’ approach in my language and coding practices. I wonder what could autobiography as a powerful feminist method do for digital spaces, software and its development?
In 2019 I developed SEVEN [’7’] - a circuit board that functions as a reading interface, that manipulates and unfolds a non-linear narrative depending on the reader's interaction with its parameters. It was my first attempt to work with hardware and electronics. I began prototyping as I was following online tutorials about Arduino and reading beginner manuals. It struck me how little educational material in this field was produced by women. Even though the material I found provided fundamentals in electronics, the advanced projects focused mostly on appliance making and lacked more creative and imaginative examples. I eventually decided to experiment with the “print()” command that most programming languages obtain to output text. I saw a potential to work with writing and how it could be used to build a navigation system for a more fragmented reading process. With the narrative content embedded in the code I chose to address and describe the patriarchal conditions of a late night promenade. I wrote and arranged it in modular parts that later would join and separate through the audience interaction with the hand-held interface. The output of the process, a continuous digital printing of new patterns and arrangements of the narrative, can be seen/ read on a plugged in television screen.
Images:
CREDITS
1. SEVEN [’7’], 2019, documentation of the hand-held interface
2. SEVEN [’7’], 2019, documentation of text output on a TV screen during a group exhibition INPUT/OUTPUT at DePlayer, Rotterdam
With AUTO-STREAMS, an ongoing prototyping-research project, I aim to critically reflect on existing digital communication and in particular live streaming platforms. These tools have become a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives and many artists’ practices during the pandemic. They are often commercialized and unmodifiable, conditioning artists to adapt their work to the interfaces during online events. The possibilities to present artistic work have therefore generally been limited to video or shared-screen options. I find these types of simulated television environments unimaginative and problematic. In contrast to most audio-video based platforms, the aim with AUTO-STREAMS is to envision and prototype a series of interfaces allowing performances strictly through streams of text. A particular interest is to work towards developing prototypes tailored to generate and broadcast genres of ‘auto’ (-fiction, -theory) inside web-browsers in real time. The performances - streams - serve as moments to activate and bring attention to ’auto’ writing practices and to populate them inside digital spaces. I want to accentuate unedited, unapologetic ways of working with language and code, as a feminist gesture to hack the literary and the digital.
CREDITS
1. AUTO-STREAMS, 2022, documentation (screenshot) of prototype_1 during a live online stream
2. AUTO-STREAMS, 2022, documentation (screenshot) of prototype_2 during a live online stream
3. AUTO-STREAMS, 2023, documentation (screenshot) of prototype_3 in making
A word that is inscribed in the choreography is spatialised through its letters; also through the gesture of writing, and speaking. The actions stage the word because they bring into account its objectual character. The word that enters into a relationship with actions or objects during the performance, becomes a gesture-sign: sign because every word, action or object has meaning that can be interpreted; gesture because signs and actions come together in a unexpected relation. The gesture that unites action and sign does not seem to carry meaning but modifies the meaning; it is the "or" of the sentence I will go to the right or to the left; where "or" seems to have no meaning but determines the meaning. Gestures that unite two different elements give the choreography a poetic function, because they produce utterances that are not descriptive but figurative; utterances that oscillate between an idea becoming a form and that form being formed. In the gesture-sign, the gesture crosses the sign, interrupting its definition and opening its union toward one new figuration.
The concept of poesy is redefined in romantic literature: instead of being supported by the order of the narration, it builds phrases-images that speak what the stones are silent (Rancière). The poetic ornament is operating an invention that provides the missing words; it is born from the urgency of an idea to appear; mute idea that appears singing, dancing, and while not fully a word or language, it is a gesture-sign.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1.Text 01/Work in progress of Choreographic utterance 01. Notes for a Performative Lecture by Sara Gómez. Still from video documentation. Barcelona, Spain. Dec 2021.
2. Choreographic utterance 01. Notes for a Performative Lecture by Sara Gómez. Photographic documentation during the INprescindibles Artistic Residency (#49), at La Poderosa, Barcelona, Spain. May 2022.
3.Choreographic utterance 01. Notes for a Performative Lecture by Sara Gómez. Video documentation fragment during the INprescindibles Artistic Residency (#49), at La Poderosa, Barcelona, Spain. May 2022.
LINK TO – full video (Barcelona, Spain. Dec 2021)
Poetic figuration is a way of naming a truth (what manifests itself in experience and we cannot grasp), to assign sensitive edges without exhausting it. The choreography could give figure to that truth, building bridges from language to politics. For Badiou and Rancière, a truth becomes evident in a mismatch, in an injustice for the first, for the second, in a disagreement that requires to verifying why the equality is not taking place. The poetic language then, could not be a mere convention, but the effort to bring to light the truth. Choreographic utterances are border and overflow because they outline the unsaid and allow us to think about it despite its immeasurability.
I draw a text in real time over the stage to make a synoptic map -with videos, texts, testimonies, images- talking about some indigenous Mexican people (in Chiapas) who have been displaced from their lands for changing their customs and official religion. I explain how the guerrillas like the EZLN; some indigenous leaders; part of the Catholic Church; and politicians who promote the self-determination of the peoples, have directly or indirectly contributed to depriving these natives of their social-symbolical representation and political participation: they are deprived of community decision-making processes and of the right to work their own lands. Through poetic and choreographic language, I want to give an image to that disagreement to discuss it, because it otherwise lacks representation. Displaced indigenous people live on the periphery, without access to means of communication.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Choreographic utterance 02. Notes for a Performative Debate by Sara Gómez. Photographic documentation during the Research Academy: Performative Interventions, at Zurich University of the Arts. Switzerland, October, 2022
2. Choreographic utterance 02. Notes for a Performative Debate by Sara Gómez. Video documentation fragment at the Artist’s Atelier. Mexico, January 2023.
