From left to right >>> you will encounter (1) Transcription: The original conversation transcript (partially edited); (2 - 4) Distillation: Documentation showing the process of distillation/selection from original transcript to performance reading script; (5 - 6); Presentation: Documentation of performance lecture and further reconfiguration of the textual script.
For those readers with time and inclination, the conversation transcripts presented here can be read at length, revealing something of the nature and tone of the conversation itself within the practice of conversation-as-material. However, the inclusion of the transcripts is conceived more as an attempt to reveal the connection between transcript and textual distillation. Here, the invitation to the reader is to glimpse or scan rather than necessarily read the transcript material in its entirety.
Context: This third iteration of the practice of conversation-as-material within the frame of Re— considered the relation of ‘waiting for something to happen’ and ‘making something happen’ within the process of writing-thinking, receptivity to the forces of accident, chance and distraction as ways for inviting in the unexpected. The performance lecture was commissioned as part of Accidentally on Purpose an exhibition, online project, series of soundtracks and closing event curated by Candice Jacobs and Fay Nicolson and produced in collaboration with QUAD, Derby, 2012.
I don’t think we should put too much pressure on. Sometimes it is the point where you are trying to work something out; something through [...] It is hard knowing where to start ... not wanting it to feel too prescriptive. There are particular questions that might come out of the context. What are the recurring problems that we see as our issues? There is a sense of us wrestling with the practice of practising and writing and performing and thinking … and within this there are a set of struggles and obstacles, whether we are aware of them or not ... It does seem to be something to do with this. What are those repeated problems? Maybe we leave this in the air and come back to it. No, I think that this is an interesting place to start. There is something else inside the work ... There is a point to the work other than itself and its own making ... It is how rather than the what and the why. So how are the repeating problems? It is more of a poetic concern ... It is much more about how to get to the point. Whatever the point is ... but the point changes [...] The question of how do you repeat without repeating? The structure gives a sense of freedom ... to flex in the middle or flex in terms of content [...] We are talking about something that is quite particular to our own practices, or maybe to practice. The gestures can’t be repeated. They are insistent, but the way that they insist is totally different each time. (T)here is a grammar; there is a punctuation of these movements. And I don’t just mean that they can’t be repeated ... but that they are necessarily different each time. It is impossible to be exact in a way. There is a sense of endeavor ... it is different every time because there is a limitless vocabulary. They are two very different performances ... they mean quite different things. They speak to quite different concerns because of the specificity of the context [...] They are both getting at something. It feels as though the difference is in the intention? But they differ in the context and in terms of what they are intimating towards. The index finger is interesting in the ways in which it is used — the gestures remains the same, but the intention radically changes ... The work rests on what is latent and what is not said. It is a trying; it is a testing of that particular way of speaking — the index is the speaking finger. And in many ways, what it is saying is quite loud [...] It is trying to get over what it might mean to other people as well ... that is the experiment. Focusing down on that. We are in the territory of what we have already done, and there is something in the work where there is a moment where you pass into the possibility of what it might be. It is really a very fragile line. I am not sure where that happens … It may well have already happened but we can’t see it. Speculation is dynamic, hesitation is movement, and knowledge is on the move — all of these things. This notion of groping for something, perhaps that you never get towards ... never getting to the thing that you are groping for. Maybe it is the difference between waiting for something to happen and making something happen. I think that the work exists at the threshold — at times it is waiting for something to happen and at other times it feels as if it is putting pressure on, to force it in some kind of way [...] It rests on the relationship between those two modes. How do you repeat without repeating? Or it just shifted the vocabulary in a way that couldn’t have been anticipated. And in a way we are preparing for something to happen. We are getting ready for it to happen. What does that mean? What is that? The preparation composes what will happen and shapes it. The nature of the invitation is key. What I am doing — it is live, it is happening, it is of the moment, it is very felt. It has a framework ... there is a conversation, there is an internal logic. Maybe it needs the frame — for otherwise you are talking about such slight gestures, they just fly away. You need something to spring from in order to show the chaos, in order to show the live. It is not even taking care — it is a form of attention towards something that is so ephemeral. The attention — without that, without that frame, it is very gaseous or easy dispersed or not seen in a way. It is about attention, the attention that we are bringing, the focus that we are bringing on the hands and on the script [...] The closer you get, in the close ups, you get more … you get closer but you don’t necessarily get any more. The closer in it becomes the less readable it becomes somehow ... there are a lot of full stops. It involves a focusing … It needs to be as exact as possible, and there is so much when you get in there. It gets smaller and smaller, in many ways [...] Going back to this repeating problem of how do you repeat without repeating? This is a distillation process. A sense of the perpetual distillation of the same content, the reduction and reduction [...] It bleeds [...] Distraction that comes in sideways and starts to shape things in a way that you ... couldn't anticipate. What might come in from the side? This sense of a deviant aspect — where momentarily your attention wanders and settles in a place ... Other things will always come in — new things come in and distract all the time [...] Maybe the focus is really important. It is not a form of distraction that is moving away, it is a form of distraction that is coming in. Trying to keep focused but nonetheless ... aware of these other things. It is an engagement ... a felt engagement. How would that work in terms of repetition? It is thinking through, it is provisional. It is eventual, evental ... It is a bid for feeling knowledge, felt knowledge, as in the felt tip. The penmanship aspect. Felt tip — this whole notion that it is felt, that it is a feeling, a feeling, but it is the tip of a feeling. Whilst you are getting the tip, it is also the felt tip, a fuzzy logic. There is something about it being the tip in the same sense as the top of the head ... that also being a place for a certain kind of knowledge. The felt tip, and the free hand and the movement of the ink as well and whole notion of hesitancy on the move. You can show hesitancy in freehand in the ink and the friction on the paper — all this movement is somehow important in ways that I can’t quite articulate right now. There is a blindness, a grasping or a groping towards language — the fragility of language or the impossibility of language [...] What it does is create a focus, or a kind of pressure point, but it is just to the edge of that, where the actual vocabulary will come from ... It is around the edges of what we are saying, rather than the thing that we are saying. This is the delicate part of what I am doing. [...] There is something to do with the way that the gesture deviates from its plan ... The openness [...] There is a difference between pure openness, and something that is deliberate and yet still open. It can be closed and yet still very open. It is that fine line. Purpose is found accidentally. Trying to perform purpose — trying to get to the point, pointedly trying to get to the point ... but in doing that it totally highlights that the point is both prop and protagonist. It's a performance of getting to the point, that's the point. And also the futility and impossibility of that as well. You have everything on the go and there is always drafts. There is something to do with this sense ... of seeing the point at which something is being articulated. What you think you are articulating in the present tense, or what you think you are articulating in one moment ... when you look at it from a different position, it is also saying something else. There is something weird with language — with language not just written — for it has the capacity for speaking in the present tense but also for speaking differently from a future point. They are saying something between the words, which is very different to what I was trying to say. A small aside, or a fragment. Or you could keep going back to it and working through, framing it differently. It gathers meaning and loses meaning all the time. It is latent and it is always there. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote it. Notes tend to be very directional, trying to sketch out a set of data, whereas this was much more meandering. In terms of thinking about them as two discrete approaches to the vocabulary that we are working with, is there something to do with it being at the point where one — again a sense of the tip, the felt tip — where one tilts into the other. There is something cursive in the sense of the hand — they seem as though they are suddenly activated or required to do something and then it lapses again. The lapse. The score has moments in it where it is just do something and that is the space for speculation in that moment. At what point have you made a mark? Have you already made it as you commit hand to paper ... what is the mode of hesitation there? I have to do something now. But I think that the purposefulness of that gesture is often in response to the I must do something. It looks decisive because it is literally just that decision that I am focusing on. In the moment, I don’t know what I