“Morse-signals of converted elegiac poetry into coded sonic space dematerializes mediumicity, occulted harmonic dirges of what remains and what is offered as protective concealment. I see these sounded works performing as queer fragmentation. How to speak through evidence and remains while looking towards the visionary potential to be resurrected & interred?”
S O S
I’ve embedded the Morse signal “SOS”, a common long distance distress sequence, signalling imminent catastrophe or distress (save our souls/save our souls most urgently!) with other sequences of morse-code translated poetry to create sonic tapestries. This interweaving of resonances aligns with my current material research through strategies of elegy and queer coding, in order to use auratures of feeling in place of words. I see this as a parallel poetic to the adaptive signal of S.O.S. where you can interpret the urgency of code in a multiplicity of ways such as save our shores/ send our succour/ spit or swallow/ save our spaces—a queering of tongues.
Ones and Noughts
I wonder how to integrate fabrics with acoustic compositions? To see how encoded poetry translates into textile patterns, or to reverse that process to use weaving as a model for sound fabrication. How would that work manifest in real and virtual space? I see these questions framed within forensic aesthetics, the elegiac, within queer fragMOREtation* and ecology, engaging materiality and translation not only from a field of vision, but also a field of emotion and responsiveness. *”FragMOREtation is an attempt to catch the eye — not by being big or flashy, but by being broken-off, hidden, and/or decontextualized.” —K-Hole Issue #1
He was writing about traces, his trace remains written in the empty margins, a significance recalling his body, a souvenir, the thumb impress, as if this blankness held more than the corpse of him.
I find myself lingering over mourning the end [or is it the beginning?], trying to capture the object, just as it slips away. “Occupied by” is “ordered as” first, in an open receptivity, to the liminal spaces of its opening. If I understand that to work and the subject of the work once authorized, once placed out into the wide world, or necroplasmic (composed of dead flesh) and assembled, filed, uploaded, ruptured, shares an aesthetic or way of pointing to all the information that is abridged, with an archive, another dead body—the components and links of the body of the text that are organized performatively, a hybrid narration formed of fragments, fragmented poetry, sutured in order to be read, rather than collecting selves into something succinct.
The paper smells of something, something elusive to memory, something of the press, the ink bleed, the smell of lavender and fresh gravel, evidence, a word game, this is not written on paper, no this is not ink, rather a screen, an ambiguous exhalation, a broken fourth wall or an exhumation... things rattling as they are intercatenated; fetters.
Here the fetters perform a traduction as the carrying across in duration, endurance, & end utterance. Nostalgia traduces his memories, betrayed by the emptying capacity, that written universe, on page, in link, linked together. The betrayals yet also trials, the trace remains, he is residue, he is dust, he exits as he starts--his corpus and his body of work, he is here the empty subject and signal, a fetter in fair weather, a fetter flocked together .
“What remains of the story is conducted under circumstances of extreme auditory and bodily restraint: earnest whispers, breathless whispers, fingers to the lips and similar silent admonitory signs, silences, exhalations, slight noises... words emitted with a hesitating effort, deadened voices... whispers that grow fainter and fainter... An implication... homoerotic intimacy grows from this painful subjugation of the sounding body, the present body”
Trøllkunst Performance, Calgary
Trøllkunst Performance x Crystalline, Motherbox Gallery, Brooklyn
Look at the decaying body, a spectacle we avoid seeing, the invisible process of ruination, of returning to dust, even while living. The ruin is both destination and source, mythology and genealogy, connecting the disappearance of buildings, words, beings, re-used or re-enacted in the construction of the self.
What then of the figuration? This shadow that falls on the image, whose dominant speech comes from the shadow’s parch? If it is informed and unformed by the mutations and permutations of the voice, a voice that simultaneously hits from both sides of the foundation of language, interred and interlined with some vampiric kiss, that resonates with death’s inflection and is inflicted with unhomely desire; when the embrace of a lover is wrapped in the medium of death, is this the contaminated interchange? Is it the share that writing doubles and folds into the interlocutor, the interlocking arms of death and love, a doubled fold—the ghost returns to possess as the living returns to be possessed? What can be spoken of out of the ruin of language, out of the attempt to assay, to extract meaning from the syntagmatic traces left when the poet tears down the house around which the language we claim as home is formed?
This strange meeting of ruin, desire, what is comprehended, what can be born out of the madness of the day beyond the gate, into night, into nighttime encounters with the lover, the ghost, the pale figure of speech that is left, a tender act, the secret sealed with a bite/kiss, the site where the “I” of address is contaminated with its ghost echo, the enflurane ether, the other “I” that comes back, from far away, out from elsewhere, to speak at the same time, that interwend of this inter-se; a mirroring correspondence.
“...There was something wonderful in this real song, this common, secret song, simple and everyday, that they had to recognize right away , sung in an unreal way by [queer], even imaginary powers, song of the abyss that, once heard, would open an abyss in each word and would beckon those who heard it to vanish into it.”
Gothic Voices
…in a sort of tightrope dance we play along the wire between the legible work (object) and the erasure of ourselves and what we create. What would happen if I could take certain strategies of covert action—the surrealist shot in the dark,”In a dark room, eyes wide open”; processes of redaction where a shadow falls over the subject, and the reproduction leaves only this shadow, not the subject itself; or even further the imagined death sentence —that last utterance falling heavily—as tools to counter disintegration? The voice of the stand-in, this covered subject speaks of its loss & gain, from out of its obliteration or abyss, from death into breath—mediumicity.
“…echo chambers [that] pick up and repeat the sounds of negation, death, denial-endings that become protracted
through repetition, like the lingering deaths in…stories.”
“Words cast each by each to weather avowed indisputably, to time.
If it should impress, make fossil trace of word,
Residue of word, stand as a ruin stands, Simply as mark
Having relinquished itself to time to distance.”
“Both vampire and author are suspected of not existing. Both are claims and declarations. Both are somehow undead—and spectacular”
And why would I not make a corpse of your performance? I’ll spoil the poor actor up on the stage that courses life, your blunder; the buffoonery of your attempt to act the corpse. I’ll corporify the celadon of the grasses pressed from the well-travelled passage along the ghost road, the course or charge of your words. You attempted then to counterfeit a feat of living death, you act out the funeral procession, as if an archimime presiding on the stage. You conceit that the colour of your work imitated a corsair’s voyage—plundering.
The enlightenment you cached was the phantom light that lured you on to more exhumations, and in the medium of flickering death, you are one who deals in corpses, slipped into the renewed copy and curse. You are initiated into this act of imitation, the copy and counterfeit of the valuable object you desired to represent, yet the corpus you lean against the lich-gate, it never existed, you throw out disjecta membra (scattered fragments).
𐌷𐌴𐌸𐌾𐍉 Dracula
Apophrades, a process of negation; I inter with the dead and through some dark communion I seek to slay what’s already dead, apophatic, like moth larvae devouring the wool off the dead letter’s sound, it returns to some decrepit ruin, some decreased pit, a dank mouthful of andness and the silent violence of the slashed ligature, &, the delimited site e.g. Castle Dracula.
“if poetry has the power to make the naught resound, if it has the power to house, bury, and commune with the dead, it is because its rhythms, accents, and elegiac tones have their elemental source in human grief. If the transmutation of the earth into invisibility is at bottom a poetic task… it is because human beings are veterans of mourning.”