Abstract
But if forced, then I would say it is something like articulation and testing the threshold of articulability. Why this exercise fails, at least for me right now, is that the materiality and physicality, which get necessarily lost through the transcription, appear more than ever to be in fact quite essential to the piece. Perhaps failure is a misnomer. It is rather that this other form rather than evolving the piece seems to rather just render another kind of work. And in that, it perhaps does what I wanted it to: to transport to another space, while playing with the ideas of transport and of space. Though I am still not convinced that text is the way that is most native to the work I’m after, it is nevertheless making me begin to think anew about so many complications endemic to performance/action, about the complexities between score and execution, about trying to master or manipulate time, about trying to subvert known architectures.
41°18’50”N 72°56’4”W
I’m I’mreally I’m really dizzy and I’m sitting on the floor I’m not entirelysure what direction I’m facing I have ear plugs on I blindfolded myself and then I rotated multiple times and then I stopped and I set an alarm for about an hourI think I’m gonna lie down I’m gonna lie down And then I’m gonna have this thing next to me and I’m just gonna talk I
What is
What is wrong
What is the difference
Why is it that I don’t think why is it that this one form of writing research or thinking I don’t think can be what is the word it is not equalisable it’s not tantamount it’s not the same thing as I think the kid of research one does when one is trying to make a work in art let’s say in quotes because the art because I think when I’m researching or I think one of the things that happens everythingkind of equalises Everythingbecomes subsumed under the idea of source material The taxonomy sort of flattens out or becomes thisone everything can become source and I don’t think this is something irresponsible or slop slipshod about it but rather it’s it’s always operating at degree of your being and being sensitive and realising you are related to the world and all you can is create these things that the world seems to accept or designate as art or at least that is how it is for me when I everything I do even going to work sitting there hearing some noise in the hallway it triggers some memory or triggers like a set of ideas not even a set of ideas triggers something in me threshold as affect or sensation and the task or the it’s truly a what is that expression a labor of love to pursue that line of thought or that line or it’s not thought to call it a thought is already to give it too muchofadesignation that experience or that becoming aware or something be it some kind of schema or I mean the joy really comes from just being open to everything and having the faith that because you are somehow singular I mean bracketing everything like my god that we are products of ideology products of our environment product of our past etcetera etcetera prisoner as it were of the context in which that inhabit bracketing all that having the faith that you are this singular sieve through al this will be poured ad so that what comes out if you stay honest to your sensations try to really get to that degree zero of encounter and experience and awareness and begin to operate at that moment then what you will create whatevertheformitis it’s going to be good it’s going to be it’s going to make sense somehow I get frustrated often by people telling me Ihavetostandup because lying down makes me sleepy right now I get so oftenfrustrated by people telling me I get so often frustrated so often telling me that oh I am a researcher and so
I think that writing for me has has been something like transcription its always notes for something or its transcribing something and at the same time becomes notes for something buthatsisalltosay I’ve never considered writing as something onto itself but always notes for me like para like prosthesis paraphernalia or scaffolding for the works that I am and the [my ] works that I make are PRECISELY the things that resist transcription Writing at the end of the day is transcription I know that throughout my whatever brief existence I have read this and that theorising about writing it was at most pleasant but all that at some point seems like notes NO sorrythatsnotwhatIwanttosay it’s really hard for me to get traction with that kind of writing I’m not interested in writing ultimately because it’s something that cannot be part of my practice and it’s not because I’m shy or unconfident or whatever it’s simply not I’ve come to realise it’s not part of who I am and so it is uncomfortable that so much of our transactions now necessarily operate with get transmitted via the vehicle or currency as currency of all these transcription text is like the receipt of something that happened or is happening
But this is all boiling down to perhaps what I want to speak about the irony that I should express through writing my issues with writing But more than that the task I set out for myself to discover in this next hour
What does it mean that the space of the writing is an extension or is part of my studio And I mean that in an emphatic sense
I think making this kind of gesture or not just gesture but living really living it that’s urgent here that’s urgent here And using that as a kind of constraint for me to think about what does that mean for a studio practice what does mean for writing I think this hearkens back to thing I said at the very beginning When you are researching as an artist everything becomes material Even when I’m sitting in the toilet
