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RECITATION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEWqkb0t6dE&t=166s

Aperghis is a Greek composer living in France who often uses computers and technology as mediating devices. This is an early work of his from 1978, a cumulative/additive text-work for performance by a singer/speaker, fully notated rhythmically but without specified pitches but most often performed by solo female singers in recitals.

A kind of delirious nonsense that still manages to create a sense of “character” even if you cannot understand the words

It starts with the central phrase of the sentence and then phrases are added before and after the central phrase until the entire phrase can be articulated and then the last word is “precieuse” (precious)

It has the character of fragments of overheard conversation subjected to an inappropriately formalised scheme. It appears sampled from “real life” but heightened and distanced at the same time by the rhythmic structure especially.

It also makes reference to the 19th century operatic tradition of the “mad scene” (a display of vocal virtuosity associated with hysteria, speed and high notes): paradoxically the title refers to the narrative parts of conventional operatic form where characters “speak” in music with minimal or no accompaniment. Because it is more a piece of “music” than a piece of “theatre” the artificiality of vocal production is part of the effect of the work and this is particularly visible in the laughs that punctuate the piece.

It clearly plays with the mutual transmutation of sense into nonsense and vice versa. It connects to the graphic/mathematical language experiments of “Oulipo” or the “Lettristes” of the late 20th century. It is obviously influenced by the series of vocal works that Luciano Berio wrote for his then wife, the amazing singer Cathy Berberian in the 1950s.

Two phrases “comme ca” (“like that”) and “gramme par gramme” (“gram by gram”) stand out as “pillars” of the structure because they are relatively clear and rhythmically distinct. “Gramme” is also a transverse, cross-lingual reference to “letter” in Greek

Many different performances of it on Youtube by men and women - Benedicte Davin gives a very intense, slightly menacing performance of it, complete with actions whereas Sarah Maria Sun makes more of the humour of it in her video despite being less “accurate”

A big influence on some of the ways I am going to be working with text and (in)comprehensibility of text in future even though I was far more influenced by Beckett’s short plays like “Not I” and the text-works of Chris Mann in my last performance.

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Brain Ferneyhough: “Time and Motion Study II” for cello and electronics (1973)

This is a work that is a big influence on me. My cello performance in class for the final assessment made constant reference both to its sound world and to its tone of frustrated pressurised grappling with the impossible. The piece is ridiculously difficult to perform and any performance is necessarily “inaccurate” as the player cannot possibly articulate every level of musical material equally well. There are passages that split the two hands from one another and specify different actions that conflict with one another. There are two tape delay loops that repeat phrases back to the cellist from an alienated position and with distorted timbre creating a sense of overload, entrapment and confusion. Later in the piece the cellist vocalises with a ring modulated contact microphone attached to their throat, with phonemic material derived from Antonin Artaud. 

In my last performance where I brought a cello into class and used it to perform a dialogue with the “tape” piece I had made. The “fixed” media derived from superimposing the vocal shapes of my text onto a semi-improvised texture I had made from cello recordings made whilst listening to the original text on headphones. I could not easily hear what I was playing so I modelled the rhythms of the speech from my laptop. I was most concerned to match the phrasing and clustering of sound events in the computer-spoken text. I used a “vocoder” which superimposes the rhythmic and spectral characteristics of speech onto the sonic material of the cello texture: making the cello “speak”. In a certain sense the speech then became a form of notational guide for the performance itself. What was important here was the blurring of the borderlines between “fixed” and “free”, between “immediate” and “mediated”, between speech as sound and speech as communication.

Performing under duress is a great source of intensity of expression and I greatly admire the way that Ferneyhough uses the desire of the performer for “accuracy” and “perfection” faced with such complex musical material and technical challenges against themselves. The work ends up demonstrating its own impossibility, ends up being about the barriers to “efficiency” it sadistically puts in the way of the performer. This is a kind of piece where you could question “was it actually performed or only approximated?” Given the complexity of the work any performance will be an approximation so the piece as a “performance” only barely “exists” at all. 

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Samuel Beckett: “Not I”

Performed by Billie Whitelaw 

I come back to this astonishing piece again and again. It is a huge influence on me. The sense of pressure, a suppressed screaming, the laughter, the questioning of the self, the confusion of tense, pronoun and subject, the staging with a small mouth high above the audience with the face blackened and erased leaving only an endlessly chattering voice. 

