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Torque 2

torque2_8Image: Nathan Jones/Sam Skinner

An anthology of essays and poems exploring the act of reading.

FEATURING:

Anna Barham, Charles Bernstein, Tim Etchells, Stephen Fortune, Grace Harrison, Mark Greenwood, N. Katherine Hayles, Liam Jones, Nathan Jones, Alex Leff, Esther Leslie, Claire Potter, Nina Power, Hannah Proctor, Eleanor Rees, Erica Scourti, Sam Skinner, Garrett Stewart, James Wilkes and Soenke Zelhe

Edited by Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner

Produced as part of Torque#2 The Act of Reading 2015

Published by Torque Editions, Liverpool/London, 2015

More information and free download here.

Monotypes

Mira Schendel, Unitled, 1964

I went to see Mira Schendel’s Monotypes at Hauser & Wirth. The gallery’s on Saville Row and it was early on a Saturday. That was Bill Nighy, my partner said as we crossed the road, but there are so many people who look like Bill Nighy round there that I wasn’t convinced.

The monotypes were laid out flat on waist-high plinths, sandwiched under glass, right by the windows. They were tearing up the road outside and one of the road-workers kept on looking at us looking at the prints. I caught his eye occasionally and wondered if he was going to come in and look at them himself, and whether the gallery attendants would let him in with his work boots on. I felt I was pushing it myself with an old pair of trainers. I really didn’t see Bill Nighy but I think he was probably wearing a navy cashmere overcoat that contrasted in a tasteful way to his “silver” hair.

These prints are half a century old. Schendel made them by tracing across small sheets of Japanese paper laid over rollered-out black oil paint. Where she pressed into the paper, it irreversibly picked up the ink. Now the lines she traced have a dark nimbus, a hiss, which I like to imagine developed from the purely material interaction of fibres and oil.

I write “hiss” because when I think of Schendel’s monotypes I think of sound, and the act of transcription between the sounded and the seen. I know a number of them have an elemental religious aspect to them, and also that if you like you could talk about Schendel in relation to Flusser and ontology etcetera, but I’ve always wanted to treat these unlikely, minimal objects as scores.

Schendel was friends with Haroldo de Campos and met Dom Sylvester Houédard when she came to London for her Signals show, so we definitely have a license, if we need one, to think about these intense but fragile and unvociferous prints as part of a noisy world, in fact as part of a ‘verbivocovisual’ system, to borrow a word the concrete poets borrowed from Joyce. If they’re scores, they function to preserve, or distort, or transform material, as a condition of it moving from state to state.

But does a score need to have an object? Does it need to score something? Is it possible to have an intransitive score? Because actually that’s what the prints seem to suggest (the wordless ones in particular). Hans-Jörg Rheinberger mentions a case from virology research, writing that “for forty years the experimental system was in a sense oscillating around an ‘epistemic thing’ that constantly escaped fixation”. In a similar way, the object of knowledge of these prints also appears to escapes fixation; it’s never quite specifiable as such.

There’s a kind of seismic quality to these loose groups of monotypes and I think that connects to the way they oscillate around their object. The way something vibratory is not a thing but a relationship. Outside they started drilling the tarmac again, using a minicat with a pneumatic attachment. We could all feel it through the dark concrete floor.

Image: Mira Schendel, Untitled (from Horizontals/Horizontais), 1964. Exhibition details here. Source for Rheinberger quote here – thanks to Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard for pointing me towards it.

Read-Receipt: A Performance for Receipt Printers and People

Read-Receipt Documentation from James Wilkes on Vimeo.

A performance at Static Gallery, Liverpool, 21.01.15, as part of Torque2: The Act of Reading

3 ethernet-connected receipt printers were set up in the performance space. Over the course of the performance, they were remotely triggered to print receipts, with a new text printed each time one was taken.

Read-Receipt

The texts to be printed were assembled from over 2500 years of receipts, invoices and tallies, framed to allow reading, performance and conversation. The receipt is freed from its functional straitjacket, and turned into a marker for the reciprocal relationships between reader and writer, speaker and listener. It becomes a modern equivalent of the ‘tally stick’, notched and split to make tangible the indebtedness of one to another.

receipt cropped for web

Thanks to Sam Skinner and Nathan Jones.

