PDF Talking Squid - Bridget Crone

PDF of the publication which accompanies Double Screen (Not quite tonight jellylike).  
Essay by Bridget Crone

Double Screen (not quite tonight jellylike)

Stills from the work that is the result of the residencies at Site and Wysing:
Double Screen (not quite tonight jellylike), 2013, 2 channel HD video, 33 minutes
Shown at Arcade, London, 10.10 - 16.10.13

PDF Transcript of Artificial Voices event (20.02.13)

Download the PDF here

PDF Transcript of Joanna Gavins / Text World Theory event (21.03.13)

Download the PDF here

Two works by Gary Hill

...on VIMEO (follow the links beneath each still)

Meditations (towards a remake of Soundings) 1979/1986
https://vimeo.com/5596880

Video (color, stereo sound)
Original format: U-matic
Running time: 4:17 min.
Color video camera/recorder, two microphones, audio mixer, speaker and sand

"The beginning of a remake of an earlier work [Soundings, 1979] in which I wanted to extend the reflexivity of each text in relation to the interaction between different physical substances—in this case, sand—and the speaker cone. A loudspeaker fills the screen and I begin to speak, referring to the speaker itself. This is followed by more declarations of what I am doing, ‘…a hand enters the picture….’ A hand filled with sand enters the picture and slowly releases it into the loudspeaker’s cone. Every nuance of speech vibrates the speaker’s cone (or membrane), bouncing the grains of sand into the air. The more I speak about what is happening, the more it changes—or feeds back into—the movement and patterns of the sand. At times the grain of the voice seemingly merges with what is experienced as ‘sand.’ The hand allows more and more sand to trickle onto the loudspeaker until the cone is no longer visible. The timbre of the voice crackles and is radically muffled. When the speaker is completely buried, the voice sounds distant but remarkably clear." - Gary Hill

Site Recite (a prologue) 1989
https://vimeo.com/5513020

Video (color, stereo sound)
Original format: U-matic SP
Running time: 4:00 min.

Appearing as a hazy horizon laden with strange objects, the scene comprises bones, skulls of small mammals, butterflies, nuts, and other botanical “finds” spread out on a round table. These are objects of the kind that one might collect on a nature trail in a forest—but also shells and crumpled notes. They are relics that suggest the cycle of life in a way familiar to us from vanitas still life painting and natural history collections. The camera moves around the table, picking out objects which, because of the shallow depth of focus, stand out one after another from the panorama of the jumbled collection. A bird’s skull, a piece of bark, or a crystal appear needle-sharp in the picture, whereupon the focus changes and the contours of a shell emerge from the nebulous background. In this way the camera discloses the transient beauty of the items one after the other, capturing the beauty of each for a fraction of a second before focusing on the next object. This precise focusing/unfocusing continues for the duration of the work, while a narrator explores his momentary state of consciousness and relationship with the world, verbalizing his own thoughts as transient objects in an ontologically focused vanitas of mind. The rhythmic vocalized syllabics synchronize with the focusing and blurring of the image. And the final tableau places the viewer inside the mouth of the speaker looking out. Just as the narrator opens his mouth and speaks, light enters the speaking cavity, the tongue moves, and the teeth masticate the last words of the work: “imagining the brain closer than the eyes.

“A prologue to Which Tree, an unrealized interactive videodisc that later morphed into Withershins. Using a track and dolly system, the camera was set at table top level from where thirteen circular tracking shots were made, each at a set focal point across the table. Additionally, the camera was ‘locked down’ at sixty-four points equal distance around the track from where the camera was rack focused through an extreme shallow depth of field. The thirteen rings and sixty-four points create the possibility of eight hundred thirty-two ‘match points’ toward seamlessly editing the rings and intersections together, as if one camera in continuous motion. The initial idea was to have the viewer/participant navigate a circular two-dimensional map representing the description given above—thirteen concentric circles with sixty-four intersecting diameters. As one walked the pathways, a spoken text would be heard spatially in relation to one’s location and change as one continued through the path. The prologue/text was produced as a representation of a single walk suggesting a myriad of other ‘walks’ and other ‘texts.’” - Gary Hill

http://www.garyhill.com/

Strophic

strophe |ˈstrōfē|

noun

the first section of an ancient Greek choral ode or of one division of it. Compare with antistrophe.

• a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line-length, especially an ode or free verse poem.

DERIVATIVES

strophic |-fik; ˈsträ-| adjective

ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Greek strophē, literally ‘turning,’ from strephein ‘to turn’ ; the term originally denoted a movement from right to left made by a Greek chorus, or lines of choral song recited during this.

antistrophe |anˈtistrəfē|

noun

the second section of an ancient Greek choral ode or of one division of it. Compare with strophe.

ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (as a term in rhetoric denoting the repetition of words in reverse order): via late Latin from Greek antistrophē, from antistrephein ‘turn against,’ from anti ‘against’ + strephein ‘to turn.’

