PDF Talking Squid - Bridget Crone

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

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.

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).

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?).