Lygia Clarke, Irene Clairemont de Castillejo

Lygia Clarke- constructivist Brazillian artist of the 70's, interesting to me because of the work she made that encouraged some kind of intimacy, some kind of collaborative experience. I love the idea of making work that brings people together in a tender moment, without words, sharing space. This thought process partly comes from the idea of Maddie, Simon and I - sharing our breath in a small room, creating something ritualistic and tender without needed to orchestrate tenderness through conversation, touch or eye contact. Got me thinking of the broad chage of ways to feel intimate with someone, without necessarily continuing a relationship.

Lots of this also comes from a book that i read years ago called "Knowing woman" by Irene Clairemont de Castillejo, in which she talks about the idea of having a 'Meeting'- having some kind of fleeting, but intimate encounter, not necessarily with someone who is actually in your life. The intimacy can be derived from a look, a shared realisation, conversation, or none of the above. This brief meeting can be more special and memorable than whole years of relationships that are empty of 'meetings'. I love this idea of the tender moment between strangers.

Slow down

Have been thinking recently that I have maybe been overcomplicating the idea, and thinking of all the genius of simplicity that is seen in art- like Yves Klein, Duchamp, etc etc. So thinking about pulling back a little from the pressure that I have been putting on myself to create something incredible, complex etc. I recently thought about the idea of making something physical that accompanies a performance. The piece I make would still be interactive, but maybe not to the degree that I had originally been imagining. Also thinking about playing to my strengths, things I already know how to do- I already understand clay, and to a lesser degree, plaster carving, and I love and practice blind drawing, and have experimented with mobilising them before. So maybe I could explore the idea of combining these things with a movable sculpture, and bring in a performance piece which establishes the tone of my work- an experiential, meditative thing, which explores the dissolving of meaning. I feel really excited about this.
Another idea is to make some kind of instrument that is based on the inner ear, and either generates a selection of sounds or can be the origin of sound, an instrument of some kind. Could start messing around with clay and metal to make something like this. 

Hummmm

I now have a little collection of recordings of experiments that I've done with groups- choir, in workshops, and from my regular sessions with Simon and Maddie. I have been struggling to upload them to this blog which makes it difficult to write about them, because I want them to support what I am saying. 

I've been thinking about the experience of vibration, the intimacy that comes from shared aural space, the sharing of breath and the closeness that it brings, without the need for knowing each other, or even necessarily sharing eye contact.

So I had been thinking about the idea of amplifying the vibrations that happen in the circular humming exercises and making it more of a physical sensation. one way of doing that could be to build a plywood stage and put speakers underneath it, and invite people to lie on the stage floor...but there are a number of problems with that idea. If it was a raised area, it's quite likely that people would feel too conspicuous to lie down in a public space in front of everyone. It's also a limited space and would discourage people from joining the humming, which I would like to be possible too. I want to make something experiential for people, not just a sculpture that people will look at. I like the idea of work that is open to the possibility of play. I also thought about the idea of bricks that have some kind of inbuilt soundsystem- each containing a note. People can press buttons/shake the bricks/ect to produce a note in a human voice, building any combination to make a song of some kind.

This would fit really well with the continuous performance of the humming.

Reading things

http://theconversation.com/what-brain-regions-control-our-language-and-how-do-we-know-this-63318

https://www.wired.com/2016/01/phil-kennedy-mind-control-computer/

Arrival

I keep coming back to this film in my thoughts. The premise of the film is that there is an alien lifeform present on earth, and the world in is a panic, unable to communicate with the life form and understand whether their presence is malignant or benign. The army employs a famous professor of language to try and communicate with them, and she discovers that their way of using language is not phonetic, but visual, and doesn't subscribe to the system of rules which apply to human language forms, which dictate the human understanding of time. Through this discovery, her future and past self have an interaction which allows her to communicate with the species and ultimately save the world. This film powerfully references Wittgenstein's theory of language informing our understanding of life, which has been explored through schema and syntax. This is what interests me- the forming of a new culture, a new experience, through language. The thing is- we have the same vocal chords, mouth and brain, so I need to develop some kind of new formula for the description, the understanding, the digestion of the world with the tools that we all have available to us. HOW DO I DO THAT?????!?!