Alvin Lucier - I am sitting in a room

Original recording from 1969
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/source/Lucier-Alvin_Sitting.mp3

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now.  I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.  What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech.  I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

There's a great description of Alvin Lucier's work in Craig Dworkin's essay The Stutter of Form http://eclipsearchive.org/Editor/DworkinStutter.pdf
Alvin Lucier on ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html

Thursday March 21 6pm - Joanna Gavins speaking about Text World Theory

From 6 pm tonight Joanna Gavins, Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Sheffield University, will talk about her work with Text World Theory.

Text World Theory is a cognitive-linguistic model of human discourse processing.  Its theoretical origins can be traced to a number of diverse academic disciplines, including cognitive psychology, possible worlds theory, cognitive linguistics and literary theory. 

The basic premise of Text World Theory is that human beings process and understand all discourse by constructing mental representations of it in their minds.  Text World Theory aims to provide the analytical tools necessary for the systematic examination and discussion of these mental representations, or text-worlds. 

The text-world approach to discourse was originally developed by Professor Paul Werth during the 1980s and 90s.  Werth provided a detailed account of the fundamental workings of the text-world framework in his monograph Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, which was published posthumously in 1999. 

Werth claimed to have devised a methodological framework capable of accounting for the cognitive processes behind the production and interpretation of all forms of human communication; from telephone conversation to dramatic performance, from church sermons to newspaper reports. These ambitious objectives, coupled with Werth’s infectious enthusiasm and inspiring prose, have continued to generate great interest in Text World Theory beyond their author’s lifetime. 

In recent years, Text World Theory has been tested, enhanced and expanded by a growing number of text-world researchers and students. Their work and that of Paul Werth is collected together in the Text World Theory Special Collection at the University of Sheffield.  http://www.textworldtheory.net/ 

voice-body, body-writing

Bob Cobbing, Worm (1966)

I love the images in your last post - both the image from Derek Beaulieu's Flatland, and the images of physically tracing a text in order to read it (and therefore make the text "real").

Immediately, I had a number of half-formed thoughts, mostly connected with the work of Bob Cobbing: -

1. Bob Cobbing - "communication is primarily a muscular activity"

Music for Dancing:
COMMUNICATION is primarily a muscular activity It is potentially stronger than everyday speech, richer than those monotonous seeming printed words on the page.... Say 'soma haoma'. Dull. Say it dwelling on the quality of the sounds. Better. Let it say itself through you. Let it sing itself through you. The vowels have their pitch, the phrase has potential rhythms. You do it with the whole of you, muscular movement, voice, lungs, limbs. Poetry is a physical thing. The body is liberated. Bodies join in song and movement. A ritual ensues. 1972

2. Cobbing's Alphabet of Fishes and ABC in Sound (1965) are somehow the essential accompaniment to Teige's Abeceda.

I think you saw, Jenny Cobbing performing from the ABC in Sound at Flat-time House, but to my mind it seems to do with the body materially what Teige's alphabet alludes to visually - it is a physical stretching and shaping of the mouth to produce a voice through the material of the body.

3. Somewhere I read the poet Peter Finch write that: “I guess the most important thing that Bob taught me was that the voice could learn from the machine.”

I like this sense of both the material and machine-like nature of text here. While most of my short comments above allude to voice (as distinct from text), I think that the point is for Cobbing these weren't separate so that the visually expressive form of a letter or word, was also produced through the body. And of course, as this final short quotation from Peter Finch suggests - when Cobbing worked with the duplicator and then photocopier these machines became a kind of body for performance also (the performance-production of text-voice with his own body in collaboration).

Replies to Bridget 2 - Versus intertexti and change ringing

The score / diagram for the change ringing is really interesting.  There are the rows of numbers where the order of the numbers changes and then the coloured lines too which trace the pattern of the numbers.  It seems this duplication must be to emphasise the shape of the method as a whole?  I suppose it would be quite hard to recognise the pattern in the spread of numbers on their own, you'd have to read every line instead of 'seeing' it.    Perhaps that's a little like what we apparently learn to do with words - to recognise them for their overall shape rather than having to spell each one out individually to ourselves.

 I just found this image in a book I’m reading (Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith) which uses a similar system to the method notation.  It’s a page from Derek Beaulieu’s Flatland (2007) in which he traces the path of each letter as it occurs on each page of Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland written in 1884.  This takes the idea of ‘seeing’ as opposed to ‘reading’ a text to an extreme. It scrubs out all the possible meaning and sound qualities of the letter arrangements to become purely graphic (although somehow it does look like a graphic representation of sound – different frequencies turned on their side). 

In the last reading group where we discussed an extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy, the conversation turned to ideas of speed reading - a technique McLuhan touches on as an extreme example of the ‘alphabetic dissociation of the senses’ that is one of the book’s central concerns.

