[-empyre-] Narrative, and speaking traces

[Christina McPhee]

Sarah, Also thanks so much for your interesting interpretation of the  
"Tesserae of Venus' in relation to skin or a technological skin.  I am  
really struggling with trying to write about this and your perspective
is really helpful.  I just thought in this connection that it would be  
cool to share with you and -empyre- a new interview / conversation  
between myself and Caroline Bergvall recorded in April 2009.  Caroline  
is
a UK-based  poet-performance artist-sound artist, whose work also  
relates very closely to this month's discussion, and who inspires my  
work on many levels. http://www.carolinebergvall.com/

So the interview is here-- it's raw audio, so please forgive the  
casual nature of it, perhaps you will enjoy.  The conversation deals  
with these themes of tesserae and erotic body ("venus" ) as non- 
abjective :-)
http://christinamcphee.net/tesserae/venusdrawings_interview.html


and it relates to some of the drawings you see here: http://silverman-gallery.com/artist/seriesworkview/1615/355/9817


Christina



On May 29, 2009, at 3:48 PM, sarah drury wrote:

> Hi all,
> I've been on the road all day and have just found a rest stop with  
> wireless.
>
> More on narrative: I’d like to branch out from projects that explore  
> the
> body  as “the site or sites of multiple struggles, ambiguously  
> positioned in
> the reproduction of social habits, requirements, and regulations and  
> in all
> sorts of production of unexpected and unpredictable linkages” and  
> look at
> projects that track artifacts of the body in space and place, with  
> various
> ways of referencing the body as a tracking device for reading the
> landscape.
> Earlier in this month’s conversation, Christina McPhee discussed her  
> project
> Tesserae of Venus, that explores the buckling or folding of skin:  
> the skin
> of the body, the skin of drawings of technological landscapes as these
> drawings buckle and fold over time in the weather, the skin of the
> photograph documenting this deterioration over time, the skin of the  
> earth
> as it submits to processes of energy extraction and other kinds of
> technological deformations, the skin of the buckling surface of the
> carbon-saturated landscape of Venus, the cultural/architectural  
> buckling
> that occurs as  “biological systems clash and meet with technological
> landscapes at the urban edge. In an online interview, she refers to  
> this as
> an exploration of “some sort of granularity of scale between the  
> human body
> and geologic form.”  Ultimately the photographs and video are the  
> top layer
> of skin, shed as a narrative form from this process. . “Fault-seeking,
> fault-finding, the performance drawings suggest field notes to a  
> geophysical
> and psychic space that can only be realized in brief.”
>
> In a project that focuses more on memory and the archaeology of the  
> ground
> one stands on, Teri Rueb’s “Core Sample” creates a GPS-equipped,
> headset-equipped  sound walk in which the walking body reads the  
> landscape
> of Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor, a former dump and reclaimed  
> landfill
> park visible just off the coast.  This project does not focus on  
> issues of
> body trauma, but on the wanderings of the walker as a kind of  
> playback head
> on the landscape, with the walker’s coordinates, including elevation
> relative to sea level, corresponding to exact points of narrative in  
> the
> geological, archaeological, industrial, the more current  
> recreational layers
> of the island’s geological surface and including the
> technologically-determined atmosphere above the island as well.    
> With each
> step, the walker encounters geospatial tags and engages audio  
> narrative of
> the many layers of density of information: the geological record and
> satellite communication, air traffic control of the nearby airport,  
> the
> archaeological record of native cultures on the island, the  
> artifacts of the
> increasing speed and violence of usage of the last 150 years, the  
> current
> recreational use of the island as a park.   Engaging the  
> unselfconsciousness
> of the walker as a kind of empty state, the walker moves over and  
> through
> the layers of human and nonhuman activity, engaging a four- 
> dimensional map
> of narrative of the landscape.
>
> The body’s movement through the gentle recreational location spools  
> out its
> embedded narratives, “all sorts of production of unexpected and
> unpredictable linkages”.  The body’s path reveals the location of  
> the place
> in space extending from the geological core to the orbital’s of  
> satellites,
> its location in a historical continuum of production, consumption,
> forgetting, cultural erasure.
> Sarah
>
>
>>
>> hello all
>>
>> thanks to Sarah and this discussion that has been springing forth --
>>
>> i was really interested by your emphasis on narrative, and hope we  
>> can come
>> back
>> to asking more questions about "narrative"  (different narratives) in
>> relationship to voice (sounding/sound making/
>> vocals/music) and movement, and in relationship to  body movement   
>> and
>> gesture,
>> and following the last statements you made, also in regard to the
>> interactional design
>> you describe in some of your examples (the narrative in design is a  
>> tricky
>> issue, i would