Achromatic telescopes & corby presses

Here’s Clive Scott, translator of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, on literary translation as a “centrifugal practice”.

“On the one hand, I am imagining a centripetal attitude to text, a continual return to a source text, which believes that this source text fully possesses itself in its linguisticity; that the literary is a stable constant within it; that what one must garner from it is its meaning, by interpretation. On the other hand, my hand as it were, is the centrifugal practice of text, which believes that the text is constantly in search of itself; that it does not comprehend itself; that it has yet to fulfil itself.” (Source)

So if we take this centrifugal attitude to the text, Scott argues, what follows is that any translation will cause the text, as he puts it, to “[fan] out into multiple versions of itself” – these versions not just being various interpretations of its meaning, but “performances of the experience of reading it”.

This provides a way of rethinking and maybe rehabilitating the discredited idea that an artist might be a translator of scientific research. Because this is translation not as a faithful return to a source that knows itself, and has a stable meaning, but as an imaginative multiplication of the possibilities inherent in an engagement with an excessive experience. Maybe the scientific text, the journal article, doesn’t behave like that: but the experiment itself might be such a multiple, expansive, contested and shifting object.

The translation of the experiment is not a matter of disciplining the imagination then, but of employing it to develop the inherent potential of the experimental scenario, which in this reading is no longer fully owned by any one discipline. This is very much the spirit of translation and enquiry we’re trying to develop with the Hubbub project.

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Peter Vickers discusses the 18th-century instrument makers who successfully made achromatic telescopes by combining two lenses made of different kinds of glass, but managed this based on a false analogy, taking their lead from the supposedly different refractive properties of the lens and the humour of the human eye. (Source) In fact, as Vickers notes, the eye suffers from exactly the kinds of “chromatic aberration” as previous telescopes, only corrected in the brain. Vickers’ point is about the difficulties of deciding which parts of a theory are involved in making a prediction; but for thinking about the role of imagination, the interest lies in this ambiguous relationship between a system of knowledge, later abandoned, and its dependent but surviving invention. We can see the usefulness of the false analogy, the train of thought which rattles loose enough to jump tracks, or the leap of imaginative connection that misfires but lands somewhere hospitable. We need to make room for these kinds of serendipitous achievements too.

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Translations of three secular chansons by the Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez (d.1521):


Faulte d’argent

I did it for the vine, I did it for the gram
a force de batture, sent letters to sault
Ligeti’s stochastic hammer
in the ditch below the walls.
I, Josquin des Prets, otherwise J.p.
Jo. de Pratis, Josquini, Joskin Dascanio etcetera
meadowed in loosestrife
quail running at the bailiff’s knock
lightly through rubble the
popcorn at the end of its bellcurve
the consonants dragging their ligatures
along empty autostrade
sparrow without an excuse
nor a funding proposal nor shoes

Douleur me bat (Motivic cells remix)

slapped by dollars
nux vomica
desire dressed me

protrusions (blebs)
vesicular trafficking
bleb-to-bleb

I’d prick faded nylon
I’d grab a corby press
I’d clip acetate statins

and sad billfolds
a goat’s embrace
in wolfskin wallets

in rice paddy folds
in frog bone brace
in biscuit palette

to crease financial trysts
to fix your orthodontist
up banks the Tiber mist

Plusieurs regretz

Janus-faced with a silent J, or condemned to the adjective. Collapsed after frosts, exposing moon-milk cavities in tufa. 19 + 17 + 13 + 11. At the start of the performance 1000-lire notes were dipped in paste and gently layered all over the surface of his face. Line up your receipts from last month and ask yourself if there’s something wrong. Iron wires and gold threads passing under water. 9 + 19 + 21 + 11. A moment later, his tuxedo spattered with gastric acid and mucus. The nearby volcanoes have upset the usual ratio of isotopes. The mathematician nicking a baboon’s fibula to make her calendars. Lightly through rubble the jewelweed popping in the heat.

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Parts of this first aired at ‘MindSpace’, 25 March 2015. The reference to Vickers is adapted from a separate paper.