“[In the new institutes for speed reading] they are taught how to use the eye on the page so as to avoid all verbalization and all incipient movements of the throat which accompany our cinematic chase from left to right, in order to create the mental sound movie which we call reading.”

A number of the group hadn’t read the text beforehand and so were attempting to get ‘up to speed’ during the discussion - Laura described a technique she’d learned which involves running your finger down the middle of a page and reading those words that it touched, somehow either trusting your peripheral vision to take in the rest or just joining the gaps mentally.  I wasn’t really able to make it work for me – perhaps it requires a lot of practice – but it also made me realise the extent to which I do read aloud to myself, in my head, when I read a text.  I’m not a quick reader at all.  I also thought it slightly ironic that a method which McLuhan’s described as totally visual, was in fact being taught through tactile methods – running a finger over the text.  And that reminded me of how when learning to write at school we were taught to put our left index fingers down on the paper at the end of a word to establish the gap we needed to make before writing the next.  Words were things that needed to be physically separated.  If we made mistakes we would lick our fingers and rub the pencil letters until we got a smudgy mess - there was a lot of touching of words going on.  I think alphabetic writing has a tactility all of its own which McLuhan and Rotman fail to explore again and again – I seem to keep coming back to that.

Reading Group 3 - Unpacking the portmanteau and slips of the pun

Wednesday 20th March, 6pm

Two essays that explore portmanteaus and puns for the last reading group at Site:

Derek Attridge - Unpacking the portmanteau, or who's afraid of Finnegan's Wake?
Soeren Hattesen Balle - Slips of the pun: signifying sex in the poetry of John Ashbery

>> to book a place and to receive both texts by email

puns and ambiguities are to common language what adultery and perversion are to ‘chaste’, that is, socially orthodox, sexual relations. They both bring together entities (meanings/people) that have ‘conventionally’ been differentiated and kept apart; and they bring them together in deviant ways, bypassing orthodox rules governing communications and relationships. (A pun is like an adulterous bed in which two meanings that should be separate are coupled together.) It is hardly an accident that Finnegans Wake, which arguably demonstrates the dissolution of bourgeois society, is almost one continuous pun (the connection with sexual perversion being quite clear to Joyce).

Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 1979, quoted by  Derek Attridge in Peculiar Language, quoted by Soeren Hattesen Balle in Slips of the pun.

Replies to Bridget 1 - More alphabetic gestures

That particular image of the Meyerhold etudes and your interpretation of them as an alphabet of forms made me think of Karel Teige's Abeceda.  

On squid and sliding down letterforms

I wanted to say, Anna that you have caused me to think about text and its possibilities in new ways! I was due to give a talk on my work on image and affect, and I suddenly found myself writing about sliding into text itself: me and my body sliding down the letterforms on a sheet of newspaper. It's a bit silly and out of context perhaps here but I forgot to tell you about it when we last met and I was quite excited about it. Suddenly, I was writing about cleaning squid and the oozey, gooey insides of the squid splattering onto a piece of newspaper and...

"Splat. The goo flops onto the newspaper that I’ve carefully laid out in readiness. And it sits there not quite inert. Jelly like and flaccid but as if it could ooze away. I look at it up close. To watch it quiver. Its wetness sinks into the paper and spreads. Its total mass starts to deflate and even now it seems uncontainable.

The guts ooze along letterforms occupying both the black outlines of alphabetic shapes and the white spaces that give the shape shape. I feel as if I might morph and move into this mess. It improves the typeface no end, a bit of yellow gutsy stuff dangles over a T, black squid scat makes its way down the letter A. I might just slip down a letter I, squelch through an O. Motion not my own. (What is self and skin anyway? I seem porous.)

Squid guts, body and the alphabet combine, flatten out and join together to enter into the flow. More images more images. White noise, the alarms on the scaffolding going off again, faint voices from upstairs… perhaps a siren. All are images into the mix."
 
Not sure if it makes sense out of context but wanted to let you know what your work has inspired!

Thinking bout pattern poetry and versus intertexti

After our brief conversation last week about pattern poetry, I have been thinking again about change ringing - the peculiar art of ringing church bells. Looking at your entry on pattern poetry (on 29/1/13), I was struck by the visual similarity in the notation of the bell-ringing instructions (called the method) and the example of versus intertexti that you give (except that former uses numbers and the latter mostly letters though numbers count the lines).

In the versus intertexti, letters are arrayed in rows on a grid (and these rows are numbered) and a passage is found or traced through these letters in order to find the hidden meaning in the text. (As an aside, I have to say that my personal fascination with this is twofold - 1. I am extremely diagrammatically challenged myself so looking at these verses makes my head spin, 2. I love the name - it is fantastic to say with all its "s"sounds, as well as "ex" and a sharp "i" at the end.)