LINK TO – Choreographic Utterances
<< Sara Gómez
I have approached my work to language in thinking about whether choreography is an aesthetic apparatus (Déotte). To achieve this, I am writing not only in an ordinary way (by essays), but by performing texts through my artistic practice. I aim to show that choreography creates its structure during its performance, and gives rise to an aesthetic apparition that allows us to think about reality. This is not only done with the things that the choreography brings into its body, but with the ways in which it organises and writes with these in space. Choreography has the capacity to join heterogeneous elements and thereby to produce meanings with them; it provokes encounters between gestures and images, signs and bodies; it carries out a poetic invention due to the tension it produces between these elements. Choreography writes with what would not have a relationship before its event, which is written out of contradiction. It creates debate. It gives to itself a body to grant a sensible presence to what did not have it before, inventing ways of making the unthinkable appear, to enable reflexion about it, as the aesthetic apparatus do. The first stage of my practical research was focused in making the choreographic writing visible, using written and spoken utterances inside the performances taking up the sign and the aesthetic qualities of language. In a second stage, I am seeking that this performed writing gives shape to an unnamed conflict, a mismatch or disagreement that lacks words and representation.
<< Vanessa Graf
In my practice, I am often uncertain: Afraid of falling into the chasm that opens (sometimes more, sometimes less) between what is considered art, what is considered science. Of course, the realities of research both practice-based and scientific are never this simple – instead of being a neat either/or decision, there are threads connecting the two, and for me, the strongest of them is language. It is the fragile bridge that allows me to work right on top of the weird void between art and science; a gap that seems to change shape every time I turn to look at it (a strange place to call home). My research follows infrastructures, in the material sense: I walk along cable routes, I visit data centres, and look for cable landings at remote beaches. But more than that, my research follows infrastructures, in a semiotic sense: I talk to data centre managers, listen to network engineers, and interview developers and investors. Every large-scale development project starts as a dream – a vision of the future, an investment that is calculated for years to come. What are the imaginaries at the root of large-scale industrial building projects? Who are the monsters, the ghosts in the machines? In the process, I use narrative as a framework to understand infrastructures, discerning patterns in language that seem fantastical long before they turn into steel and concrete. I am curious both as a researcher and an author of literary fiction: How does the imaginary shape the real?
The PhD project Head in the Cloud systematically considers narrative as the very framework through which to understand infrastructures – thinking infrastructures through fiction, as (partly) fiction, with fiction. It follows Internet infrastructures in the Swiss and Austrian Alps and examines their site-specific stories, fantasies, and imaginaries. What interests me is the interaction between language, imagination, and infrastructural reality: To what extent do global narratives like the Cloud influence local infrastructure projects? And in what way do local realities, concepts, metaphors, and stories in turn determine computer networks? The research follows a media anthropological approach and is centered around a series of semistructured interviews with data center managers along two main Alpine North-to-South corridors. The questions center around the status of local infrastructures, their development and envisioned projection, and the significance of the Alps as their natural environment, but conversations can always veer into different directions. The information thus co-created together with my interview partners is then analyzed with particular attention to narrative structure.
The stories that emerge out of these conversations are often weird, but wonderfully so: hybrids of fact and fiction, one as effective and world-making as the other. Mountains become synonymous with sustainability, while entire data centers vanish into the Cloud, and the distinction between the mathematical world of network engineering and the realm of dreams and fantasy collapses. The resulting compendium of stories speaks to the power of sociotechnical imaginaries: a storybook that troubles the seeming methodical rationality of techno-scientific progress.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Head in the Cloud (2021 - ongoing), by Vanessa Graf
2. Redundancy (2021), animation of the redundancy narrative for Head in the Cloud (2021 – ongoing), by Vanessa Graf
LINK TO - Head in the Cloud PhD project
The Field Kits are based on visits to Internet infrastructures at a given place. Wherever possible, I meet with the persons responsible for the upkeep or management of the infrastructure and talk to them about its functioning, development, and expansion. For this project, the conversations are unstructured, although they are all loosely based on gauging the importance of locale and environment: Why is this infrastructure here, not there? I take notes, pictures, or record the conversations, sometimes I also film. Later, I analyze the material for storied matter(s): Which narratives are recurring, which fantastical ideas and imaginaries are at work?
My interview partners tell me about resilience against atomic bombs; about the bunker-like nature of mountains and the stream-like qualities of cable routes; about gold rushes for data and networks growing like trees. Each place has their stories, each place has their dreams. For the Field Kits, I join them as storyteller – I gather and group the narratives and transform them into poetic stanzas that steer away from the myth of the Cloud, to talk about a mythology of their own.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Material Internet Field Kit 1: Material Internet Field Kit: Warsaw (2022), by Vanessa Graf
2. Material Internet Field Kit 2: Material Internet Field Kit: Warsaw (2022), by Vanessa Graf
3. Material Internet Field Kit 3: Material Internet Field Kit: Linz (2020), by Vanessa Graf
LINK TO Material Internet Field Kit: Linz
LINK TO Material Internet Field Kit: Warsaw