Litmus Launch

Litmus2-Flyer

Reading for the launch for Issue 2 of Litmus alongside Amy Cutler, Verity Spott, Peter Hughes, Lucy Sheerman, David Caddy, Markie Burnhope and Nancy Gaffield.

Weds 26th Nov 2014
Mascara Bar
72 Stamford Hill, N16 6XS.
7.30pm, £3.

Introducing Mopha

Update: second performance, UEA Drama Studio, Norwich, 21 October 2014, 7.30pm. Additional performers: Rebecca Tamas, Lawrence Bradby.

Mopha group

Our first performance: Rich Mix, Bethnal Green. 7.30pm, Sun 28 September 2014.

We’re really honoured that Marian Hazlitt has written an introduction to the first performance by Mopha collective:

INTRODUCING MOPHA

I’m sitting in on a Mopha rehearsal. We’re in Patrick Coyle’s studio, and Emma Bennett is throwing a watermelon to other members of the collective, who are catching it with varying degrees of skill. She explains that she’s interested in ‘effort noises’, a phrase she learnt from absent Mopha member, Holly Pester. Efforts noises are the non-verbal sounds that radio actors make when they want to suggest invisible actions. A classic of the genre, apparently, is Shula climbing onto a horse in the Archers.

James Wilkes is also into radio sound effects. ‘It’s about the disjunction between eye and ear’, he says to me later. ‘Radio producers are often aiming for a concrete, realist sound world, but the ways of doing that are totally absurd. Like making the sound of a fire by popping bubblewrap.’ His piece for the Rich Mix show, ‘Live Realist Spacewalk’, combines meticulously transcribed dialogue from a spacewalk on the International Space Station with the tropes of sci-fi films and patently inadequate sound effects.

For Tamarin Norwood, the Mopha project is a chance to explore ideas, already developed through her practice in video and sculpture, around drawing, blindness, touch and instruction. With their inevitable errors of transcription, the works that she’s made develop a slowly emerging collective theme: the utopian idea of describing something perfectly, and the stubborn failure of words to be equal to the world itself.

Patrick’s contribution to the night, ‘Horse d’oeuvre’, not only picks up on Emma’s reference to Shula’s horse, but further undercuts any attempt to formulate a logical science of style. His work begins with a phrase taken from the 19th-century philosopher Herbert Spencer, concerning the correct ordering of a banal description of a horse; before long though, this fragment of language mutates, through chance algorithms, into something much stranger.

The last time I saw SJ Fowler on stage, he was in character as a sinister compere summoning the voices of the dead. This foray into theatre has clearly taken root, as he delivers a claustrophobic, repetitive miniature play for three characters and a director. Despite its overtones, this seems to be as much about what happens when you ask non-actors to act as it is homage to an absurdist tradition.

A few weeks later, I catch up with Mopha again. Appropriately perhaps, the watermelon has disappeared from the performance: Emma’s piece has evolved, and she’s now working on something derived from Basil Fawlty’s pathological relationship to the objects around him in Fawlty Towers. But the watermelon is there somewhere in the background, one more absent object amongst the many that this collaboration conjures.

Marian Hazlitt

Hubbub at Wellcome Collection

I’m Associate Director of Hubbub, an international team of scientists, humanists, artists, clinicians, public health experts, broadcasters and public engagement professionals. We explore the dynamics of rest, noise, tumult, activity and work, as they operate in mental health, neuroscience, the arts and the everyday. We are based in London as the first residents of The Hub at Wellcome Collection from October 2014 to July 2016.

For more on what we’re doing during our two years at The Hub, have a look at our website, our twitter feed or our facebook page.

Asylum Chapel – Sounding the Walls

IMG_1449_compressed

Site-specific work for multiple speakers at Asylum, Peckham, 3rd July 2014. Performing alongside Patrick Coyle, Jenny Moore, Julia Calver, Gen Doy; curated by Edward Ball.

The speakers played fragments from my reading of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which features a South London almshouse which may or may not be the same Licenced Victuallers’ Benevolent Institution to which the chapel was attached. They also played fragments of sounds created by running my hands over the walls, chairs, doors, plaques and masonry fragments in the space.