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.