So many things about this work fascinate me. I admire how it is presented as if this voice were going on forever and the play that we see and hear is a fragment of a larger, unknown whole. The mouth mutters under her breath until the sound level reaches a certain point. The voice needs to be amplified, quite possibly not just for audibility but also for precision and speed, it being easier to speak clearly and at high speed when not concerned to project into an auditorium. A more “projected” theatrical way of speaking would make the piece less doubtful, less questioning in character. The repeated phrases “What?” or “Imagine that?” would have a very different character without technical mediation with microphone and speakers. 

Its rhythmic quality is something I find very inspiring as well and I still find only Billie Whitelaw gets that right. It shares this with much of the music I love and my own work as well, little bursts or packets of events, bundled together into little groups without ever building into "the big phrase”. Instead there is a kind of micro-phrasing, an obsessively detailed intricacy without any overarching coherence because that “coherence” is what the work is searching for and necessarily failing to find. 

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PERFORMING/PERFORMED

Peggy Phelan writes in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

“Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.”

An interesting set of claims. I would argue that what Phelan calls “performance” here is possibly better described as “performing”, the action of performance rather than the performance as a temporal form or as an event. Emphasising “performing” over what is performed in the performing does indeed place the necessarily fugitive, unidirectional action in a position of “immediacy”. It is also not entirely clear what kind of conceptual work the term “present” is doing in that first sentence. What is clear is the rhetorical work it is doing: it sets up performance as a kind of life as distinct from the “death” represented by recording or reproduction. In some ways it is as if Benjamin never wrote his famous essay, with a presentation of performing, the act of performing, as a kind of untouchable directness betrayed subsequently by technique. Is there a kind of naturalism being smuggled in by the back door here? This argument Phelan is making here is not too far away from the Platonic denigration of writing as dead technique as distinct from the living presence of the speaking voice in the same shared space as the listeners.

What I would argue then is that in a performance there is the performing which is simultaneous with but somewhat distinct from the performance performed. The “performance” in itself is something of a virtuality, a memory perhaps. Last night I saw a performance. What does this mean? I saw something being performed, but the thing I saw was not the thing being performed but the performance itself as a kind of grouping or set of phenomena. What I now think of as the performance I saw is something virtual, conceptual, mediated by my memory, my memory of my expectations, my memory of what I felt etc. The performing-event has ended, vanished and disappeared but “the performance” can remain without being reproduced, it is now just virtual, imaginary, a mere impression of having seen/heard a performance. Thinking of mediation as an objective or substantive externalisation of that memory/imaginary trace of the performance implies getting over the dichotomy of life/death or directness/betrayal that is being utilised here by Phelan. 

She wants an escape-hatch from mediation, reproduction and technique but every attempt to delineate one ends up by inserting it back into the economy of the always already mediated. It is as if she wants to preserve a moment of performance without objectification or mediation: it is retained as a “thing” only virtually, imaginatively. But she runs up against the paradox that in attempting to define a non-objectifiable act of performing as distinct from the performance that is performed or recorded this becomes emptier and emptier: it can only be specified negatively after the act itself, it was what escaped from the attempt to grasp it and in this way it is “betrayed” yet again. The rhetoric of “betrayal” implies the possibility of a “just” or “faithful” presentation of the performance in its performing but no such thing can be possible once you have defined mediation in these terms.

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SECOND REFLECTION

In the earlier versions of my piece the focus was on me as a “soloist” and my laptop as “accompaniment”. In the earlier versions I had “Alex”, one of several voices in my laptop operating system, calmly and flatly read a text I prepared and mutilated at high speed against which I was somewhat powerless. In the first draft performance I attempted to transcribe the rhythmic qualities of the voice into movements of a pink sharpie on rough paper. In the second performance I varied the setting and the mode of presentation.

For this last version of the piece I decided to take the basic structural metaphor of the piece and materialise it on an entirely conventional instrument, the cello.