In any given moment in the moment of embrace in the moment of of I don’t know kissing someone or something like this the mind is always going the studio is there of course that is a different moment than say when you are testing out a new material or trying something or when you are outside shooting something Perhaps it’s preciselyasbeing trained or training as a photographer I’m out there in the world truly as a nomadic creature but also finding a kind of humbling solace in the studio but that humbling solace is so energising that it makes me greedy and then again not humble but greedy let’s say and feeling megalomaniac
So long as you don’t beat my body and my mind is still going I am still there
And I think about things like
So long as my mind is going I’m still there aren’t I And to say this space two three pages these sheets of paper in a journal somewhere this blank website well it won’t even be blank I don’t know yet but it is a part of my studio you see you look into my studio you get to be with my studio in a way I don’t know how you feel about that but this is uh uh I don’t know is that the closest form of touching in a way
Come here and hold my hand a little bit
The floor is cold
And I was resting my hand a lot of my weight on my left hand so it feels a bit funky it feels a bit crunchy and I need to kind of roll it around to get it back to normal My body is a little bit uncomfortable because I feel like I’m coming down with a cold or something
The last days were a bit strange because my sleeping schedule got messed up and it made me body feel leaden It was a very thought provoking week in some ways
Ultimately to ask an artist to express something about what it is that they do or think it’s strange
Not to say it’s such a privileged position but maybe it is
But it’s like they
Recognising the tangibility Um I’m not exactly going for a universal or something like this I don’t want to be dogmatic about anything It’s probably like the worst case of some kind of narcissism just doing something to figure out something for myself Perhaps almost pathologically so and then um I mean there then there’s exposure then perhaps someone reacts to it um I’m quiet just now because I’m thinking about the idea of exposure and visibility and perhaps writing or transcribing is making something visible granted that the audience is literate You know there’s all this blather all this vocalisation then you transcribe and it becomes a record and then becomes visible in that way I suppose you could have speakers and have the sound be projected and have some kind of installation or install the speakers somehow so then you get to have some visible tangibility too But I suppose writing also doesn’t have to be visible There’s also Braille writing that’s for the blind But what I’m trying to get at is the idea that when I transcribe this moment and begin to draw the draw the extension of my studio with these words where where is my studio Where is it It’s like I’m trying to send you a piece of my self through that But why not figure out a way to like youknow connect via webcam What is so interesting about this particular medium of accessibility I think it’s also being embedded in this other space making the hard claim that it IS my studio it’s a kind of re it’s kind of a re-territorialisation it’s a kind of colonisation it’s a kind of parasitism Or it is rather shedding light on what’s precisely the schema of parasitism what’s parasiting on what Of course there is the pun of para-siteHaha not my original um I’m so cold here right now and there some other noise I vaguely hear through my earplugs And I feel so feverish I could be anywhere Outside right now is a mountain for all I know This one this like extinct volcano outside of Edinburgh where lots of tourists are going up it’s very very steep and until I saw this place in real life I saw it a lot in my dreams and upon seeing it for the first time I realised all the dreams I’ve been having the recurrent ones for the past twenty years it was here This volcano This extinct volcano And from up here you can see the ocean You can see the sea That I think is pointing towards ultimately like Norway I can’t quite smell it yet It’s a bit windy and the sun still feels hot when the sun breaks through from the clouds It’s summer It’s cool though it’s not hot like where I’m from It’s not sticky like where I am from Being in the place Ive seen in my dreams the last two decades its like feeling homesick and so full of home at the same time like a shock like a dizzying like a dizzying feeling and I keep shivering
I think this interest or this adamancy about the fact the this text does demarcate the space of the part of my studio it is also about camouflage camouflaging my studio what happens in my studio for me anyway and I’m sure for many people too is a kind of the most vulnerable thing and it is to say here I am transferring my most vulnerable to you
ButofcourseifIweretomerely transcribe these words and send them or publicise it that way maybe they would be dead But perhaps it is enough to have the disclaimer: listen literally listen – all these words were part of the moment when all these words are equal to the moment ARE the moment when I began to talk about the space of the studio It’s okay to talk about the space of the studio because so much art now maybe always been recurrently is about the possibilities of making art and it’s strange I can never get myself to think about what is art but perhaps a concession maybe it’s a concession I think about what is the space of that contains the production Being here with my eyes closed and my ears plugged feels so cold and shivery rocking and forth a little bit it’s like flying I can’t believe I’m related people people that are outside of here to whom I’m related connected biologically psychologically emotionally affectively sexually politically I don’t know so many things and so in a way this space DO NOT READ MY TEXTS AS TEXTS but read them as these new geographies and new architectures Notevennew architectures notevennew just read as architecture as geography it’s all what is a map a map transcribes and makes potential that’s what a map is so this is the map the map of my studio it IS my studio And I’m rocking faster now because it is cold