In bell ringing or change ringing, there is a "method" which is, I understand, the name given to the notation or score directing a particular order of bell-ringing so to sound a tune. This is a chart of numbers that has a passage marked through it - different colours for different bells. All I know about change-ringing (which the Central Council of Church Bellringers calls, "The particularly British art of ringing bells full circle to a method") is from randomly seeing an image and briefly reading some information (from various websites including the one from which the image above has been taken).

I am fascinated by the idea of finding a text within a text (something that seems near impossible to me) in the case of the versus intertexti, and the articulation of a similarly unreadable (to me) text that is then activated in a particular way through the body and producing sound in the case of the change ringing.

I guess this could be said about any score - that is contains special information waiting to be discovered - but I nevertheless find it all somehow quite thrilling!

Motion capture technology...?

Hi Anna, responding just one last time to the Rotman... and his mention of motion capture technologies and our discussion of gesture.

I like this image (above) very much. It is an image of Vsevolod Meyerhold's system of biomechanics. In short, biomechanics was a rigorous training system through which Meyerhold sought to standardise and refine the movements of the body to act as a kind of language. By establishing these "etudes", Meyerhold wanted to establish a system of communication through isolating and slowing down movement in order that these gestures could express certain actions, intentions and be understood. 

Meyerhold wanted to breakdown the illusion of theatre in order to show its mechanical structures and he included the body and language within this. There's some fantastic images of the way in which he achieved this breaking down of the illusion of theatre by extending the stage into the auditorium and showing the mechanical workings of the sets etc.. 

But in terms of language, I think Meyerhold's interest in the body as a kind of machine (evident in the rigorous training his actors undertook, for example) is particularly interesting in relation to the question of motion capture technologies, because here (in the image above) we see the body capturing movement as a form of language much in the manner in which Rotman suggests motion capture or kinetic technologies might do. And therefore, we can consider the photographs of these movements to be a kind of notation or alphabet (in Rotman's terms).

Reading Group 2 - The Gutenberg Galaxy and Sesame Street

Wednesday 6th March, 6pm

Leading on from the first reading group meeting where we discussed Brian Rotman's take on alphabetic writing, its affect on Western subjectivity and its displacement by new technologies in Becoming Beside Ourselves, we will be reading two more texts about the alphabet:

An extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy - Marshall McLuhan
And  Brought to you by the letter I - Jessica Winter 

>> to book a place and to receive an email with both texts

Written in 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy makes a much more nuanced analysis of the affect of alphabetic technology in two stages - pre and post the advent of the printed word following Gutenberg's first use of moveable type around 1439.





Jessica Winter - Brought to you by the letter I

I. The pleasure of the text

“I invited a friend of mine over for dinner,” says the man ruefully. The gray-faced, middle-aged fellow is a squiggly animation, made of skinny, put-upon lines that form sluggish shapes. His dinner guest is nothing like him. The little friend who bounces through the French doors is the letter M, angular and robust. M has googly eyes at the tops of his twin peaks, which extend downward to become super-springy legs and dancing feet that also serve as his hands. M hops into his host’s outstretched palm, then rubs against his jowls like a cat. The gray man, beleaguered by these shows of affection, trudges toward a grand table piled with a colorful smorgasbord, plus candelabra. He slumps in his seat and invites the bug-eyed M to dig in. “Mmmmm, marvelous!” the M cries. “Meat! Munch! Magnificent!” M’s center of gravity is his mouth; a rib-eye steak, a loaf of bread, a glass of wine vanish into the V-shaped dip. The bottom point of this center “V” is also a straw, slurping up a glass of milk in one go. “Milk!” he says. The two upside-down Vs on either side of M’s mouth are pincers, chomping instantaneously through an entire melon. “Mmm-melon!” he says.

>> download PDF from The Serving Library

Language Sounds and Artificial Voices

Discussion on Wednesday 20th February at 6pm with

Roger K Moore, Professor of Spoken Language Processing, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Sheffield.
Ranjan Sen, Researcher in the sounds of language and language change, School of English, University of Sheffield.

Click here to book

After some preliminary conversations with Roger and Ranjan last week I began to think about how although they are from very different fields, both of them work to construct voices that are in some sense artificial - either computer generated for use in technology (Roger), or reconstructing the sounds of dead languages and tracking phonetic change over time (Ranjan).  And while their approaches have different aims I wonder if there may be some overlap in their methodology, and the insights each gains into how language is stored and processed in the mind.