With this last performance I took the text spoken by “Alex” in the earlier versions and changed the timing of some events, added pauses, added a couple more “pause” vocals and re-recorded the laptop speaking. I ran this recording from the laptop into my headphones then, in the bathroom as a matter of fact, I improvised a response to the text on the cello, recording that in the bathroom. Then I used the cello recordings, overlapped and complexified a little with processing in Audiomulch as if they were a “field”, a flat, textured but essentially static strand of sounding time. I then used a vocoder to impose the rhythmic and spectral characteristics of the computer “voice” onto the sound of the cello recordings: the goal was to make the cello “speak” as well now. I made a recording of the resulting “speech” and then used that as a basis for improvised responses in the class room presentation with solo cello sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradicting what was happening on the “tape”.

This is, as Michael pointed out, a recursive process that has no obvious end and could continue. This is indeed what I have been exploring, even to the extent of having one voice supply the rhythmic articulation for another in a different language.

Towards the end of the piece the computer speaking is itself subject to interference, chopped up, granulated, re-assembled into still unclear fragments of text. At the same time the cello seeks to re-assert itself, even attempting something like a “melody” but that too fails.

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ON GROYS

Boris Groys refers to the famous Walter Benjamin essay in his book “in the Flow” when discussing the relation between the mechanical reproduction of modernity and the contemporary multiplication of identical reproductions in digital form. According to Benjamin the “aura” of the art work was linked to its productive context, the time and place and networks of meaning in which an object was produced. The copy of the artwork lacks the “authenticity” of the original; its presence in the “here and now”.

Benjamin writes: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its here and now, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be ... The 'here' and 'now’ of the original constitute the concept of its authenticity, and lay the basis for the notion of a tradition that has up to the present day passed this object along as something having a self and an identity.”

That “self identity” of the object is precisely what much contemporary work denies, destroys, doubts, deconstructs. 

According to Groys it was the avant grade of the early 20th century that “wanted to completely break wirh nature in the name of the new industrial world, and with the mimesis of nature in the name of inventing new, unnatural forms of art and life. That is why the main artistic device of the avant-garde was the operation of reduction. Reduction opens a perspective on the most effective reproduction- it is always easier to reproduce something simplified than something complicated.” (Groys p.142)

The modernist principle of inventing new unnatural forms of art and life is itself predicated upon a focus upon technique: the new forms were to be found by patiently breaking and remaking aesthetic techniques. It was not just a matter of new “objects” but of new ways of intervening in the necessary mediation of experience by technique. I use “technique” to translate the Greek concept of “techne” which includes language, art, machinery, tools, etc. It is a conceptualisation of technology as directed action upon a thing (without limiting “thing” to the world of stable solid objects). If, as Hegel demonstrates, there is no “immediate experience”, if even the utter givenness of the world of sense is already mediated by language in particular then mediation is more than a contingent feature of our interactions with reality but is rather an entirely necessary moment of that process. If mediation is necessary, unavoidable, then the invention of anything at all, any aesthetic innovation or presentation necessarily involves a passage through the mediation of technique. I am denying here that there ever is anything unmediated and positing that mediation is prior to what is mediated. I am positing that our belief that mediation mediates the immediate is capable of being thought only because mediation has already brought that which is mediated into existence: this is a kind of bootstrap ontology. 

Think of it this way.

We can point or gesture towards what exists and say “this”. Were someone to ask us “what is present for you?” we could point and say “this”, we could draw arrows or wrote the words on a card and put it next to the thing we are indicating. Now we could not specify that presence without the detour through language, without the empty signifier “this”. Pointing to the “this” as immediate necessarily involves mediating it: the “immediacy” is not at all that but rather a kind of transcendental illusion. We have the mediated in front of us and fashion into existence a prior “immediacy” that only means what it means (the virginal innocence of the given) after its own mediation. The “before” is an effect of the “after” because what was before the “after” is only what it was afterwards.

The text of my pieces this semester played with this constitutive ambiguity by constantly speaking of “this” as if it were undecided whether the “this” referred to the place and time of writing, the place and time of recording or the place and time of performance. By bringing into conflict writing, recording and performance I was attempting to de-realise everything, dissolve everything into a state of uncertainty, doubt, confusion. I was after a kind of linguistic and sonic vertigo.

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INTERMEDIATION

I want to propose a concept: “intermediation”. My problem with the concept of “mediation”, especially as regards the documentation of performance involves the temporal and spatial coding of the immediate. “Mediation” suggests, despite itself in a sense, that there was something immediate, prior to mediation, prior to the “fall” into representation or language. “Mediation” immediately evokes a “this” of sensation that would be an origin or a source of the mediated. This means as well however that the “immediate” is mediated by its subsequent mediation. “The immediate” was already mediated.

