notes toward a subtle body (2021 - ongoing), score via single channel video and sound
notes is the first in a series of ongoing score works that explores the idea of the address, and uses the idea of the score as a pattern that shifts the body into a different rhythm, awareness, and habitus by marking it, riddling it, opening it with questions. It takes cues from N Katherine Hayles’ elaboration of “the address” in language, computation and urban networks. What may seem to be insensible or illegible is its own kind of signal. Presented as a short video for Liquid Architecture’s online exhibition, Machine Listening: Improvisation and Control, this somatic charts the notation or inscription for what may seem to lack an address – what is insensible or illegible – in order to disrupt a defined pattern of sensing, feeling, affinity and resonance.
The non-addressed is the body’s register of excesses and discontents: material, affects, histories, realities which exist but are excised in an epistemic field or habitus. This score moves towards sensing and creating this recessed ghostly body within one’s own. It explores relationships between address, location, emptiness, and embedded memory by breaking down the boundaries of a body and a delimited present through a series of iterative exercises pairing text and a soundtrack composed of whispers, mouth sounds, and a mix of otherworldly environmental sounds of ice and space – sounds that feel close to the skin and body, and yet wider than that or more unplaceable. The use of voice in the form of a whisper creates remote proximity, a place between language and the non-verbal, yet noisy body. The score extends the skein of subjecthood, abjuring language for a gesture towards a remote shape, an after-image, a hallucination; amid triggering low whispers and pauses, a location arises in the body, the presence of something previously absent or unrecognised.
The root of the idea came from the ongoing project SPHINXES (Infernal S). In thinking about the figure of the sphinx, I considered that the word “riddle” also means “to fill with holes”, “to permeate” – and that to riddle a body is to score it, and flood it with questions.
notes is the first in a series of ongoing score works that explores the idea of the address, and uses the idea of the score as a pattern that shifts the body into a different rhythm, awareness, and habitus by marking it, riddling it, opening it with questions. It takes cues from N Katherine Hayles’ elaboration of “the address” in language, computation and urban networks. What may seem to be insensible or illegible is its own kind of signal. Presented as a short video for Liquid Architecture’s online exhibition, Machine Listening: Improvisation and Control, this somatic charts the notation or inscription for what may seem to lack an address – what is insensible or illegible – in order to disrupt a defined pattern of sensing, feeling, affinity and resonance.
The non-addressed is the body’s register of excesses and discontents: material, affects, histories, realities which exist but are excised in an epistemic field or habitus. This score moves towards sensing and creating this recessed ghostly body within one’s own. It explores relationships between address, location, emptiness, and embedded memory by breaking down the boundaries of a body and a delimited present through a series of iterative exercises pairing text and a soundtrack composed of whispers, mouth sounds, and a mix of otherworldly environmental sounds of ice and space – sounds that feel close to the skin and body, and yet wider than that or more unplaceable. The use of voice in the form of a whisper creates remote proximity, a place between language and the non-verbal, yet noisy body. The score extends the skein of subjecthood, abjuring language for a gesture towards a remote shape, an after-image, a hallucination; amid triggering low whispers and pauses, a location arises in the body, the presence of something previously absent or unrecognised.
The root of the idea came from the ongoing project SPHINXES (Infernal S). In thinking about the figure of the sphinx, I considered that the word “riddle” also means “to fill with holes”, “to permeate” – and that to riddle a body is to score it, and flood it with questions.