am deciding to do but it is a decision. Breath and circumstance — the place where the real openness happens in terms of making is here. This is contingent. This is the contingent ... there are two different modes of contingency. There is the contingency within the process of making and the contingency within the process of the performance, and they feel quite different. There is the dialogue between our practices — there are strands that are running parallel to one another and I don’t think this is to say that they are touching all the time. It is much more like a diagramming — expanding and then coming together and then departing. Maybe there is something about the felt tip, that is not still enough to be seen as a failure. It is not static enough. Maybe it is a punctuation thing. This is not what I am doing. This is not a purposeful accident. Something is being done — it is happening. I don’t think that I am trying to be ambiguous. I am not trying to be ambiguous. I am trying to be the most succinct that I can, but it is impossible. The way you stumble into language is an accident. The way that you speak is a total accident. I think it is quite useful to unpick it actually because in a sense what the work is doing — it fails in the sense if it is purposefully trying to be uncommunicative, or it is purposefully being mute. And if you think about lack of communication or a failure to communicate or muteness as being failures in the spectrum of communication — is it is purposefully doing that? That the smallness — is it mean to be so small [...] So there is maybe a sense that the opacity could be a hiding mechanism rather than a speculation? And I am conscious about that. I think that sometimes the hand gestures really undermine the text and I think that sometimes the text really undermines the hand gestures. There is reciprocity between the two … It is this tilting all the time, between something that is ... purposefully trying to deal with a set of concerns and then the humour activates it in a different kind of way. Humour can often be mistook for misunderstanding as well. Because laughing is a gut reaction to something that you don’t quite know how to react to it ... It is funny because it is unknown, it is funny because the reason for it is unknown. Groping is perhaps less sure of itself. Perhaps it doesn’t have an end in sight. Although groping can also be the opposite ... it is feeling something up. Being groped. It has a definite purpose that is seen to be accidental. How can a gesture be hesitant — is it then still a gesture? Can you have a part gesture ... a nearly gesture. The gesture of groping is an intervention of some sort and there is something to do with the relationship between. And sometimes I think that the gestures intervene in the spoken component — maybe that is the groping, maybe the spoken component gets groped by this hand. There is a friction there. And probably vice versa. At times the text … the reaching out is purposeful, but is doesn’t quite know what it is going to get. The stammering gets distilled into something that is more purposeful — in the stammer, purpose is accidentally found. Or there is something that couldn’t be anticipated. That sense of purpose being accidental. The work works towards a purpose that isn’t the purpose that we are dealing with now. So it is something to do with the purpose revealing itself in the work. Rather than the purpose directing the work. So, where the purpose exists in the work. I think that there is different quality to the purpose that we are having now to the purpose that will be in the work. So the purpose we bring to it is not at the thing that the work ends up being. It is something to do with the purpose that the work starts to assert. It has already got its own force in a way, the way that the work will get pressured, made, is somewhere between the force that we are asserting in terms of our purpose now and its willfulness, its own points of resistance and yield ... The work is also putting on its own pressure. It has certainly been bumped off course, we have both been bumped off course. At this juncture. It doesn’t produce synthesis very easily. So maybe there is a sense of it being between the pressure of purpose and the pressure of the work’s own resistance, its material resistance. There is a material resistance, a material history there, and it sets in motion — like a tremor, which is kind of what is happening now. It is a parallel thing, and then that is coming in there. The gesture has infinite … in a way it has infinite purpose, it could be anything and nothing. And that is just its inherent non-linguistic-ness actually, its capacity for meaning in a way. I don’t feel as if I am ready. Maybe we shouldn’t push it [...] This sense of preparing for the unexpected being one of preparing for that which could not have been anticipated in advance. This relationship between preparedness or preparing as one of preventing mishap really, or preventing error for want of a better word. That you try and anticipate any possible accident, or any possible thing that could go wrong, in order to prevent it. And then there is another form which is to do with maybe harnessing the potential of the things that go wrong. What happens in an art practice is often a form of preparedness but it isn’t to do with preventing the error, it