It is autumn
It is in my studio
And we are thinking about thresholds and camouflage and mapping What if the way the map was became real What do I’m sorry I lost focus for a second that is not the sentence I want to produce
But incidentally camouflage interests me because it’s also about distraction working on iridescence trying to figure out what that means continuing to work on it and realising it’s not stupid to continue on something adamancy adamancy adamancy dedication dedication dedication commitment commitment commitment I love I love I love it is you whom I love c’est vous dont j’ai besoin iridescence it’s like a it led me to think about camouflage but all of it makes me think about distraction to say something is there out there happening or elsewhere happening yes that’s it my studio is happening elsewhere and here allwhere everywhere that it’s everywhere and it’s not just because the accident of the fact that I’m trained or being to trained to be a photographer which brings together some outside and inside practicenono but it is the reality the matter of fact of this kind of making it’s this hyper aware sensitivity to all that is around you and perhaps you’re in disguise and people will read you another way but then you are iridescent creature and perhaps your shine misleads the people When you lift off that veneer and that’s why there’s this speaking without notes just speaking trying to trying to say say some tell you I’m TRYING TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOU I want you to know I SO DESPERATELY WANT YOU TO KNOW that I so desperately want you to know that I’m not the kind of writerthatyouthinkiam but I do write and perhaps I’m not the kind of maker you think I do make This issue of writing I got so hung up on because it’s this issue of visibility to be visible I want to be invisible until I am ready to show the things I want to make visible Perhaps this is another reason why I’m thinking about the audible lately Initially I was thinking about the audible because of the fact that I had no camera and computer for a while over the summer but I had been working with sound more and more before that and which which led me to think about feedback and how feedback relates to camouflage and you know punning on the word feedback but more importantly it’s because I had no camera and computer for a little while I began to think of composing and how I want to compose
films I don’t want to make a film script but I wanted to compose because I was thinkingverynaively verybluntly very crudelycoarselyRUDIMENTARILY about you know metaphysics 101orwhatever intrometaphysics class where they talk about one of the important cases what is the relation between a score and its execution I wonderifitsquitesthesame as the relationship between a script and its execution I wantto say its something different because there is something about music the fact that in itself it’s like you know abstract let’s say inherently abstract it doesn’t refer to language or anything Whereas script is already a transcription you can read it you can like a novel a separate thing
I just want to move my body and show you I want to reach out and show you I wanna I wish I could see myself even though I’m blindfolded it didn’t occur to me to record this part that component I was too much hung up on the audible I suppose but also I didn’t want to see myself
and I wanted to I wanted to think about
the space of my studio That’s why I want to lie downinit I want to lie down and I want to think about the space of my studio I don’t know which direction I’m facing I can’t tell where the light is because I’m blindfolded I don’t know where north is where east is east or south I don’t know where you are I DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE I don’t know where you are I don’t deny myself desire I don’t deny myself anything so perhaps I just feel neutrally about you I have yet to show you my studio I have yet to properly show you my studio to say that if I produce a text and that text IS part of my studio does it also mean that my studio consists of studio There’s walls there’s drywall there’s floorboard there’s wood MATERIALS glass wood plastic metal iridescent cellophane aluminum foil blue liquids gold powder fruits vegetable water feces even aspiration anxiety joy hurt duration
the intended duration that I really cannot say but how so then from that how do you get to that other space is it merely just referring to that that space of
is it sorry isjust referring to that thing about you know studio is in your mind I think I’m trying to create a map but why do it in this analog way but it’s not analog it’s every kind of possible material I don’t think that’s irresponsible
think THINK my studio it is show you my vulnerability my confusion both my hands are on the floor and both my hands areon the floor both my wrists are feeling the pressure of my weight as I lean forward but I have no sense I am losing the sense of top or bottom in a way because I’m blindfolded and I have earplugs and I can’t hear anything and I can’t really sense where the light is coming from I don’t even hear my heartbeat when I get still all I feel is a little bit of wind chilliness that seeps in in the space between my jeans and my sweatshirt why it’s warmed up a little bit the floor doesn’t feel exactly dirty but I can feel little bits of dust and when I tilt my head I really feel like I’m in a round space I’m in a round space and I’m a little bit dizzy Perhaps it is enough to say here too is my studio Here and here and there here too is my studio cuz these are all exceptions of my research and my searching but I threshold between the perception and recognition a threshold between two people that