Real and fictional examples of synthesised speech

Frances Stark talking about her video work My Best Thing which she created in part using free text to speech and animation software xtranormal.com
She says "the viewer / audience can have an experience that's very intimate and tender despite the fact that it's two computer voices".  In fact the tenderness and emotion seem to be emphasised by the disjunction between the automatic and synthetic quality of the voices and the content of the words they speak.
This raises a few questions in regard to the Brian Rotman text we discussed at the reading group in which he portrays writing as a poor and limiting encoding of the voice.  In My Best Thing however, which essentially turns a written script into sound in the simplest and most automatic way possible, the text seems to hold more emotional and expressive content than it could have done as a straight forward speech act.
Later in the interview she describes writing as 'being myself on a keyboard'.

Stephen Hawking
Despite the fact that the synthesised speech Stephen Hawking uses now sounds very out of date he doesn't replace it because it has become his 'voice' and is instantly recognisable.

Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey

The voice of the computer as imagined by Stanley Kubrick in 1968 is very 'human' except for its cool impassive tone.

Wall-e

Wall-e on the other hand communicates almost entirely through tonal, emotional noises  and has virtually no words - only a few names.  The other robot, Eva, has a few more words but is similarly good at conveying a lot of emotion and meaning through her tone.  This is a pixar film for children and Wall-e and Eva seem to display aspects of a child-like, prelinguistic communication compared to the 'adult' and law-making voice of the ship's computer which is a detached female version of Hal.

Reply to Bridget's thoughts on gesture

I think that's a really interesting quote you picked up on about the possibility of handwriting containing gesture, he goes on to say:

But the effect, to the extent it exists, is tenuous and not uniform enough to serve any reliable communicative function. In any event, it was effectively eliminated from public texts with the arrival of printing and increasingly from private ones by typewriting. (p26)

I found this really puzzling especially given that he allows gesticulation, eye movements while speaking and even the use of a computer mouse to be part of his repository of 'gesture' and embodiment of language, and yet does not include handwriting and typing. It seems he has already decided that anything used to arrange letters in order or on the page cannot be gestural, and yet as you point out there are many examples in concrete poetry and scoring where gesture and expression are precisely foregrounded through written forms of words or notation. 

Rotman seems to view alphabetic writing solely as a poor copy or score for speech. Where he does allow it a power of its own to create abstract and imagined realms he casts it in a negative light - as an undesirable byproduct he terms 'ghost effect' (his examination of the disembodied subject, mathematical infinity and monotheistic religion in Chapter 5). He doesn't entertain the possibility that this capacity for abstraction might offer a powerful and extraordinary possibility for mediation through which both meaning and texture might be delivered back to us magnified and through which something new might be discovered or created (although he does suggest that this happens within mathematics). He sees literature as an attempt to redress a lack, not as a positive creative form:

....the history of reading is the history of redressing what writing fails to represent. Or, the same thing, the history of writing consists principally of attempts to find readable equiva­lents and alternatives to the vocal prosody necessarily absent from it. Lack­ing vocal gesture, writing was obliged to construct its own modes of force, its own purely textual sources of affect, which it accomplished through two dialectically opposed - or better, co-evolutionary -principles of cre­ation: transduction (the discourses of narrative prose) and mimesis (the voices of poetic diction). (p27)

And a final thought on linearity which he also lays at the alphabet's door: although a text is usually presented on the page, and read, linearly, he doesn't consider the fact that texts are rarely written linearly since what writing enables is a dialogue between writer, idea and text that flows back and forth through revision. It seems that speech is actually the more linear form since it flows out of a mouth in time - its creation and delivery occurring simultaneously.

Some thoughts on gesture

Hi Anna, I'm sorry that I can't make the reading group tonight but I have had some thoughts and questions regarding chapters 1 & 2 of the Brian Rotman book that I thought might be relevant... have a look, I think my questions are around the affects or afterlives of text. Best, Bridget

In Chapters 1 & 2 of Becoming Beside Ourselves, Brian Rotman sets up an analysis of the world in which we are governed by notation – specifically the alphabet. He suggests that the alphabet has constrained us by reducing (and confining) our experience into the shape and form of its letters, and as well as mediating our understanding of a text through these very forms. Therefore, his claim is that alphabetic writing captures us twofold – one, by reducing our experience to shapes or forms on a page, and two by limiting our understanding of a subject through the form of its notation. This leads Rotman to make the rather startling statement that the alphabet is non-gestural. He writes that:

…alphabetic writing eliminates all and any connection speech has to the body's gestures. One might object that handwritten alphabetic texts evade this total disjunction from gesture. ·Written emphasis, uncertainty, rhythm, discontinuity, stress, tailing off, and other scriptive traces of the body, might be said to be the handwriting correlates to certain rudimentary forms of vocal gestures.
(Rotman, p. 25-6)

Rotman therefore articulates a division between the alphabet (stillness, notation) and the expressive nature of the body (gesture). He later extends this to a division between alphabetic writing and digital forms of “writing” such as motion capture technologies, which he suggests are able to return gesture to writing by utilizing a more kinetic and movement based approach to writing through the use of motion capture and other digital technologies.

