http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 Doing Words with Things Sat, 18 May 2013 09:47:33 +0000 a-n rss generator a-n The Artists Information Company and contributors edit@a-n.co.uk technical@a-n.co.uk http://www.a-n.co.uk/img/logo.gif http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 I've just spent an hour and a half shortening and shortening an email to get it into a 500-character contact form. It was an introductory email trying to describe this project and ask for advice all at the same time, and to shrink it I had to make all kinds of curious omissions and abbreviations while still keeping it friendly and unbrisk. I hope I didn't go too far. It may be that I've just sent off a very very polite email that fails to say or ask anything at all. We'll see when (if) I get a reply. At this stage, the project's been in my notebook for a good four or five months, and on the books of the Word Festival for at least two, and at last it's sufficiently settled that I can start approaching collaborators. Briefly, the performance will involve signing instructions and descriptions for the actions of a co-performer, who will be constructing a small but growing wire sculpture. It's a small-scale project, with a handful of performers and just a single performance in Spring this year. Crucial to the success of the work will be finding a collaborator who can share with me their expertise in the structure, detail and poetry of BSL. In my collaboration with Anthony the orchestra conductor of 'Musica Practica', having an idea for the work was a start, but it only really came together through careful and excitable discussion and the gradual piecing towards one another of originally disparate practices. I've been informally interested in sign language since my linguistics degree many years ago, and I passed my Level 1 BSL Exam last summer - but Level 1 is a bit like a fairly elementary GCSE. I can ask you all about your pets and your brothers and sisters and what you have in your pencil case, but not very much more. And that's on a good day. I have been known to forget the sign for hello. (I panic.) I'm still a complete beginner, and am well aware of the glaring gaps in my understanding of the underlying structures of the language. So over the past few months I've been reading some research articles into the linguistic structure of BSL, most recently about deixis, metaphor, gender and sign order. I find these articles very exciting as a means to develop a broader sense of how the language works beyond the particularities of the individual signs and constructions I've learned. I've also been finding out more about Deaf culture and how BSL fits in, and thinking about what it means for a hearing artist to devise a work involving BSL. What's curious from this perspective is that my interest in the language is first of all formal, as is my interest in language as a whole: BSL is exciting for me because of its physical phonology: where oral/aural languages use sound, sign languages use space. Much of my research involves grappling with the relationship between material and referential properties of language and text: Henri Chopin's audiopoem Rouge seems to merge acoustic sound and physical form and almost obliterates meaning in the process; my line drawings take graphological marks off the page and make them directly touch, rather than describe, the things they name. Mallarmé, Broodthaers, John Barth, I think even Allan Kaprow deal with these ideas in one way or another. And in BSL the physical phonology of the language relates to the materiality of the world in ways that are quite unique and can't be found in oral/aural language. At the moment, then, I'm searching for a BSL user who shares this fascination with the structure of the language, as there's so much I still don't know. Known unknowns.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 Today I've been looking through the BSL Poetry Anthology website, an ongoing research project at the University of Bristol. You can watch videos of BSL poems and click on links to download translations and linguistic analyses of each one in terms of anthropomorphism, blending, eyegaze, handshape, neologism, symmetry and use of space. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/research/sites/... My BSL is insufficient to follow the poems in any depth so the translations are a great help, and it's been interesting to think about how these translations differ from the parallel text translations I've worked with in the past, in which both source and target are written. I'm very aware of how much expression is necessarily lacking in these translations, and how helpful it is to read over the analyses to learn more about what's actually going on in the performances. Accessing poetry through markedly separate translations and accompanying structural analyses is a strange and clunky way of trying to second-guess the intended effect of a poem. The analyses are primarily linguistic rather than literary, and so the force of each composition is at best implied in these commentaries by reference to tropes used by the signer. Trying to read a poem in a foreign language you don't speak is best done by reading as many translations as you can get your hands on, and this process feels a bit like that. Many approaches, none of them quite touching. There's a reading night in Bristol later this month and I hope to make it over to see the poetry happening live. No analyses, no translations, and my beginnerish signing won't let me approach the poems very closely at all. But the liveness will add a new means of approach, even if it means I'm approaching something rather different without the semantics at play. The rustle of language?... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 I've been hanging around on this website a lot lately, trying to relearn my elementary BSL in front of a mirror: http://www.bslhomework.org.uk/index.php Two years of Mandarin Chinese lessons in my teens have left me with about four words of the language and a leftover affection for the difficulty of getting tones right. I did a degree in Italian and I was fluentish for a while; it's subsiding. French is drifting too. My grasp of German is very slight: I can talk with excessive emphasis, helpless grammar and wildly invented vocabulary and I love it like this. My partner is half German and I anticipate eventually learning the language to a good degree of fluency, and I regret that this loose use of the language will have to go. It strikes me that the languages I've taught myself and picked up in various incompetent and ad hoc ways are the ones I most enjoy speaking, even if I do it pretty badly. I suppose this is evidence of my analytical rather than social interest in language, because being delighted by the badness of a badly learned language doesn't do much good when I'm trying to get something said. I was at a wedding in Germany a few weeks ago and felt helplessly grateful to a kind woman who patiently let me try and say interesting things to her about the history of choreography. I dread to think what it actually sounded like. She may have been nodding and smiling with complete bemusement. This delight in half-learned languages has informed my artwork for many years, and I've often worked with translation and multilingualism specifically because of what is to be found in the gap between separate languages - when you step outside of one and don't manage to step all the way into another. But although I'm bringing to this project the excitement of my unfamiliarity with BSL, in this case my main concern isn't my own relationship with the language but rather the particularities of BSL itself. It isn't so much the potential of the gaps in between individual languages that interests me here as the singular gap in between Language and World.