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3 Auto Portraits - Gareth Damian Martin

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3 Auto Portraits

  A short experimental text that stages an act of internet ventriloquism. Blending appropriation and composition, it follows three ‘selfies’ of young women across the internet, selecting and elaborating on the descriptive text that appears alongside them, from messageboard confessions to forum obsessions. Performed as a solid block of impregnable text, it is an interrogation of the present - but invisible - masculine gaze of these three self-shot portraits.

Gareth Damian Martin

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Does she squirt? -  Andrea Mason

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draft product presentation performance (concept) - Draft

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draft product presentation performance (concept)

 So this is supposed to be a performance. But in the end – really – is it? We appear to be selling you something, ideas, products, values – but looking closer and underneath – are we indeed ‘selling’? Or would you in actuality be truly somebody ‘buying’? Maybe it turns out that we’re plainly giving you while we carefully avoid having anything taken – yet still need to find a way for you to obtain without the conning double-bind condescension that is to be found everywhere. 

Anyway. Since everything we’re doing is already a full-on, full-time,  real-life performance, this little window of opportunity tries to create a niche piece of a meta-context of a meta-context of a performance. Too many things are involved to describe in detail, so let’s just say this much: it is connected to and fully reflects whatever else happens outside of that window – it’s even fully in-sync with it. And it’s benignly left to every individual to explore its panoramic scope to the full.

Draft

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In Projection of - Debbie Guinnane

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In Projection of

 Opening up, and closing in and out. folding-oneself-in-wards. fo-fo-forming perfect circles, with a head up an ass eternal oooo’s. oommmmm…. total erosion of a joint union. home movie with body, disconnect. a voice straddling a hoof notwithstanding to attention. head, open mouth, saliva, gritted teeth, slug inflated tongue. words silently fossilised on pages hung behind the neck. sitting on a bed, with light illuminating legs, toes peek from beyond two orange arm-bands, reflecting light on mirrors. low hanging breasts wag, while wearing a dog cone. the object hollers into reverberations of the space. a projection on the back wall of slugs crawl along protruding legs, one leaving a trail of mucus behind. like the trailing mass of lost words knotted in swamp-like prints of a disorder stunted growth. malleable clay is unearthed beneath the folds of a silver sheet.  arousing-the-spine. landscapes reflect motions caught on the flesh. actions are tangibly dispersed by words plucked from live forms. in the reign of the unknown disintegration occurs the moment mouth bellows lines from the curvature of a collared horn. arms move, to reach out and touch a metronome.

Debbie Guinnane

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All human beings are born useless and equal in uselessness - Claudia Krappenberg

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All human beings are born useless and equal in uselessness

 The garden gnomes we know today first appeared in the 1870s in Germany and originally portrayed the figure of the hard-working miner with pickaxe and wheelbarrow.The actual figurine is however a useless ornament. 

In this performance a garden gnome celebrates her actual, ornamental self and calls for universal uselessness.

Claudia Kappenberg

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Of course we write at all the time - Robin Bale

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Of course we write all the time

 Of course, we write all the time. We read all the time. We inscribe and decode constantly, processes that cannot easily be separated. The assumption that they are separate comes from an assumption inherent in writing – that writing is done at a distance; the distance of the writer from the reader, temporarily, spatially or both. As if there was a primal closeness that was temporarily lost and must be replaced – as if there was ever a place to be, except where we are not.

It is worth cosidering distance. Do I write myself with speech, simultaneoulsy reading myself back – hearing myself? To do this, I must be somewhere else, looking back. 

If it is writing, it can be read. It can be read it can be read because it has already been written and that is how we can find a way through the thicket of cacography, misprints and spelling mistakes, stutters and burps, cries. Cacography is endemic. The world is a writing made with broken fingers that we nonetheless navigate via the recognition that we share its fractures.

A forest of cacography.

Writing with broken fingers.

The tongue stumbles, convulses.