I am curious about this division that Rotman makes between alphabetic writing as reducing the gesture and expressiveness of speech, and digital technologies as having the capacity for a true or real expression of the voice. So my initial question is: how is alphabetic writing gestural?

Q. How can alphabetic writing be gestural?

Immediately, I read the passages (pp.25-6, and later 49-53 ish) in which Rotman discusses alphabetic writing and gesture, and what he calls the “gesturo-haptic resources of the digital” (p.49) – I thought of three wildly divergent things:

1. The work of concrete poets who explore exactly this question in their use of typography and other forms of notation to experiment with the way in which alphabetic writing or notation is gestural. Examples might include Dom Silvester Houdard (whose work you’ve included on the blog already) and Bob Cobbing.
2. I also thought of passages in Cornelius Cardew’s “Treatise Handbook” in which he writes of the joy of discovering an expressive system of notation to give form to his music, writing in a note on the score itself that: “the sound should be a picture of the score and not vice versa.”
3. And finally, I thought of a series of drawings by an Australian artist Christian Capurro (Compress, 2001-ongoing) in which he erases images from a magazine leaving not the image of what has been erased but what is produced on an underlying page by the pressure of the act of erasure. While this is not alphabetic writing per say as he erases images, it suggests to me the way in which a form such as writing or an image goes off into the world and produces its own set of actions and affects that might take us unawares. So that the drawings that comprise this series are the accidental product of a kind of automatic writing and are produced as an affect of another action.

…and this final thought leads me to the question of ghosts and as I haven’t yet read Chapter 5: Ghost Effects, I’m hoping that those that attend the reading group this evening might have some thoughts to contribute on this subject!

So just to round off by saying that I'm not sure that I agree with the clear division that Rotman seems to make between the digital as being more able to express the gestural and kinetic nature of gesture than older more analogue forms of notation because I think that art and experimental poetry practices have shown us how the alphabet and other forms of notation might lift off the page in their own gestural expression (if that doesn't sound too fanciful?).

Bibliography

Attridge, Derek.  Peculiar Language, Routledge 2004

Austin, J.L. How To Do Things With Words, Harvard University Press, 1975

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text, Fontana Press, 1977

Baxter, Timothy. The Cratylus: Plato’s critique of naming

Bök, Christian.  Crystallography, Coach House Books, 2003

            Eunoia, Canongate, 2001

Brooke-Rose, Christine.  Amalgamemnon, Carcanet, 1984

Bradley, Arthur.  Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Edinburgh 2008

de Brugerolle, Marie (Ed). Guy De Cointet, JRP|Ringier, 2011

Crone, Bridget (Ed). The Sensible Stage – Staging and the Moving Image, Picture This / Plenty Projects, 2012

Culler, Jonathan (Ed).  On Puns – the foundations of letters, Blackwell, 1988

Derrida, Jacques - translated G.C. Spivak.  Of Grammatology, John Hopkins 1997

Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More, MIT Press, 2006

Durkin, Philip.  The Oxford Guide to Etymology, Oxford, 2009

Gaston, Sean & Maclachlan, Ian (Eds). Reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Continuum, 2011

Goldsmith, Kenneth.  Uncreative Writing, Columbia University Press, 2011

Hoban, Russell. Fremder, Bloomsbury, 2002

Joseph, John E.  Limiting the Arbitrary: Linguistic naturalism and its opposites in Plato’s Cratylus & modern theories of language.

Kostelanetz, Richard (Ed). Breakthrough Fictioneers, Something Else Press, 1973

McLuhan, Marshal. The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, 1962

McManus, Denis.  The Enchantment of Words – Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Oxford University Press, 2006

Perloff, Marjorie & Dworkin, Craig (Eds).  The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, University of Chicago Press, 2009

Plato - translated C.D.C. Reeve, Cratylus, Hackett 1998

Rotman, Brian.  Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being, Duke University Press, 2008

Sedley, David.  Plato’s Cratylus, Cambridge University Press, 2003

Simpson, Nicola (Ed).  Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter – The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard.  
Occasional Papers, 2012

Stein, Gertrude.  How To Write, Sun & Moon Press, 1995

Wittgenstein, Ludwig.  The Blue and Brown Books, Harper Perennial, 1960

Bulletins of The Serving Library #3.  Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language, Dexter Sinister, 2012

Arrangement for the opening conversation

Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being

We will be reading three chapters from this book for the first reading group meeting on Wednesday 13th February:
Chapter 1 - The Alphabetic Body
Chapter 2 - Gesture and Non-alphabetic Writing
Chapter 5 - Ghost Effects

To book a place and to receive a copy of the text via email please click here

A synopsis:

"Becoming Beside Ourselves" continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books "Signifying Nothing" and "Ad Infinitum...the Ghost in Turing's Machine": exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In "Becoming Beside Ourselves", Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West's dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as the alphabet did centuries ago. Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to "lettered selves," they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language.Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

Rameses III mortuary temple

The last DSH reference for today...
'Between Poetry and Painting' is published in Occasional Papers' new book Notes From the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard 

Massin's 1964 edition of La Cantatrice Chauve by Eugene Ionesco

Another reference from Dom Sylvester Houédard's 'Between Painting and Poetry'

 

 

Pattern poems and a Proteus poem by Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius (4th century AD)

Whilst re-reading Between Poetry and Painting by Dom Sylvester Houédard and searching the internet for his visual references I found pattern poems and Proteus poems by Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius.