is to do with developing a capacity to harness the possibility of those chance interventions when they arise. The difference between a preparation to exclude contingency when the contingency is unwanted versus preparation to invite some kind of contingency [...] That letting go allows it to become something that is different to what you have been preparing. But at the same time, related to ... what you have been anticipating. It is about not overworking it — leaving off in good time. Sometimes the sense of the planning or the preparedness is not to do with preparing for all eventualities, it is being prepared in yourself to be able to respond when the time is right ... It feels as though the preparedness is one of ... knowing what to do with it, or being able to see it. Being prepared to see. Going back to that diagram. So it is being open to the unexpected ... or not always to the unexpected, just to the situation. The idea of receptivity - not being too hurried, teasing a way forward and letting something wave towards you. When you are not looking directly at something it will come ... the notion of looking away, both in terms of looking away from the thing, looking away from your subject of study ... but also the fact that when you are writing your head is down. You step away but that thought is still there. The vocabulary happens on site ... quite often it is done through fragments. So the words come. In their own time. And often they come slower than you want ... Come on. Come on, words, come on. Flexing it in some kind of way. Something that is given is a gift. But you give in the sense that you yield. It is a form of surrender. Give and take. Or when something has give it is elastic. A sense of pressure — there is a tension ... that is somehow broken. Or a pressure that is somehow changed. It being a physical pressure, a push, or a press. Pressing. What is it — the promise of a sentence? The possibility of the sentence is one of a sentence. There is a contractual bind in the first word in some respects. And so you are bound by that, even if you choose not to partake. So there is a feeling that these things aren’t stable either — a sentence structure can be circumstantial. You start out not knowing what you are doing, and in the end it retroactively makes sense. It retroactively has structure, whether it makes sense or not? It retroactively is a sentence. There is this gesture of hesitation which is being performed and it is being consciously performed. The hesitation in the work is both scripted and actual. We have made space for hesitation. We have made space for hesitation but the work is also speaking about hesitation and is performing a certain hesitation. Some of it is what you might describe as genuine hesitation and some of it is part of the score. Part of the grammar of hesitation ... Is that what we are looking at? Putting a kind of pressure on that — what does it actually mean to hesitate? ... There is something about the planning and the unplanning, of something being unplanned. I keep repeating it. And it is not because I don’t understand it — it is because I am groping. Groping it. There is something to do with the way that the unplanned is often synonymous with accidental. To plan and to unplan. Because there is change of plan, but the plan remains … it has just changed. There is change of plan and there is planned change. To undo the plan or show the plan [...] Even if you didn’t think that there was a plan before, or if we could substitute plan for structure. Even in improvization, that would hold true. Because improvisation shows structure through its pattern. Does it unstructure? Maybe. To show structure as performative, because also one of the key definitions of performative is a deviation from a base norm or a base line ... Some people believe that there is no base line, because the performative is liminal and doesn’t operate in that way. But the way that I understand it — there is the normative there, there is a line. And it is about pushing that line by degrees, over or under. Unplan. They come from different origins in terms of process. I can’t describe the difference between that and this. It is a bit like earlier on when we were talking about reduction and paring something down — how do you make sure that something comes in, that it doesn’t just become too hermetic, or it just reduces everything away? [...] Circling. Faint touches. They might have meant something at the time ... We are getting quite specific and we want that specificity. In some ways, circling is very specific. Maybe we come back to this [...] You have to spend time away from it. The time away from it is almost as critical. They can relate too much. You mark it don’t you. There is something about owning that which is different to listening. It will also not have the sense of authorship. I like the words being loosened from the body of the person that said it and from that person’s practice ... it is somehow abstract and concrete at the same time.
I don’t feel as if I am ready. Maybe we shouldn’t push it […] It is hard knowing where to start […]
(T)here is a sense of us wrestling with the practice of … practicing. (T)here is a set of (recurring) struggles and obstacles, whether we are aware of them or not […] (This) is (the) point where (we) are trying to work something out; something through.