Still Researching

I'm struggling to make work at the moment in a physical sense, but i am doing lots of thinking and researching. I need to remember to write down every little thought I have to support this process. The point I have come to now is that I have realised that my goal of creating a new language is reliant on a number of factors that I may not be able to achieve- a new language isn't built in a vacuum, so to build a new form of communication I need to explore communicating in new ways with people. So far I have led a few workshops, but in a way I feel like a need a partner in this project. I have been exploring the breaking down of meaning, thinking that maybe through this I can find a route into the creation of new meaning. So far this has been really interesting and has made me think more about the idea of language as an experience rather than as a system of descriptors that we use to describe experience, leading me to think about making some kind of installation which changes the participants speech into an experience beyond meaning. 
I experimented with a kaos pad, but it didn't distort the voice to the extent that I want it to- everything was still very comprehendible. I like the idea of maybe making some kind of raised floor that deeply vibrates, and microphones surrounding to give an experience to the participant, maybe featuring the humming excercise continuously, in person, or maybe a recording of it. But is this meaningful enough? I suppose it can function as its own piece, not necessarily a final piece. 
I also realised that I need to spend some time with some babies to observe their interaction with meaning and sound making. It feels right now like I have lots of ideas and not many practical applications for these ideas. 

Plaster Carved Poem

With monuments to lost languages in mind, I carved the foraged poem into a plaster block, aiming to obscure the words in the carving style, further dissolving the importance of meaning in the poem. I like the idea of making something that is an extension of a long process of unwinding meaning but building something new. I want to either make some entirely new form of communication, or completely break down the forms of communication that we already have, maybe using some kind of code so that these  elaborations on the loss of meaning can be decoded- kind of like morse.

The foraged poem translated into morse code

Thinking about the forms of communication which bridge the gaps between visual and audible, or languages that have systems not formed in the same way as human verbal language, but are used by humans. Thinking about- sylbo, morse code, and ASL and Makaton.

Wondering how these languages are processed in the brain, if they use different parts to the language centre. I wonder if there is a way of stimulating this part of the brain without engaging with language in any way recognisable to human's current form of communication.

First Carving thoughts

Unfired stoneware carving- I quite like these results, but the initial carving felt kind of aimless- the image is attractive to me but is essentially meaningless. I'm interested in the breakdown of meaning, but that has to come from a meaningful place, rather than just making pictures for the sake of it. Maybe the image making could come as a response to the sound pieces, or actually using the soundwaves to make the image. Adding the poem in made it feel worthwhile, like something that could actually be found, and which would be impossible to decode, but you would want to.

Wrote the poem that Simon, Maddie and I "wrote" onto a block of plaster, going to see what is possible in carving it in a way that obscures the actual words.

Monoliths, monuments, stones sending signals

David Marshall

Jonathan Micheal Ray

Interested now in the idea of stone as some kind of signal maker or satellite dish. The idea of stones as the paper, the vehicle of ancient forms of language/ pre language- meaning itself being held in this permanence. Want to experiment with carving stone or maybe not stone, maybe stone - like materials that carry new meaning, like foam, plaster, concrete ect. Maybe could carve the poems or soundwaves into the "stone" or embed speakers or soundmaking objects inside the stone.