“[…]” communication” in much contemporary discourse exists as a sort of ill formed, and differentiated conceptual germplasm. Rarely has any idea been so infested with platitudes. Commuication is good, mutuality is good, more sharing is better; these seemingly obvious dicta, because unexamined sweep too much under the rug. […] “communication” has become the property of politicians and bureaucrats, tehnologists and therapists, all eager to demonstrate their rectitude as good communicators, its popularity has exceeded its clarity.

[…] in classical rhetorical theory communicatio was also a technical term for a stylistic device in which an orator assumes the hypothetical voice of the adversary or audience; communicatio was less authentic dialogue than the simulation of dialogue by a single speaker.”

John Durham Peters “Speaking into the air”

“[Gossolalia…] this fiction of language does not cease to be taken for a luanguage and treated as such. It is ceaselessly obliged “to mean” something. It excites an unwarying impulse to decrypt and to decipher that always supposes a meaningful organization behind the sequence of sounds. The history of glossolalia is made up almost entirely of interpretations that aim to make it speak in sentences and that claim to restore this vocal delinquency to an order of signifieds. In our era in the West, from the interpretation of the glossolalia of the Pentecost given in Acts of the Apostles (“pious men of all nations” understood “in their own languages”) down to Fredinand de Saussure or to psychoanalysis, the serious and jublilant play of speech always receives a rather clever hermeneutic response that reduces the “want to say” to a “want to say something”.

The history of this equivocation goes back to relations that, since antiquity, Reason has maintained with Fable while usurping its place. The scholarly hermeneutic effects a substitution of bodies: in the very space established by Fable, it replaces the spoken story with the content of its own analysis. Western modernity developed the sleight of hand in all of its forms of ethnological, psychiatric and pedagogical exegesis as if it were necessary to write in the place where “that” speaks. Savage voices and voices of the people, mad voices and infantile voices define the places where it becomes possible and necessary to write. Voices furnish the hermeneutic with its condition of production, that is, with the sites it occupies where it converts them to text. In face of the glossolalic chain, the hermeneutic work mobilizes its scientific apparatus. But in so doing, it unveils the belief that animates it. Whereas glossolalia postulates that somewhere there is speech, interpretation supposes that somewehre there must be meaning. Interpretation searches for meaning, and it finds it because it expects it to be there, because interpretation relies on the conviction that especially where meaning apperas to be absent, it is hidden someplace, present “all the same” thus, the hermeneutic pursues its object most obstinately in those non-sense places where it postulates “secret languages.”

Michel De Certeau “Voval Utopias: Glossolalias”

It seems that the “illegible” must have a twin, but I have no common (or uncommon) word for signfying that which cannot be written upon. It is as if the idea of somehing as unreceptive to inscription was beyond thought, or as if the idea of being “a something” -  at all- is predicated on its hospitality to our writing.

It is, at first, strange that the idea of a thing that cannot be read has its part in language, but that which cannot be  written on is denied the name. But it is exactly this quality that bans it.

Robin Bale

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Tahom - Bean

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L.I.S.T.E.N.

 is a performative reading that brings together archival notes, short fictions, interrupted narratives before and after listening, fragments of memories. I am interested in the impossibility of naming sounds and the possibility of writing them nonetheless. As a text within a text within a book, L.I.S.T.E.N. is reinvented and re-assembled in every other reading and every other listening. 

Daniela Cascella

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‘The Light User Scheme’- Richard Skinner

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‘the light user scheme’

'Each poem in 'the light user scheme’ is a short, tight burst of narrative. They ask: what is happening beside you? What is going on over there? Allusive yet exact, formal and philosophical, 'the light user scheme’ works as a subtly interwoven series of oblique glances, condensed emotional intrigues and resonant images drawn from the lives we live now and the lives that go on all around us, just at the very edge of our awareness.’

Richard Skinner 

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Echoes - Christian Patracchini