Thinking of the immediate and the mediated as constitutively mediated amongst themselves (that is, that there are only the immediate and the mediated because of their constitutive distinction from one another) is a way of thinking the two as aspects of the one process: intermediation. “intermediation” could be thought of as implying a mediation without any “immediate” to have been mediated. It is a thinking of mediation as primary, prior to the constitution of that which is mediated. It is a thinking of mediation not as distortion, destruction or as diffusion but as constitutive and productive. 

Thinking of aesthetic technologies (film, video, sound recording, staging, mise en scene) as intermediate means seeing them as already mediated, already in a system of virtual relations prior to any particular sensation or phenomenon arising or being produced.

Thinking of technology as intermediation means seeing even the most “unmediated” of performances (think of a performance that occurs once only, with no audience, no documentation other than the indication that such a performance had occurred: it would still be mediated by the absence of its own documentation or “preservation”) as already mediated, already relational and therefore just as far from the “immediate” as anything else is.

Here’s another way of thinking about this: if the “immediate” is produced as an effect of mediation and there is nothing other than mediation then perhaps we could think of this as a kind of “immediation”, mediation that denies itself, limits itself in order to produce as if by magic, the effect that before itself there was some kind of immediacy, directness, simplicity.

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This semester over the course of several performances (of differing degrees of success moment to moment, I would say, judging only from what I heard and/or felt during them) I wanted to explore ways of foregrounding mediation as a concept but also as a process: mediation implies for me an almost allegorical sense of form, substitution, cryptology, variation and distortion, noise and entropy, degradation and decay but also production and presentation. 

The common thought of “mediation” is that it is a secondary, merely derivative, supplementary thing added to something that does not require it: “the immediate”. Now this, the concept of the “immediate”, is precisely what Hegel is attacking in that first section of the Phenomenology that inspired my own, highly mediated, take on it.

What would “the immediate” be then? It would be the concrete, certain and non-abstract, undeniable, indubitable, absolutely real and temporally present data supplied to us by our senses, without delay or distortion, without differentiation neither in space nor in time. 

Hegel writes: “The concrete content, which sensuous certainty furnishes, makes this prima facie appear to be the richest kind of knowledge, to be even a knowledge of endless wealth – a wealth to which we can as little find any limit when we traverse its extent in space and time, where that content is presented before us, as when we take a fragment out of the abundance it offers us and by dividing and dividing seek to penetrate its intent. Besides that. it seems to be the truest, the most authentic knowledge: for it has not as yet dropped anything from the object; it has the object before itself in its entirety and completeness. This bare fact of certainty, however, is really and admittedly the abstractest and the poorest kind of truth. It merely says regarding what it knows: it is; and its truth contains solely the being of the fact it knows.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, S91).

Here Hegel is pointing towards the fact that the sensuous presence of the object before us, our consciousness of perceiving the object before us, the sharing of a spatio-temporal frame with the object are all on the face of it absolutely certain and concrete knowledge. But all we have determined in thought is that we are perceiving something before us. We have not done anything other than ascribe existence, presence, given-ness to it. This seems to be immediate. When the object shows itself to us we take it up immediately, right there and then, in the same here and now that the object occupied. This is what “the immediate” might be like.

But how would we indicate the existence of the immediate? We could point to it and say “this”. As Hegel writes: “It is – that is the essential point for sense-knowledge, and that bare fact of being, that simple immediacy, constitutes its truth. In the same way the certainty qua relation, the certainty “of” something, is an immediate pure relation; consciousness is I – nothing more, a pure this; the individual consciousness knows a pure this, or knows what is individual.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, S91). So Hegel is not denying that such an immediacy occurs. He is denying that it is capable of forming relations or any kind of cognitive framework without entering into mediation: the immediately given simply is, and its being is all that we can say about it without mediating it somehow. Even further than this Hegel then goes on to show that the specificity and particularity promised to us by the word “this” which seems to point directly and immediately to the real also empties it of content because that same “this” can be used right now while I am writing here and it means nothing like the rose that I pointed to yesterday saying “this”. The repeatability of the word “this” in different contexts is simultaneously what makes it function as an index and denies that very function: the “this” can “point” to the real only because it fails to properly grasp the real. In other words, the thing that we point to and apprehend perceptually and which we can point to saying “this” in an attempt to capture its particularity escapes from us in the very act we make of attempting to capture it with such an empty term as “this”. So, argues Hegel, the only way to properly grasp reality is through the mediation of language that will have already commenced in any case.