The multiplayer instrument

Toha -

Uana-

http://www.instrmnts.com/uana-2/

Victor Gama

What Next

I've been thinking lots about intimacy through sound- 
ways of having intimacy with a stranger without using words. I'm thinking of some kind of invention that makes a sound only when manipulated by two people at the same time. My ideal would be some kind of horn - like wind instrument that needs two people to be blowing into it simultaneously. Ideally what this mechanism would do would be to bring two people to stand opposite each other, making eye contact, being forced to take deep in- breaths, big out breaths, and feel the vibrations course through them, therapeutically, meditatively. The most crucial aspect of this is that the mechanism needs two people for it to operate. At this point I don't even know what material I would make this instrument out of. I'd like it to be big. A great example is this circular flute, but the sound of this is not actually dependant on their being multiple people, just the using/lifting of it. Made by Studio BrynJar.
I like the idea of the instrument being something cicular, so that someone could be in the middle and bathe in the sound.

Talking over each other

I'm interested in the idea of organised auditory chaos- like this obviously planned acceptance speech, where neither speech is comprehensible, tangled into the other. There is nothing that annoys me more than being interrupted by someone or being talked over. I love the idea of having a group conversation in which we all talk at each other at the same time, potentially each saying something very true to us, something that we really mean. And then potentially finding a meeting place, bringing us into an organised song or chant or something. It could function as a release- speaking out without the need to actually be heard, without the need to actually listen to anyone else, just participating in the moment and disregarding social convention. 

Words being abject

This video completely gives me the creeps. This is a great example of benign and neutral words becoming completely abject, because of the way they are spoken, because of the strangely intentional disorder that they are spoken with. This intentionality is completely context dependant- a woman in the street speaking these words frantically is not a poem or a work of art, it is an expression of an abject mental state. But here, it is a work of art willingly exploring the abject corners of the mind a, with the ability to step back out of these corners at the end of the experiment.

Like babies

A performance that seems like a return to the baby state- pre worded communication, an opportunity to explore the abject emotional states which words  force us to suppress and mould into something more accessible and attractive . I'm interested in the idea of the deep deep abject- beyond the physical, beyond the verbal, deeper into the psyche and pulling out the subjugated emotional states which cannot be explained by words and are subsequently rejected. 


Performance by Angelina and Eirini Kartsaki

Workshop Poem

This friday I hosted Simon and Maddie in a collaborative session. I led them through rituals that created a mutual intimacy that wasn't based on our relationships or who we are. First I directed their attention to their breath, with visualisations and body scans. Then we did "Corpse aerobics"- moving the body of one of the participants who was dead weight on the floor, loosening them, giving them a minimal contact massage. Then we lay on the floor, our three heads touching in a triangle, and hummed, finding harmonies together, beginning and ending intuitively. Then we keened, and finally, having reached a new level of intuitive connection, we foraged in the space between our three minds for words, and wrote a poem in the air with our voices. It felt very hypnotic and meditative and put us in a strange state. There was more that I wanted to do in the workshop but we ran out of time, but it was a good starting point for me and got me thinking about the possibility of building a collection of songs which has no clear writer, from music with no clear agent. I like the idea of an unknown human origin.

 Here is the poem we found together-

Together we will shout

Shalt out sing signs symbols shrouds onto these lines count

children know this intuitively 

thou shall not know make entry blouse forms 

I've maybe ok 

will play the game with islands far from here

chairs people proffer size how to rise over parasites

spit spirit sprickt 

terrifying beautiful but terrifying

so so long sucker 

feel my gentle skint 

I wonder where it's gone to or even if it was here

alone

like Suzanne Suzanne Suzanne Boyle 

once said

cry me a river

I've also included an early video of keening experimentation.

Babies building language

The five universal sounds of babies building language-

NEH - HUNGER

OWH - SLEEPY

HEH - DISCOMFORT

EAIR - GASSY

EH - BURP

Babies need connection to build a new language relying on eye contact and physical contact to start to translate the words spoken to them, which means that to build my new language, it needs to happen with people, I can't build a language to communicate with others unless there are others there. These babies build meaning into these sounds, but I wonder how much of the meaning comes from their body language, being opposite each other, having eye contact, using hand gestures?