(T)here is a point to the work other than itself and its own making. It is more about how to get to the point. Whatever the point is […] but the point changes. It is impossible to be exact.
There are questions that (will) come out of the context. (W)e should put (on) too much pressure. (We) might not … exhaust the possibilities.
(T)he question is how do you repeat without repeating (?) (T)here is a repeating structure, but […] how do you have change within that structure …
(T)he gestures can’t be repeated. (T)hey are insistent, but the way that they insist is … necessarily different each time.
(T)hey are … getting at something. (T)he difference is in the intention, (in) what they are intimating towards. (T)he gesture(s) (are) the same, but the intention … changes. (Meaning) rests in what (remains) latent, (in) what is not said.
(T)esting (out a) way of speaking; the index is the speaking finger.
(W)e are in the territory (between) what we have already done (and) the possibility of what … might be. It is really a very fragile line, a fine line.
I am not sure where (it) happens. I don’t think it has happened yet. (I)t may well have already happened but we can’t (yet) see it..
Speculation is dynamic, hesitation is movement, knowledge is on the move.
(G)roping … for something (;) (but) never get(ting) towards the thing … that you are groping for. (T)here is something about not being quite sure.
Maybe it is the difference between waiting for something to happen and making something happen (;) […] (I)t rests on the relationship between th(e)se two modes.
(W)e are preparing for something to happen, we are getting ready for it to happen. (T)he preparation composes what will happen and shapes it. (But things) change depending on the context. The nature of the invitation is key.
(T)here is an internal logic … a number of rules […] (We) are talking about such slight gestures. You need something to spring from.
(I)t needs to be as exact as possible. (T)here is so much when you get in there. (B)ut the closer you get, you don’t necessarily […] get any more […](T)here are a lot of full stops. […]
(D)istraction … comes in sideways and shape(s) things in way(s) that you couldn’t … anticipate … (I)t is …. trying to keep very focused but nonetheless … attention wanders. (O)ther things will always come in.
(I)t is a bid for feeling knowledge, felt knowledge, […] it is the tip of a feeling […], the felt tip. (T)his also being a place for a certain kind of knowledge.
(H)esitancy (is) on the move … in the ink and the friction on the paper (and) all this being movement (and) somehow important in ways that I can’t quite articulate right now.
(L)anguage is … feeling its way … there is a blindness, a grasping or a groping towards language … the fragility of language (and its) impossibility.
There is a different register of activity happening … tilt(ing), the point where, […] thinking is happening in a slightly different way to how (it was) before.
(It) create(s) a focus, …a kind of pressure point, and … just to the edge of that … is the delicate part of what I am doing. […] It is around the edges of what we are saying, rather than the thing that we are saying.
(T)here is something to do with the way that the gesture deviates from its plan […] Neither is that a failing of the method. (T)here is an orchestration to it … that is necessary.
(I)t is very definite but it is … unclear to what end … (its) purpose is accidentally found.
I am trying to get to the point; I am pointedly trying to get to the point […] a performance of getting to the point, that’s the point. That and that.
(I)t is a continual process; thinking … is always (a) draft.
(S)omething (is said) between the words, which is very different to what is (actually) being said. (A) small aside, a fragment.
Or you could keep going back to it and working (it) through, framing it differently.
(I)t gathers meaning and loses meaning all the time […] the origin of things is … often forgotten […] (yet) (i)t (remains) latent and … is always there.
(T)hey seem as though they are suddenly activated or required to do something. (T)hen it lapses […](W)hat is the mode of hesitation there.
(T)he purposefulness of th(e) gesture is often in response to … do(ing) something […] it looks decisive … I don’t know what I am deciding to do but it is a decision.
(B)reath and circumstance (are) the place(s) where the real contingency … happens. (T)here is the contingency within the process of making and contingency within the process of performance, and they are … different.
(T)here are strands … running parallel to one another and I don’t think this is to say that they are touching all the time. (C)oming together and then departing.