This is a classically dialectical move that Hegel makes: start with what appears as the immediate, reveal that it is not at all immediate but already mediated, then make mediation itself the only way to actually arrive at your “immediate” starting point. The appearance of “circularity” is important: the circularity of mediation, that it turns out what was thought to be the origin of the process is actually another result of it, is a source of dizzying linguistic manoeuvres in Hegel and a constant source of inspiration for my own work.

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THIS

I think one of those times that I first fell in love with philosophy was in second year General (ie. continental) Philo at Sydney Uni (1987) reading the Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit for the first time in class. In some respects it’s not a work whose system I can take terribly seriously as a whole. But some parts of it, like the first sections of it concerned with the “this” and meaning effectively paved the way in part for a lot of structuralist ideas about language and reality and their mutual mediation. There are parts like those first sections that are dazzling vertigo-inducing feats of linguistic manipulation. The sentences go on forever. There are strange metaphors that sometimes obfuscate whatever he might have meant. Even though Hegel, and especially perhaps the more “romantic” younger Hegel, has long been considered “idealist” there are also very materialist readings of Hegel made later by of course Marx, Lukacs, Adorno, Markus

The section about the “this” fed directly into my very first piece in this course.

It is in some ways almost impossible for a native English or French speaker to fully grasp what Geist (translated above as “spirit” but that’s inadequate too) means to a German or would have meant or resonated with in Hegel’s own time. Delightfully, and in a way totally Hegelian in character, the historical distance makes comprehension difficult but also in that makes you realise how reading and interpreting anything is always going to be a matter of transference, translation, carrying-over. Given the influence the text has had, the degree of “second-hand” exposure one has to the ideas just from being around theoretically or philosophically-minded people, it is sometimes difficult to read the text without seeing it as a patchwork of quotations of later thinkers. I came to Hegel from an existing interest in both Marx and Freud (I got interested in Freud around the same time I worked out why I really liked the Village People and wondered why I loved the music of Boulez so much). The “master-slave” conception of the dialectic was something I had already come across but reading it in the context of the book as a whole made it merely part of the growing universal and cosmologically-scaled scope of the thought. The Phenomenology attempts to describe and perform a spiralling virtual anthropology of consciousness from “mere” sense-perception all the way outwards to the stage of world history. 

It’s sometimes fascinated me that he starts with the idea or, more accurately, the practice of using the word “this” because that elementary givenness of the “this” that is here and now as I might point and say “this” is something that seems like a basic, fundamental granting of some kind of being, presence, existence or presentation to something: what is is what you could point to and say “this”. 

“What gives?” 

“. . . this”

“This” also sounds like an answer to a silent question: the question “what is?”

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TECHNICS & TIME

This book by Bernard Stiegler is incredibly difficult (I would put it at Hegelian level) and I would not say that I fully “understand” it as yet but it has become central to my thought and practice. It is a radical re-interpretation of the concept of an “essence of technology” or “technics”, derived of course from yet another interpretation of the Greek concept techne which is of pivotal importance to thinking about art, especially one that necessarily and therefore self-consciously uses many different forms of technics as material, form, content, rhetoric, context, etc. This is not just because “techne” can be translated as “art” but because “techne” is a way of thinking about being itself as something made, something brought into being (not in the creationist sense) through being disclosed

It was upon reading this book that I realised that my constant usage of a kind of variation process, involving distortion and substitution, in my audio and my visual work could be connected to an interest in the question of technics. 