Letting go of meaning

Letting go of normative forms of communication and meaning-making, gathering new forms of expression from the instinctual spaces in the bodymind. Ritualistic, shamanistic, primal, exploring the voice in transformative iterations- expression that grows and malfunctions and boils over and froths. I want to find that space and build ways of working collaboratively with body sounds... mouth, throat, body but not necessarily the vocal chords. It's not just about making sounds, it's about expressing something that words and letters and even pictures can't do, finding a meeting point between the cerebral and the primal. Forming connective moments with people that are not based on anything but sound- no need to understand each other, like each other, know each other, because in this moment we build something together that is at once meaningless and meaningful. I dream of doing sound experiments with someone who doesn't speak english. With that we would even lose instruction, the agency would be completely mutual and yet non existent. 

Marting Creed enjoying the alphabet in a new way. I was thinking about how a child builds their understanding of words and talking, and how that is built through the staccato expulsion of sounds like these. Creed feeds them into a normative musical format.

The expression of the words gives them new meaning, words that are in themselves fairly meaningless. Empassioned meaningless words.

Luxuriating in the lack of meaning, building something with a textural exploration of sound, completely dissecting language to create something that sounds abject, bizarre, and not beautiful.

Like a stream of consciousness, completely lacking in any common thread between words, Sue Tompkins makes a landscape with the sensory experience of words and vocal sounds, rather than the meaning of sounds.

Finding poems in the fragments

Tearing up private diary entries and finding poems in the fragments-

This beautiful somewhere,

The sunshine I love, my bike, I excite. Feel good, live somewhere, stomach strong and love feeling joyful.

For my healthy person for I want, I feel, I want, I am, and him, socially actually stimulate feel loved and know.

Know who I am. Balanced life, abundance. 

To collaborate, I feel passion. 

I want learn, get my drivers license somewhere evil.

Mouth, sense of self and. And love. 

Forced Collaboration

"Forced Collaboration"
"Forced Friendship"
"Friend Tape"

I was playing and being silly with Nathan Henton (2nd year) in his studio, and we taped his hands to mine to play the guitar together, as one. It kind of worked, but we couldn't play the guitar with the ease of one hand. This got me thinking about the possibility of working in a performance context with some kind of binding that ties two bodies together, entering into the liminal space between the two participants' autonomy. I'd like to make some kind of FCC- Forced Collaboration Costume, that combines the two bodies in a constricting way that doesn't allow either body to have complete control over the situation. There would be a list of tasks to carry out as one- perhaps in the normative ideals of making art- we would sing a song, paint a picture, make a hand built pot, write a story. Everything would be improvised. This performance activity would require a complete surrender of control by both participants.

Experiments

The experiments above were exploring the possibilities of clay casting further, trying out small sculptures filled with latex and smashed. The results were kind of interesting because the latex sunk in the middle leaving an interesting sculptural form, but it doesn't excite me, partly because the forms remain covered in the clay and coloured by it, instead of the smashed clay revealing a kind of pearl or gem, as I had been envisioning. 

I started thinking about the idea of microscopic cells, connected to the skin or veins or stomach lining like thorns, thinking of the huge importance of the tiniest cells that populate the body, like bacteria on the skin or the mitochondria, or the way that the reproducing white blood cells swell the glands in response to malignant bacteria. I had the idea of handmaking many small, slightly differing cells in gold or silver, piercing a handmade flesh, but I also worry that the work could err into territory of being too decorative- I think there is a fine balance between an invitation for engagement and something that is too attractive to be really interested in. I don't want to make something that would look beautiful in your living room, I want to make something that opens up a line of enquiry.

Still also exploring the idea of casting the tube, making a mass of writhing passages to carry the bodies information. I was trying out plaster and algenate casting but the brittleness doesn't appeal to me. It feels like it uncomfortably straddles the natural and the artificial, when at the moment I want to be making work that has a material significance. Through making this though, I thought of the idea of layering latex on the outside of a long clay sculpture and smashing it on the inside, shaking, pulling or melting it out. Interesting to think of the actual making of the piece becoming somewhat performative in itself.