An essay by J Stephan Edwards 'The Carmina of Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius and the Creative Process' explains:

Optatianus produced three distinct types of poetry, two of which are imitations of earlier forms, and one type that was an original creation. Taken as a body of work, the Carmina are part of an evolving tradition of poetry known as technopaignion. This type of poetry is meant to display the skill of the writer for arranging words in a complex way so as to create either a visual pattern with the verses themselves, known as pattern poetry, or to conceal a text within the poem for the reader to ‘puzzle out,’ or versus intexti. A limited number of pattern poems pre–date Optatianus’ work, most originating in Greece. Simmias and Theocritus are the best known creators of Greek pattern poetry. Optatianus’ pattern poems are probably a continuation of that Greek tradition and represent the genesis of his creative process. Similarly, Optatianus also wrote one known proteus poem, the words of which can be re–arranged to create new verses while maintaining the established poetic meter. There are no known examples of versus intexti prior to Optatianus, so that he is thus credited with having invented that form. He did so with amazing virtuosity. The intexti vary from simple acrostics to complex patterns that produce a graphic design within the text of the poem, a kind of self–contained illustration. As further evidence of his remarkable skill, a number of the poems also contain proteus poems, while others have intexti that can be transliterated from Latin to Greek. A minority of the poems goes so far as to incorporate all of these elements into one carmen, a masterful achievement of skill and inventiveness.

An essay by Florian Cramer 'Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet'  goes on to talk about the 'Proteus' poem Carmen XXV in more detail:

I Ardua componunt felices carmina Musae
II dissona conectunt diversis vincula metris
III scrupea pangentes torquentes pectora vatis
IV undique confusis constabunt singula verbis

 All words printed in the first and the fourth column of the poem and all words in the second and third make up two sets of words which can be arbitarily shuffled with each other.  The words in the fifth column are fixed, thereby ensuring that the poem will remain hexametric despite its words shuffling.....  In its initial notation, or state, the poem tells of dysharmonic junctions, uneven meters, rough tones and confused words tormenting the singer.  Optatianus Porfyrius, an important formal innovator of European pattern poetry, makes his poem an aesthetic self-reflection which, jumbling its own words, performs and confuses itself simultaneously. Optatianus’ Carmen XXV became paradigmatic for poetry when Julius Caesar Scaliger coined the term “Proteus verse” for word permutation poems in his 1561 Poetices, and made them a canonical poetical form for the century to come.

Cratylus - an oblique starting point

Liquid Consonant (production still), 2012

Language is an inexhaustible subject and material resource in Anna Barham’s process of making. Her fascination with the combinatory possibilities that systems of signs, such as alphabets, offer to produce language, have found in Plato’s Cratylus a ground for further investigation and, in turn, new artistic production. In Cratylus, Plato sets up a fictional dialogue that investigates the ‘correctness of names’, wondering how a particular combination of letters came to be chosen to represent a given object. In a climactic passage of one of the text’s central arguments, Socrates and Hermogenes, while acknowledging the vastness of the task, perform a methodological exercise allowing them to divide a series of words into letters whose pronunciations appear to somehow describe, through sound, the very object that the words stand for. And words suddenly appear to them as encoded descriptions of objects. Socrates thus compares the construction of language to painting, suggesting that “it’s just the same as it is with painters. When they want to produce a resemblance, they sometimes use only purple, sometimes another colour, and sometimes – for example, when they want to paint human flesh or something of that sort – they mix many colours, employing the particular colour, I suppose, that their particular subject demands”.[i]

It is the discussion of the letter rho (Ρ,ρ), which specifically motivated Barham in this new body of work. According to Socrates, rho imitates motion because “the tongue is most agitated and least at rest in pronouncing this letter”[ii] and can thus be found in Greek words in which movement has an essential role (flowing, flow, trembling, whirling etc). In her own language Barham traced the presence of rho in the phonetic notion of a “rhotic consonant”[iii]. In the artist’s mind, “rhotic” subtly slipped into “erotic”, leading her to appropriate the Greek words cited by Socrates in order to act out their pronunciation and hear their sounds through the sensual lips of a digitally animated mouth.

