netpoetic.com

On Tuesday here in Asheville, NC, I’m talking about my artwork and research. I will have a small installation present. It is a table on which people place objects. Inset into the table is a screen running this pseudo-random animation. The animation is of (mostly) noun phrases from late-era Emily Dickinson poems, set in a typeface derived from her own handwriting. The phrases perpetually “title” the objects, enacting cognitive slippage. (If you want to simulate the installation, just tip your monitor horizontally and set objects on top of it.) Hopefully the talk will be some kind of nutshell version of this much longer thesis paper about my work.

Then on Sunday I’m doing a telepresence performance with French artist Annie Abrahams called Double Blind (Love) (scroll down for English). Here is the full press release with all the juicy theoretical details. The performance is viewable online. Below is an excerpt from the press release where I talk about the project without explaining it:

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Following Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, Brian Massumi identifies a kind of “abstract real” body — a body “never present in position, only ever in passing.” Like Zeno’s arrow, it only “arrives” in concrete stasis once it hits the target. Until then, it is a body as trajectory. This body is incorporeal, not in the sense that it is “spiritual” or “immaterial,” but in the sense that it is still becoming what it has yet to become.

In Double Blind (Love), I am interested in how such a body-in-transit performs language over time. The project includes “live” video, but we are blindfolded. There is semiotic signification, but it is limited to a single word (love). There is a bodily presence, but it is haunted/cancelled by the absence of an other body. Musical rhythm is confounded by lags and hiccups in the uneven flow of the network. So we are left with vocal timbre, instrumental tone, melody, and the flow of lived time. What will happen during/in this minimally rigorous time-space? The piece is meant to be experienced durationally (in part or in whole). The “when” of the experience is more important than the “where,” since there is no primary/original location. selfworld.net is arguably the most “central” location, since Asheville is skewed toward my positional body and Montpellier is skewed toward Annie’s positional body. The position of our bodies in gridded space is less important than our “abstract real” becoming-bodies as they perform. Hopefully this slippage between body as positioned entity and body as becoming trajectory will be felt in the gallery spaces. “Incorporeal materialism” (Foucault). “Traveling without moving” (David Lynch).

For me, Double Blind is the most recent turn in a series of Pop Mantra performances I have been doing where I perpetually perform a single phrase from a pop song for several hours blindfolded. Repeatedly singing these phrase is a kind of (anti-)heroic/epic, brute-force attempt to break people’s hearts. Collaborating with Annie on Double Blind wonderfully complicates and problematizes that original direction. I am earnestly hoping (against all odds) to have an intimate experience, in whatever monstrous form.

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