I have to place … trust in the contingency of the making, because that is the place where a different kind of vocabulary emerges.
(These) are not my words (;) (they) belong to the work.
I am not trying to be ambiguous. This is not what I am doing. Something is being done; it is happening. And I am conscious about that.
The way you stumble into language is an accident … People stumble over their words. […] Things trip off (the) tongue […] How can it be anything else?
(T)he closeness of the felt, the felt tip, the texture of the felt tip […] and that being enough.
(I)t being the thing that needed to be said.
(I)t needs to be seen as an endeavor […] there is something being activated and something being neutralized all the time … There is a real reciprocity between the two.
The gesture of groping is an intervention […] (words) get groped by th(e) hand. There is a friction there. (But the) groping is (un)sure of itself … it doesn’t have an end in sight. At times, the reaching out is purposeful, but is doesn’t quite know what it is going to get.
(T)here is something that couldn’t be anticipated […] purpose is accidentally found (;) (it) reveal(s) itself in the work.
(T)he purpose we bring to it is not at all … the thing that the work ends up being […] the work itself has its own … trajectory of purpose. (I)t swerves.
The work (exists) somewhere between the force that we are asserting … and its willfulness, its own points of resistance, a material resistance, a material history […] It doesn’t produce synthesis easily.
(Between) our purpose (and) the resistance of the work […] (T)he gesture has infinite purpose …. It could be anything and nothing.
(W)hat (does) it … mean to prepare for the unexpected … for that which could not have been anticipated in advance (?)
(P)reparedness is not to do with preparing for all eventualities but […] being open to the unexpected. (I)t is being prepared … to respond when the time is right … teasing a way forward, letting something (in).
(L)etting go allows it to become something that is different to what you have been preparing. (T)here is a point where you (have to) leave off.
(W)hen you are not looking directly at something it will come. […] So the words come (and) slower, in their own time.
(That) which is given is a gift. To give … is to yield. (It is) both a gesture forward and …(of) surrender. Pushing. Pressing. Flex.
It is about the promise of a sentence […] the possibility of the sentence is one of a sentence. (T)here is a contractual bind in the first word. (Yet) these things aren’t stable either (;) a sentence structure can be circumstantial.
It is only at the end … that … the promise of the beginning is fulfilled. (Y)ou start out not knowing what you are doing (;) it retroactively has structure, it retroactively is.
The hesitation … is both … scripted and actual. So, we (are) performing a certain hesitation. (S)ome of it is part of the score. (T)he grammar of hesitation … is … what we are looking at.
(T)here is the sense of … purpose, the question of purpose in the work. Being … purposeful but to what ends (?) […] There are forms of purpose that are deliberate … forms … that emerge.
(S)omething done … has the capacity to be undone […] backwards (and) forwards. There is change of plan and there is planned change. T)he term unplanned is often synonymous with the accidental.
(T)here is a line. And it is about pushing that line by degrees, over or under.
There is something to do with the trembling. There is a narrative of feeling (that) seem(s) to resist forming words.
Where is the action of the work, what is its tense? Why I have forgotten?
There is something about (this) that feel(s) more material. (W)e (are) talking about reduction and paring something down.
I can’t describe the difference between that and this. I won’t probably until later. They might have meant something at the time. They can relate too much.
I am conscious of giving you too much. You have to spend time away from it.
Maybe we leave this in the air and come back to it. I think that is an interesting place to start.
Maybe we shouldn’t […] push it. (We) are trying to work something out, something through.
There is a sense of us wrestling with the practice of […] practicing.
(T)here is a repeating structure, but […] how do you have change within that? (H)ow do you repeat without repeating (?)
(Y)ou could keep going back to it and working (it) through, framing it differently.
(W)e are in the territory (between) what we have already done (and) the possibility of what … might be.
(T)he gestures […] are insistent, but the way that they insist is […] necessarily different each time.
(T)he difference is in the(ir) intention, (in) what they are intimating towards.
(T)hey are … getting at something.(Meaning) rests in what (remains) latent, (in) what is not said.