While rho shifts between words in Socrates’ argument, lines made of combinations of words rhythmically germinate, letters playfully changing places, to reveal endless series of anagrams in Barham’s texts, which she presents in the various forms of drawings, video animations, publications, performances and sound pieces. To elucidate his argument, Socrates manipulates a series of words and takes the reader on a journey through which he demonstrates how letters are transformed by the mouth of the speaker into sounds that travel between different nouns, verbs and adjectives. The aural and gestural quality of words as they emerge in Cratylus undoubtedly resonates with Barham’s labyrinthine journeys through anagrams that she has travelled numerous times, never able to exhaust the possibilities of creating new shapes, sounds and, in turn, meaning, out of a single sentence.

Socrates’ search for the etymological origins of words appears as an endeavour driven simultaneously by the rigour of science and the creativity of poetics. Thought through the lens of Barham’s practice, his attempt to “apply each letter to what it resembles”[iv] evokes a performative act. Through his dialogue with Hermogenes and Cratylus, Socrates unfolds his argument as a trail of thought, questioning the possibility for his speech to make sense. He envisages the possibility that his ideas might be considered absurd. In this context, his rhetorical construction deploys itself on the edge between sense and non-sense. It might be this very possibility of lacking sense, of falling into the realm of fiction, which, from a contemporary perspective, positions his speech at the undecided limit between art and philosophy.


[i] Plato, Cratylus, 424d
[ii] Cratylus,426e
[iii] In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho.
[iv] Cratylus 424d

Vanessa Desclaux, 2012

Cratylus - 1979 Sao Paulo Bienal

Cratylus was used as the title for a British Arts Council exhibition held at the Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo as part of the 1979 Bienal.  Subtitled The English Artist and the Word, the exhibition featured the work of Ian Breakwell, John Furnival, Dom Sylvester Houédard http://collection.britishcouncil.org/collection/artist/5/17691, Jeff Instone, David Leverett, Tom Philips.

Online translation of Cratylus

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0172%3atext%3dCrat.

Socrates

Reference and Symbol in Plato's Cratylus and Kuukai's Shojijissogi

An essay by T.P. Kasulis

"Early in its development, a philosophical tradition will consider the nature of language, for language is after all, the medium of philosophical expression. To be truly philosophical, an enquiry must have at least a rudimentary theory about the relationship between words and nonlinguistic reality.  This does not mean that every cultural tradition will make the same initial decision about this relationship.  We only require that a preliminary theory of language be logically consistent and a reasonable reflection of at least some aspect of language as used in everyday life.  This paper examines the pioneering Western and Japanese philosophies of language as presented in Plato's Cratylus and Kuukai's Shojijissogi (the Significance of Sound-Word-Reality). We will find similar questions asked in these two works, as well as dissimilar answers.  The comparisons and contrasts will suggest some general observations about the nature of comparative philosophy."
Continue reading at http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/kasulis3.htm

Push/Pull, Graves Gallery, Sheffield

Information Landscapes - Muriel Cooper / Visible Language Workshop, MIT 1994

Suppose I call a man a horse, or a horse a man

Site Gallery - Artist in Residence

9 February to 23 March 2013

Words and letters form the substance and subject of Barham’s work.  She uses them like a malleable material, fascinated by their unruly and feral potential for meaning.   Ideas of the collaborative nature of language and the possible relationship between sound and meaning will provide the starting point for a series of events and a new body of work, which she will produce during her residency at Site.    

The title of the residency, Suppose I call a man a horse, or a horse a man is taken from Plato’s Cratylus, where Plato creates a fictional conversation about the correctness of names, wondering how a particular combination of letters came to be chosen to represent a given object.  This text was also the starting point for a recently produced animation Liquid Consonant, 2012 which will be screened throughout the residency. The main gallery will be occupied by a modular structure Barham has designed specially for the space and from which she will host a series of discussions and events as well as using it as the site of production for a new HD video work.

With a practice spanning performance poetry to drawing and video, words and the rules that govern them provide a central creative thread for Barham. From their logic on a page; their dissection into component parts; the way they sound as they roll off the tongue; and their anagrammatic qualities, even a single sentence can provide infinite creative possibilities. The philosophical questions that language provokes interact with its plastic and material qualities, and the work that Barham makes plays inside this gap, testing the limits of how far words can be stretched from their original meanings. 

Events:

Residency launch: Saturday 9th February 11am-1pm 

In-conversation brunch with Anna Barham, Bridget Crone, independent writer and curator, Richard D Steadman Jones, researcher of the history of ideas, University of Sheffield and Laura Sillars, Artistic Director, Site Gallery.  

Reading Group: Wednesdays 13 February, 6 March, 20 March

Exploring texts on the ideas of language and philosophy that touch Anna’s work. 

Screenings and Discussions:

Throughout the project Anna will be organising more events as her research unfolds. 

Closing Party: Friday 22nd March 2013, 6pm - 8pm