Thomas Thwaites- A holiday from being human

https://vimeo.com/125170738

Reflections on Simon Clarke's recent lecture-

The lecture was focusing on ideas of anthropomorphism/anthropocentrism, which mainly centred around examples of artists either imitating or attempting to embody animals. 
I thought it was interesting that in artist's attempts to embody animals, they actually created quite complex technological modifications which seems futile to me, because humans are essentially primal and animal, and if we could just divest of these advancements we would actually re-embody the animal nature that we all have. 
Perhaps one of the advancements that would need to be released for this to happen would be the way we form and use language. 

The philosopher Wittgenstein believed that our mother tongue forms our understanding of the world, and wrote of "Language Games". "A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the “rule” of the “game” being played."


I see that as not only formative of our identity, community, and culture, but also as being constricting and inhibiting, requiring our individual natures to conform to something that is explainable and linear rather than being haptic, intuitive, experiential and responsive.

In this artist's "Holiday from being human" I wonder if what he is seeking is a holiday from the experience of humanity or a holiday from the descriptors that confine his experiences. His modification of his body seems to impose further limitations, rather than open up his sphere of experience in the way that the release

of social and lingual rules might. It seems like what he may be seeking is an old form of environmental connection that humans have in the past relied upon for survival.

New Ways of Making A Language/ Body As Lense

Language is contact, an agreed-upon formula for our interaction with the external and internal world. I'm interested in how language informs our internal, private relationship with the world- how do those who don't use our normative forms of language (Those who are deaf, those who use the whistling language "Sylbo", those with TBI or other disabilities who don't use words) form their own internal dialogue. Language can function as a mechanism for understanding what we experience- there are millions of species of flowers, but the term "flower" distinguishes them all as having common properties, and as being separate from stone, humans, or water. This idea links into Simon's last lecture, involving ecocentrism and the anthropocene. 
I'm thinking about the "Lingual Binary" and how to break free of that in workshops, inviting a completely new way of communicating with each other, maybe erring more towards music and even verbal and bodily percussion. It would be amazing to form a kind of language that didn't revolve around or originate from the vocal chords. 

"Completely New Communication Workshop"

• Start with deep breaths, then shallow. Listen to the way that the breath sounds, then listen to how the different ways of breathing feel in the body.
• Longest note. Compete, together, harmoniously in who can push a note out of their body for the longest time. We will find ourselves in accidental harmony.
• What percussive sound can you make with your mouth that doesn't use your vocal chords? Be as loud or as quiet as you like. we start one by one, built up a phonetic landscape, and dissolve one by one, so each individual sound is heard.
• Hum. Ritualised community making. Listen to each other. Be sensitive to each others note making. Find the harmony together, release it when the time is right.
• Keening. Imitating each other. Listening, carefully, and allowing the sounds to ripple through the circle, being sensitive to the beginning of new sounds.
• "Draw" portraits of each other using sound? what does the curve of the cheek sound like? what does the hollow of the nostril evoke?
• Maybe mutually deciding on sounds that represent different emotions? What does grief sound like? Try and break free from the socially agreed upon notions of what grief is or should be. Think about the actual sensation of the emotion in the body. Then draw it. Then draw your drawing in sound. 
• Draw the person opposite you without looking at the page. Then interpret the drawing using non-binary words. By this I mean that the words used should relate to a feeling that the drawing embodies- not literally, but phonetically. Read the words out as a poem. Can you take all of the vowels out of your words and then read them as a poem. Then take all of the consonants out of the words and read the vowels only, as a poem. Now put it to a tune, all together at the same time. Make the vowel sounds as long as you can. 

I wonder if through this brand new form of communication, we can enter into a new way of experiencing the world and ourselves- using new descriptors free of social conditioning or context, can we reconnect with a more intuitive and sensory way of experiencing life?

Octopuses have displaced neurons- rather than a collection of cells in a localised region (the brain), their consciousnesses are spread throughout the body, meaning that their bodies are tools for experience but also that the processing of experience happens in the body. I believe that humans are also built this way but have medicalised our own senses, meaning that rather than wholistically experiencing our environments and processing life accordingly, we apply a code to our experiences that limit our lives to the words that we use to describe them. The body, the breath, the heartbeat, is a language in itself that forms a subtle relationship between the vessel and the environment, imperceptible to the untrained eye. 