The index is the speaking finger. (T)here is a blindness (;) a grasping or a groping towards language.
(I)t is a bid for feeling knowledge, […] felt knowledge.
(I)t is the tip of a feeling […], the felt tip.
At times, the reaching out is purposeful […] but it doesn’t quite know what it is going to get.
(I)t needs to be as exact as possible. (B)ut the closer you get, you don’t necessarily […] get any more […] (T)here are a lot of full stops.
There are forms of purpose that are deliberate […] and forms … that emerge. (T)he gesture has infinite purpose […] It could be anything and nothing.
(T)here is something to do with the way that the gesture deviates from its plan […] (its) purpose swerves (;) (it) is accidentally found.
(D)istraction … shape(s) things in way(s) that you couldn’t anticipate.
(O)ther things will always come in.
(S)omething (is said) between the words […] which is very different to what is (actually) being said.
Maybe it is the difference between waiting for something to happen and making something happen […]
(I)t rests on the relationship between th(e)se two (different) modes.
(T)here are strands […] running parallel to one another (which is not) to say that they are(n’t) touching. (Things) com(e) together and then depart.
(Somewhere between) our (own) purpose (and) the material resistance […] of the work. (S)ynthesis (is not) produce(d) easily.
It looks decisive (but) it is impossible to be exact. (We) might not […………….………..] exhaust the possibilities.
The hesitation […] is both scripted and actual. (T)he grammar of hesitation … is what we are looking at.
(W)hat (does) it … mean to prepare for the unexpected? (B)eing open to (the possibility of) letting something […] (in).
(It is) a gesture forward […] and (of) surrender.
(T)here is a line. (I)t is about pushing that line by degrees, over or under.
(S)omething done … has the capacity to be undone […] unplanned. There is a change of plan and there is planned change.
(W)e (are) talking about reduction and paring something down. There is something about (this) which feel(s) more material.
I can’t describe the difference between this and that. They might have meant something at the time.
It is only at the end … that […] the promise of the beginning is fulfilled.
Maybe we leave this in the air and come back to it.(T)here is a point where you (have to) leave […] off.
(Left) This exposition shows the distillation of conversation transcript into a poetic, vocative text. However, within Re— the text itself has been presented visually, graphically, temporally, relationally, performatively, through performance lectures, moving-image installations, and various kind of scores.
View documents and artifacts [scroll right]
4. This PDF shows the layout for the textual ‘script’ used within the performance lecture. The script is a direct distillation from transcribed conversation.
5. Documentation of the performance lecture. The actual performance lecture comprised two parts: Part 1: Two distillations of a conversation were presented side by side. One mode of distillation involved a live reading of the textual distillation that had been ‘condensed’ from the original conversation transcript (See 1 for the script). A second mode of distillation involved a visual-diagrammatic tabletop performance – a diagram drawn, a finger pointing – that was simultaneously filmed/recorded and projected live. In turn, this projection was presented adjacent to a series of textual fragments – creating moments of connection and disconnection with the spoken and shown components. Part 2: Following the live-performed section, the recorded material from the preceding live performance was re-presented as a projection, where the material was encountered without the spoken word component. The documentation presented is from the second part of the performance lecture, as documentation was not made of Part 1.
6. This image/text configuration attempts to show something of the interplay between the read/spoken and the visual-diagrammatic components of the performance lecture – and could be conceived as a kind of ‘score’. These scores have since been used for reactivating the material as a performance reading (alongside the documents of the performance) within various conference presentations, including New Modes of Art Writing II: Intersections of the Critical and the Creative Voice, Manchester School of Art, 10th November 2017; Critical Reinventions, University of East Anglia, 12 May 2018; Artistic Research will Eat Itself, 11th International Conference on Artistic Research, University of Plymouth, April 2018; In Dialogue symposium, Nottingham/Lincoln/Derby, November 2019; Elastic Writing in Artistic Research, UniArts, Helsinki, August 2021.
