Thank you for sharing this Annie,
I have a question (I enjoyed reading the last Bakhtin quote about voice).
Do you think that voice is also conveyed in the same way in the written
word?
I ask, because I recently participated in a residency in which a writer
was partnered with a voice coach. I was lucky enough to have a session
with the voice coach and feel that the extended range of voices that I
accessed through this session have added range to my thought and writing.
Ruth
On 03/03/16 10:48, Annie Abrahams wrote:
light
This is a copy of my latest blogpost. I want to share it here too,
because it might be of interest to some of you who are not connected
to me otherwise.
(Next performance will be March 19th 20h in Im_Flieger in Vienna)
Take care
Annie
We started out with three very different meetings (See turbulence.org
<http://turbulence.org/commissions/besides/>) and then decided to
continue to explore one of them further; we restricted ourselves to a
theme and made the project on “meeting online =” also a research on
the relation between objects/things, text and the voice.
We began experiencing and experimenting the performances as *an other
method of thinking together about both object agency and online
collaboration*.
– We stage a collaborative performance project online.
– Meeting online =
– We are meeting online, trying to get more grip on what is actually
happening in online webcam communication.
– This is a research project where we use performance as a tool.
– Using performance as a tool, is a way to create a common responsibility.
– We use an interface which doesn’t permit that either of us two can
become dominant, an interface that has flaws, glitches, bugs, an
interface that cannot be domesticated.
– We are not developing a performance – our performances are part of a
research process.
/My performances are a research tool, not an object ansich, not
something to show off. /(See allergic-to-utopias
<http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-058/annie-abrahams-allergic-to-utopias/>)
*But the audience? Why should they be interested, What is it for
them?* *They can think with us!*
So far :
/besides, the person I am becoming /1/06 2015
There are :
– *the interface *: two webcam images side by side, one
managed by Martina, one by Annie. Both images have exactly
the same size and presence there is no power relation. *
– a text *: a remix, done together, of phrases read and
heard, collected over one month by Annie and Martina
individually. We determined before who would read what part
of the text.
– *objects* : things : we will not use personal objects,
things with a very specific personal history and they should
not be too beautiful, as ordinary, casual, daily as possible.
What did we mean by that, why? We didn’t want things to be
symbols. We almost entirely excluded also natural objects as
flowers, leafs etc., because, they are already alive on
their own and so are too symbolically loaded too.
The objects were placed in front of the webcam at before
undetermined intervals.
– *the hands* : hands who lay down the objects carefully.
– *two voices* : as neutral as possible. Because the
interface merges the sound of both webcams in one stream,
there is no way for the audience to distinguish if a voice
comes from the one or from the other webcam. They can only
hear that there are two different voices, *there is a dialogue*.
/What dialogue? Who is talking to who, who is addressed? Who receives?
The objects replace the faces we are used to see in webcam images. We
see them in close up – they become actors – we can believe them to be
intimate, to have a relation. They too have a / are in dialogue. They
too are elements being in the event. (1)/
*This is where the two subjects meet. This is where we meet.*
In /besides, the city is not a tree,/ 22/07 2015 we used a
different, more narrative, mix of the same text collection.
We decided to abandon the neutral voice and let the exchange
be more natural allowing for affect to transpire (2). We
speeded the rhythm and alternations.
Hands should be just careful installers, shouldn’t
manipulate, nor stay too long in the frame.
For /besides, smaller than a single pixel/ 28/11 2015 we
made a new text collection. No natural objects at all were
allowed anymore. Would the perceived agency of the thing
change if we would enter and exit them at specific moments
in the text? If we stopped talking while changing the
objects? Would the objects become more present, have more
influence if we allowed for moments without text?
We stayed with speaking the text in an ordinary manner.
Would the dialogue be more fluent if we decided to use the
texts fragments randomly? Would that give more dialogical
power to our voices and rhythm? Would that help us to use
text and objects equally in our perform thinking experience?
*We perform experimenting thinking together using words and things and
the affects transferred via our voices. We experiment performing
thinking together using words and things and the affects transferred
via our voices. We think performing experiments together, We
experiment thinking performance together, We experiment performing
thought …*
(1)“According to Bakhtin, in order to ‘overcome’ the
separation and opposition between art and life, between art
and culture, the elaboration of a ‘first philosophy’ is
required: The philosophy of event-being. Art and life cannot
and must not tend towards identification, as was the case
with the Situationists, for example. But, in order that the
enriching, excessive and productive difference between art
and life be able to express itself, it is necessary to
possess a theory which, whilst maintaining the irreducible
differences between these two dimensions, articulates them
in the achievement of the event.” Maurizio Lazzarato in
Dialogism and Polyphony.
geocities.ws/immateriallabour/lazzarato-dialogism-and-polyphony.html
<http://www.geocities.ws/immateriallabour/lazzarato-dialogism-and-polyphony.html>
(2) “According to Bakhtin, the voice or intonation, not yet
captured in the ‘phonetic abstraction’ of language, is
always produced ‘on the threshold of the verbal and the
non-verbal, the said and the non-said’ and it is through it
that it addresses itself to the other. This address is
affective and ethico-political rather than linguistic. It
‘appropriates, travels, avails itself of linguistic and
semiotic elements, confirms and drifts away, critiques and
legitimates meanings and established intonations’. ……………It
is only when the voice penetrates and appropriates words and
statements that the latter loose their linguistic
potentiality and turn into actualised expression. It is only
at that moment that words and statements are encumbered with
the a /unique /and non reproducible role in verbal
exchange.” Maurizio Lazzarato
generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato6.htm
<http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato6.htm>
Notes on performance series /besides, <http://bram.org/besides/>/ with
Martina Ruhsam, 03 2016, Annie Abrahams
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