Technē is of course the root of our modern conception of “technology” and it is tempting sometimes to think this is why it is often thought that technē is opposed to physis, that the terms form a binary opposition, easily turned into a violent or destructive heirarchy. This backwards projection, which is hard to avoid, of a specifically modern conception of “technology” onto a Greek understanding of technē is something Heidegger specifically warns against repeatedly. This is why for instance he says that the essence of technology is nothing technical. In other words, the essence of technology, which for him means the way that technology comes to be, what its way of coming to presence is, cannot be something itself mechanical, technical or instrumental but must be found somewhere else and I think for Heidegger it was actually in art, in what the work of art does, what work it does, that he finds an “essence of technology”. He later names it “das Gestell”, the “enframing” (but also “the set-up”) of beings. In a celebrated essay on the origin of the work of art he later describes how a Greek temple does not describe or represent anything but instead makes the world present as world by jutting out into it, making a kind of productive tear in the fabric of the world in order for the world itself to come to presence as what it already was as it were. Given that the “Kunstwerk” essay was written shortly after the start of the Third Reich, with Heidegger himself commencing classes with a salute it is frankly horrifying to read that for Heidegger the establishment of a state was just such an action as the building of a temple with Corinthian columns and classical proportions. The “building of a world” can sometimes and in this case did necessarily imply the complete destruction of an existing one. 

Now that modern conception of technē as being opposed to physis is something Heidegger resisted, despite the romantic and homespun nostalgia for traditional peasant life that animates his writing from this point onwards. Sometimes Heidegger’s writing can seem as if the pre-Socratics were the figures in Millet paintings and these writings were their thoughts as they picked through the fields. 

According to Heidegger the standard way of thinking for the past two millennia since Aristotle has been that the product of technē was essentially inert, lifeless and neutral, lacking any capacity to genuinely move itself in a directed way, the way even plants grow and flower. Life is movement and physis is what contains in itself the possibility of change whereas in technē a maker is required. The product of technē is not alive in any meaningful way.

Instead in a sense Aristotle in the Physics assigns technē to the realm of the mineral and the earth by way of the human of course. The archetypical example of technē in the Aristotelian sense could be found in the human habit of making tools: fire, spears, clubs, axes, knives, hammers, chisels, etc. In the beginning was the tool, if not perhaps the weapon, many of which can be considered a technical mimesis of nature’s bountiful stingers, fangs, teeth, claws, . From this perspective tools are made, at first by repurposing then modifying or imitating things found in nature, to supplement a “deficiency” in his own nature. “Man” lacks something nature has but can make up for that lack so is at the same time deficient and superior vis-à-vis nature. In defining “man” as a rational, speaking, tool-making animal this vein of thought places “him” firmly apart in fact from both physis and technē. This idea of technologies as prosthetic supplements for a lack in what “nature” provided “us” has proved a durable one and is still at play even in the post-romantic denunciation of the idea that nature has “denied us” anything at all, that in effect a return to a state of harmony with nature and the renunciation of advanced technologies is what would solve all modern problems.  

Now it’s just this view of “technology” as something secondary and merely prosthetic, something forgettable, that fuels and is paired with what Derrida called “logocentrism”, the elevation of the voice as centre and generating matrix of signification, the denigration of writing, especially writing machinery as secondary, supplementary, excessive, inessential, or misleading. This view animates much of the privilege accorded to the “live” and the “immediate”. Logocentrism conveniently forgets that language itself is a kind of technology, even a kind of machinery: “human expression” in musical or other codified languages is relatively easily simulated with machines of a moderate level of sophistication. Logocentrism also animates the view of documentation of performance as “secondary” or “merely derivative” of an originally presence, a poor copy of a fullness, a shallow pool by comparison with “the real thing”. This conception of technology in practice usually just means that technologies that are ingrained enough into habit stop feeling anything like machinery and more like hats, clothing or jewellery, things with a borderline place relative to our bodily limits can take on the appearance of “second-nature”. Then from a standpoint closer to that “second-nature” a newer technology looks all the more technological in character: analogue vs digital, vinyl vs CD. This is of course McLuhan’s hot or cold media as well.

In a strong sense, it is the view that I believe is popularly held of technology, especially musical ones: people think of a synthesiser as “technological”, but not a violin, most people would deny the name “technical” to the voice, or language, most people would deny the utter mediated nature of even the most “direct” perception and that those perceptions are mediated technically. This conception of technology, which can pass sometimes into outright luddism, is usually accompanied by its constitutive other, the Rousseauist fantasy of untouched, raw, pre civilised nature (something often found amongst adepts of “improv”).

It is easy to see how it can become something like a matter of life or death because they form the terms under which the concept of technology is itself so often thought: virgin nature and the killing machinery of civilisation, the live recording and the edited studio recording, the people and intellectuals, the living body and the dead machine, the living natural soul and its enemy the modern machine body, or today, the body’s limits overcome by willpower or diet or surgery or faith or war or fashion. All play on the same opposition between a vital, living, spontaneous, somewhat supernatural kind of “nature” in order to oppose its murder by machines of living death, engaged in repetition, mechanisation, replacement of the human. 