This workshop is an exploration of using the body as a lense through sound and vibration. 

Exploration of Lingual atrophy and paralinguistic communication

Exploration of Lingual atrophy and paralinguistic communication

Devolution

Unravelling

Suspension

Atrophy

Deconstruction

Of meaning

Cohesion

No longer linear or sensical, but lateral and sensory.

Ritualized sound building with the voice, the tongue, the teeth, the breath, the cheeks and lips.

Forming an elemental relationship to sound making which invites enquiry, exploration and engages with verbal degeneration.

Accessing the guttural and primal use of the voice formative in our understanding of language, and delving beyond it into the subtle aspects of communication that influence our processing of the world. It is from these foundations that children build their language and thus their understanding of their environment, it is with a ritualised and intentional practice we oscillate back to this form of phonetic expression.

Exploring lingual habits that don’t conform to English Language and social contract- the whistling of Silbo, the clicking of Xhosa, Bulgarian ‘second voice’, Irish Keening and beyond.

Resources

Andy Kaufman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3UG8jP3A8M&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=3&t=0s

6.40

Adriano Celentano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=4

Feral Children

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkX47t2QaRs&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=6&t=11s

Gaelic Lament

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLXd2wl2f-Q&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=8&t=57s

Midsommar Keening

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlxrWNQaxXs&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=9&t=0s

Limmy, fear and non verbal narrative making

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXEw1e7ii4k&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=13&t=28s

4.09

4.21

6.45

Roomful of teeth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogu7Wfg1MLY&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=15&t=0s

Xhosa, Miriam Makeba

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgb60Qsjrs&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=19&t=0s

Inuit throat singing, breath as instrument

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnGM0BlA95I&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=21&t=61s

Compositions of non articulate singing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvYiHLHoe2g&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=25&t=913s

Misunderstanding as comedy trope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9G9o4yNjwo&list=PLe1nLDAHSveiRGjynZR8DwcUP67GAbzYq&index=38&t=0s

Life without buildings, lack of conformity to narrative or meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SL4_DsUlH8

Sue Tompkins, exploration of words without context

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-vNWcc-MMU&t=27s

Viridian Ensemble

https://viridian.hotglue.me/

Artist Statement

If a child was asked to draw their internal organs, they would do so not informed by medical textbooks or whatever cursory knowledge an adult may have of human anatomy, but would draw from a perspective of sensation, imagination and visualisation. As we age, the intellect takes over and this somatic connection becomes more tenuous and less sensory.

I am artist with a continuous, holistic interest in the breakdown of meaning and reclamation of intuition. I build work from a liminal space in the mind, somewhere between feeling and thinking, connecting to the pre-intellectual understanding of the world that all humans have.

The combination of craft based skills and an ability to surrender to the unknowable allows me to make work that restages the body as a sensory experience rather than a functioning object.

An understanding of the properties and cultural context of my materials is essential to my practice, bringing me to work with terra-cotta, porcelain, bronze and wax, materials which have been harvested, dug, and used for centuries to form the artefacts from which we have built technology and society.

Paring back to these essential foundations of physical knowledge, I use hand building methods to cast, coil and pinch sculptures which embrace ambiguity in their inference of the body.

The use of these methods of making is rooted in a reverence for the traditions, cycles and rituals that humans use to bring meaning to the passage of time.

 The sculptural work is made to honour the body and the subjugated aspects of humanity, currently with a focus on the 60+ sphincters in the body. My sound building work is made with an interest in phonetic expression without the constricts of language or meaning. The ability to express from a primal place, unconcerned with social convention, relates to my ongoing research of feminism and the abject.

 This socially engaged project is ongoing with workshops, performances and experimentation, working towards a possible large scale production engaging the visual and phonetic with my interest in social collaboration.

My broad and conflicting interest in the body and religion have empowered a working process that pushes boundaries, observing irony and respect for each individual physical function.