I hesitate because so many wordsjust came into my head and I didn’t use them irresponsibly like transintimacy or iridescence thingsthatImworkingon but I have noticed about iridescence or how people speak of it something to do with scintillating multiple and even queer Yes I’ve always felt it’s related to queer and that’s why that’s part of why I wanted to think about it I wanted to queer a little but intimacy and make transintimacy and make a new kind not a new kind but I want to suggest there’s this other ways of being close and perhaps that this is an exercise of transintimacy to say that that space that space there is here and here is there and I perhaps it’s another way of saying I am you and you are me interface there’s no interface interface is an excuse and that dizzying hall of mirrors that is iridescence to find the right one the real mirror the real door to there tocrossover to there
Yes
Intimacy is camouflage together
We’re gonna make no we’re not it’s not camouflage against it’s camouflage together
STAIN ONTO ME I stain onto you bleed a little bit onto you and hungrily you slurp it or something like this TRANS no sorry
The very fact that iridescence can also get read as kitsch it also I think a part of its deceptiveness its deceptiveness I’m interested in it’s like dazzling distracts you you think it’s oh it’s like about some teenage girl Kitsch camp I don’t know this one conversation I had about gay men’s aesthetics of a bygone era
All that yeah sure but the fact that it catches your eye something sinister about it How to Make it Sinister yeah not how to make it sinister but to show that it is sinister to show something for what it really is And in Fact or to show like something else that is also essential to it and that is that is also that is this exercise of wagering that This space is That space it’s to show both something about it but also the nature of space so perhaps this is it that to show the sinister component of iridescence is also to show something about the sinister
because it’s like dazzling seductive thinking about this I don’t feel annoyed or shame or whatever frustration or whatever that I seem to have gone back to what I was dealing with back in June nonono this is productive thisisgood And if I were to let me try a thought experiment if I were to encounter something and say this is part of the studio and perhaps I would think this is receipt from the studio or something but to think that it is part of the studio it begins to make us reconsider the very idea of space and lived space but we’re already doing that it is another way of manifesting virtual space you are virtually here you are basically there you are essentially there HERE you are essentially here and and there’s nothing Well first of there’s nothing radical about it I don’t think my goodness be in this space with me it is the ultimate studio visit what is a studio visit you come into this charged space
and there’s so much affect you experience mundane geometry differently it like transforms the mundane geometry and like when you hear an incredible piece of music transforms its basic the space you inhabit begins with proprioception I think and extends out and out and out it goes through so many different kinds of space my desire my desire to reach the stars the farthest star so in a way my space extends all the way that much out
and oh and this is great because I was thinking I’ve been trying to figure out a way to realise this one project that involves starlight and volcanoes and because I was interested in like the closest thing and the farthest thing and it became the oldest thing and farthest and now I’m back to thinking about it as the farthest thing and the closest the closest thing is the thing that I already have the farthest thing is the thing that I desire the ever expanding thing is also what I desire expanding or extending my studio towards you
41°18’50”N 72
°56’4” W
Recurrent performances begin to provoke the question of documentation. The recurrence of performances (of actions, of experiences, in other words recombination of time and space) parallel the question of documentation, which itself can imply primarily a couple of different things. The contemporary obsession with visibility, specifically curating visibility, the renewed taxonomic pathology. In a word: branding. The perceived need to control visibility, to be a good auto-PR person. To that end does documentation, in one sense, become an issue. But the other sense is more interesting because it is has more conceptual ramifications, it can potentially (and should) feed back into the conceptual core of the work. The relevant question basically would be: is documentation at all possibility? This might be a case in which precisely tampering with the system, as it were, changes it. One can never really document, just as one can never measure x without… This might be a digression because performances, recurrent obsessive pathology to noncommittal cynical to whimsical, do not necessarily require documentation.Indeed, the initial and sustained impulse towards performance originates from the simple hunch that “everything” is material, as in source material for a work. Make no mistake and think that this implies the whole of existence could be one intricate ready-made. That is too boring because it is too broad; it lacks a punctum. It does not seduce. Rather it is interesting to see everything as various components whose relationships shall never be precise but always potential, that everything that is available is malleable, recombinable. Please try to jump back and forth across categories and dichotomies until demarcation forgets its own provenance, abandons its name: material/immaterial, dreams/waking, life/death, performance/ documentation, writing/speaking, scribbling/mumbling, walking/dancing, etc.