Something like the opposite idea animates what Walter Benjamin says about what film does to performance in editing in his own celebrated “Kunstwerk” essay. There he says the director, editor, in constructing the performance the audience finally sees, performs a kind of surgery on the subject, cuts and sutures a simulacrum of the performance from things filmed on different days, sometimes by body-doubles or stunt-people, rehearsed, repeated, stretched compressed, etc etc. “Performance” in this case is much more like an assemblage or construction, a dialectical, technologically and ideologically mediated one, held together sometimes only by the charisma of the “star”: I think Benjamin was wrong to think that mechanical reproduction necessarily lead to a shrinking or fading of the auratic dimension, I think film and especially narrative film has entirely retained an “auratic” dimension. In other respects I am far closer to Benjamin, I remain fascinated by the conceptual and aesthetic potential unleashed by undercutting technologies of illusion and verisimilitude. 

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FIRST REFLECTION

That piece was interesting to perform, a lot of decisions were spontaneous, which is is a big part of my work. I like playing with what I am doing, always trying to look at it from different angles, including writing. i thought i could use my nerves to my advantage by overdoing the stressed look as I struggled to keep up with what was being said and I’m a terrible hand writer so I ended up just scribbling. that was another spontaneous decision I made on the fly and (if you’re still there with me right now thanks the style is part of all of it ok well I will start again) the text itself is a kind of fractured version of the first chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. i was very happy I found a way of playing with text this time that kept just-enough sense now and then. i manipulated the rhythms of the recorded part of the piece using punctuation and using speed and velocity to manipulate the ability to understand what was said

next i want to find a way to cut up my own speech live and on the fly as it were with the laptop as an equal partner in dialogue

i never would be able to do these works without the use of technology but I don’t actually aim for a high-tech aesthetic, i’m too interested in failure and error for that

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MEDIATION

I am not there 

now I am here

writing

this

nothing other than this

what does this mean then

thus as it 

as it was meant to as it be

was not then

wasn’t it, was not then it

was not the certainty that is

they then therefore them then are already plural

that there

might as well be have been will have been there already

any-other-now – other than this that which is or will be will have been by the time you are there then

is now here with any other than

here and now there

nowhere here whatever this is or was here

once and yet ever only that there over and over again

that is as long as there was

how it seems to point at that then what I am looking at right 

now is this “THIS”

it is night now it was raining

speak

then rain will have fallen

write

just now then

listen

and yet it is nothing not there therefore

already then (pause)

read

how given this 

now

in the night right then

now here in the night

this now, this side of it maybe

as I write

somehow

which of them

now no “where” to hear

and not

“now”

(here and

now)

but that other

now

given that

now

write that

now

I can write only right

now - THIS!

but that “this” is never just this is it not

that this

allows me to in all senses

the two sensations of the

now

the self-erasure of the sense in all possible senses

all senses of the word and it

because that is

that is the place

really what we are talking about here

isn’t it

now

the word “this” holding

that little world unfolding in the word “this”

but hollow and devoid of both, each 

now the void of the other, the not-quite of the other 

now night

it isn’t an is or isn’t however

not right 

now

is it is 

now, it gives 

now

might as well be here 

now

write it 

now

burn the paper

about the reading

for on the other side of

immediately

listen

it is night right 

now

inside here

it was raining just 

now

I am not there 

now

when you are here 

now listening to me

read what I am writing 

now when I am not writing at all right

now  

I am reading instead

but what I will or will have read 

now is right here at this very moment

(where they are anymore?)

listen

right

now as in right this moment when I write

“this moment”

not right

now here and

now with you but last night when

I am while writing this

(pause)

it is night

now

and tomorrow will be tomorrow night

now

(pause) and this doesn’t even mean that tonight is last night meaning tomorrow is today it could be last night whenever wherever right 

now right

now as you hear this because you   

might    not

be     you

later on

it also doesn’t mean that this is not last night either

unquote”)

now (“quote

I tried to listen out for just

because we know

now when it was

now it’s gone

then that

now becomes a then when we know when it was

(pause) listened for just

now and the no where there then

when you are right there or

listen (pause)

I know what comes next.