>> suggest, since working with interactivity, in my mind, is always
>> counterintuitive and
>> abjective.
>>
>>>>>
>> Her movement was counterintuitive in the degree of learning and  
>> control
>> required to manipulate her wearable accelerometers to achieve a  
>> specific
>> graphic quality.  Practicing was about finding the movement that is  
>> both
>> expressive in itself and also "draws". Lezlie's performance was  
>> highly
>> controlled, highly choreographed, and was about control in some  
>> sense.
>>>>
>>
>> i am not sure now how to address the many issues related to control  
>> and
>> control systems
>> (in such interactional settings of performance), but initially, i  
>> thought, the
>> discussion was
>> heading somewhere else, when you began to recount your work with  
>> Lezlie.
>> I didn't understand what "normative embodiment" is, I also don't  
>> know what
>> "fear of ephemerality" is.  I always consider it a joy  
>> (ephemerality).
>>
>>>>
>> The "challenge to normative embodiment" may rest in Lezlie's body  
>> presence and
>> movement themselves,
>> in terms of the role of the gaze in the social construction of the  
>> body with
>> dis/abilities,
>> paralleling postmodern theories  of the gaze in the construction of  
>> the female
>> body.
>>>>
>>
>> I think you perhaps would have to talk more about what you assume  
>> such
>> constructions to be like (gender -specific?
>> age-specific? culture-specific? abilities-specific?), and how a  
>> behavior or
>> performance performed can critique
>> the gazes (which are all differentiated), and how such differencing  
>> works.
>>
>> I am in rehearsal and cannot fully find the space to reflect and  
>> think of
>> examples where i might have been confronted
>> with : "existential anxiety" about the functioning of the body  
>> being seen, and
>> by extension,
>> the body of the viewer [my body?] , and "aesthetic anxiety"  
>> generated by fears
>> of bodily difference in a society "with a quest for 'supernormal  
>> bodily
>> perfection'."
>> I would like to hear others respond to this challenge.  I don't  
>> recall
>> aesthetic anxiety, unless you assume that we all are insecure about
>> our "lack" or or difference from some assumed "norm"  - i don;t  
>> think there
>> are any norms that anyone believes in except of course on the surface
>> of consumption and sexual selection display.  Or are you also  
>> including
>> "religious anxiety"?
>> well, there is so much to say now.
>> I hope we can come back to  the question of movement narratives.
>>
>> I certainly think that all movement is inherently story telling and  
>> telling.
>> And naturally so, it is also always also lying, no?  it is  
>> fashining our
>> selves as movement characters
>> in the stories we invent and retell ourselves and others every day,  
>> faking it,
>> and being also quite serious about that.
>>
>> In the everday sense [i would also think there is no everyday, but  
>> that we
>> tend to live under constant or increasing stress symptoms and in
>> symptotopographies, and so the question of anxiety is of course  
>> real, a kind
>> of performance anxiety, and we smile now because that too is  
>> institutionalized
>> and rhetorical now,  cliché) , the movement through our  
>> environments is
>> something i assumed you'd be also addressing,
>> when i think of walking or audio walks (Janet Cardiff and others),  
>> they sound
>> is voice is oral culture of whispered and shouted memories or  
>> associations,  i
>> love to listen to audio art and radio dramas,  they are rich to me  
>> and full of
>> e/motion...
>>
>> and then the notion of the trace as walking is something i came  
>> across this
>> morning, in  preview of Richard Long's new exhibit at the Tate  
>> (Heave and
>> Earth) in London, and the preview mentions the walking/ tracing in  
>> the
>> landscape as a motion leaving shadows or foils,  i never saw the  
>> term foil
>> before,  and apparently it refers to hunting vocabulary and the  
>> track that
>> might be left by some legs or feet when they touched the dawn of  
>> the grass and
>> its wetness, as first sunrays fall across the land.
>>
>> I remember viewing DV8's "Cost of Living" and wondered how they  
>> wanted to foil
>> me into taking it, feeling confronted by it?
>>
>> What’s a movement worth? £5 for a plié, one performer suggests in  
>> this piece.
>> With arms  that’s a tenner, add some emotion you double the fee. “
>> Heard you can do  some tricks”, another man pesters a dancer. “Do  
>> that thing
>> with your leg. I can pay you,”
>> I wondered how such critical work (if that is what it is, or is it
>> exploitational? experimental? anxietal?)  is received by different
>> communities/audiences, and how you narrate the work  
>> organizationally when you
>> produce software interaction design with abled and differently abled
>> performers in company or in schools or therapeutic environments;
>> I noted recently also the work of Petra Kuppers (The Tiresias  
>> Project , an
>> Olimpias Disability Culture Production), featured recently in TDR,  
>> with a
>> stunning photograph of one of her collaborators on the cover.  It  
>> is certainly
>> the case, i think, that methods are altered when dis/abilities are  
>> involved as
>> a conscious /acknowledged fact.
>>
>>
>> regards
>>
>> Johannes Birringer
>> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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