So really the word that is at stake here isn’t so much documentation as it is performance. Documentation, in this case specifically transcription, itself becomes a performance. But:
I have read little to no performance theory. The vocabulary I deploy here only accidentally coincides with that idiom. By performance I just mean an idea, even a whimsy, that is made manifest through my body for some duration. There might be witnesses, but there do not need to be.
Transcription became a component to my investigations not for the sake of documentation but as a means to examine the possibilities for the material uncovered during the manifestation process.
And also:
Words are boring, for me. Rather, words become interesting when I no longer think of them as words as such. No more writing as such because that then makes writing discrete from everything else that is possible.
The problem:
It must be perennial form versus content contention. The look of things is misleading. This looks like a text, it’s inserted among other texts. It isn’t a text.
Possible solution:
Let me tell you, it is a feat of great camouflage. Intimately transparent. In other words, my own iridescence
40°45’15”N
73°49’37”W
“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not—this is the beginning of writing.”1< I’m afraid the age of manifestos is past; this is no manifesto as much as it is merely making manifest. It’s hard to tell, really, having lived mostly in a psychological if not physical isolation through the accident that is my specific existence, what’s happening in the world as it is now—now = the time and space I happen to occupy, co-occupy… But this much I can sense, the now appears to be a hyper-sedimentation, hyper-juxtaposition, etc. of making manifest.
48°12’33”N
16°22”22”E
Recurrent performances begin to provoke the question of documentation. The recurrence of performances (of actions, of experiences, in other words recombination of time and space) parallel the question of documentation, which itself can imply primarily a couple of different things. The contemporary obsession with visibility, specifically curating visibility, the renewed taxonomic pathology. In a word: branding. The perceived need to control visibility, to be a good auto-PR person. To that end does documentation, in one sense, become an issue. But the other sense is more interesting because it is has more conceptual ramifications, it can potentially (and should) feed back into the conceptual core of the work. The relevant question basically would be: is documentation at all possibility? This might be a case in which precisely tampering with the system, as it were, changes it. One can never really document, just as one can never measure x without… This might be a digression because performances, recurrent obsessive pathology to noncommittal cynical to whimsical, do not necessarily require documentation.Indeed, the initial and sustained impulse towards performance originates from the simple hunch that “everything” is material, as in source material for a work. Make no mistake and think that this implies the whole of existence could be one intricate ready-made. That is too boring because it is too broad; it lacks a punctum. It does not seduce. Rather it is interesting to see everything as various components whose relationships shall never be precise but always potential, that everything that is available is malleable, recombinable. Please try to jump back and forth across categories and dichotomies until the line drawn in the sand forgets its own particularity: material/immaterial, dreams/waking, life/death, performance/ documentation, writing/speaking, scribbling/mumbling, walking/dancing, etc.
So really the word that is at stake here isn’t so much documentation as it is performance. Documentation, in this case specifically transcription, itself becomes a performance.
But:
I have read little to no performance theory. The vocabulary I deploy here only accidentally coincides with that idiom, if at all. By performance I just mean an idea, even a whimsy, that is made manifest through my body for some duration. There might be witnesses, but there do not need to be.
Transcription became a component to my investigations not for the sake of documentation but as a means to examine the possibilities for the material uncovered during the manifestation process.
And also:
Words are boring, for me. Rather, words become interesting when I no longer think of them as words as such. No more writing as such because that then makes writing discrete from everything else that is possible.
The problem:
It must be perennial form versus content contention. The look of things is misleading. This looks like a text, it’s inserted among other texts. It isn’t a text.
Possible solution:
Let me tell you, it is a feat of great camouflage. Intimately transparent. In other words, my own iridescence.