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 I've just adjusted the title of this blog having confirmed the name of the piece as "Doing Words with Things". It's a play on J.L. Austin's lectures on speech acts and pragmatics in the 1950's which was entitled "How to Do Things with Words". His lectures discussed the pragmatic interlocking of language and world, and though some of his conclusions don't convince me he lays out a useful set of nodes to navigate. The phrase "Doing Words with Things" reflects titles of other related pieces of mine: "What To Do" (2010), "What The Matter Is" (2009), "Do Something" (2009), "Writing Art and Life" (2010-11). I like words that are short and plain. The piece is gradually taking shape: it will have a clear start and end rather than being a durational performance, and I'm working more on ideas for the sculpture that will result. To sustain something like a narrative before a seated audience, I want to make the sculpture vary its appearance over time while keeping it continually abstract. The important thing is that it mirror the gestures of BSL that instruct its construction. I've found a couple of images that suggest the kind of thing I have in mind - here's one I love (scanned from a clothes catalogue) but mine will need more structural variety and a greater range of materials.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 Last weekend I went to the Drill Hall in London for a matinee performance of four plays written and performed in BSL by Deafinitely Theatre. Particularly engaging for me was the continuous bilingualism that went on throughout. The plays all incorporated surtitles projected above the stage, but the written English was used in a number of ways over the course of the evening. The words served not just to translate BSL into English but to describe music and sound effects, to show the content of a document being read silently on stage, and even to indicate private thoughts that remained unsigned. In all of these cases certain ideas and components of the productions existed for the entire audience only in English. There was abundant bilingualism among the characters too: certain characters signed and spoke in turn, many did not use English at all, some used only English and needed other characters as interpreters, one character could not sign but didn't speak either, communicating instead in non-BSL gestures. There's a great amount of play you can do when you anticipate a bilingual audience, and when a shared language is such an important part of community identity. During the interval I found myself sitting with some other BSL learners who were training for the Level 1 exam I passed a couple of years ago, and I was startled by how comprehensively I've forgotten what I'd learned. Bad. I felt like a complete beginner again. Since then I've been practising with RNID resources online and in print in advance of the BSL poetry reading in Bristol next weekend. Though I don't expect to understand a great deal of what's being signed, at least I'll be able to say hello without panic. http://www.drillhall.co.uk/ http://www.deafinitelytheatre.co.uk/ http://www.rnid.org.uk/... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 I'm trying to find out what the formal difference is between the imperative and indicative moods in BSL, so I know whether instructing will look different from describing. In English you can’t quite conflate the two moods into a single ambiguous form: phrases like ‘you, fold this!’ are distinct from phrases like ‘you’re folding this’. I’m hoping BSL might afford some context-bound ambiguity here, but if the two moods are quite distinct we’ll have to select one or the other. The ambiguity between instruction and description were crucial to the conductor’s movements in Musica Practica, and I’d like to pursue this here if it proves possible.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 I’ve been reading The Linguistics of British Sign Language.* It turns out BSL makes frequent use of proforms: elements that refer to terms previously defined in a given discourse context. Pronouns, which refer specifically to previously defined nouns, are a category of proform common in English. Pronouns make up a proportion of the proforms found in BSL, but BSL makes greater use of a range of proforms because of is spatially and temporally marked grammatical constructions. Much grammatical information in BSL is indicated in the use of space and movement, and as many full signs are anchored to certain locations on the body or use both hands at once, they cannot not freely accommodate the kinds of movement necessary for grammatical inflection. Temporarily transferring significance onto a simpler and more versatile handshape makes this inflection possible. The full sign for “car”, for instance, is two-handed and is positioned symmetrically in front of the chest, like holding a steering wheel. But indicating a car’s location, movement, relation to other objects etc. means moving the sign in space and time and in relation to other signs that might be going on simultaneously. The BSL proform for a car, a flat handshape with the palm facing down, is a form sufficiently versatile to carry  these grammatical inflections. The sculpture to be constructed during the Doing Words with Things performance will incorporate several components, each of which will need to be manipulated by the sculptor whose movements will in turn be instructed/described by the signer. As many of the components will be fragments rather than distinct and identifiable objects in their own right, it might be that the inevitable proforms will be defined in the first place with ad hoc signs created one by one for each scrap of material: “the-bit-with-the-curled-up-end”, “the-red-one”, “that-one-over-at-the-edge”, and so on. I want to develop the sculptural fragments and the overall sculpture itself with a similar degree of abstraction as the language consequently needed to describe it. Inevitably, they’ll be causing one another (MATTER again…). The language and the sculpture need to be planned in parallel. * Rachel Sutton-Spence and Bencie Woll, Cambridge University Press, 2010.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 These days I'm making models, mainly out of wire. Here's a first attempt, incorporating forks again.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 Alex Nowak and I getting knots out of string last week.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 Alex and I met yesterday for another rehearsal. It's back to wire again: the wire remembers my movements so it allows a more articulate 'vocabulary' than the string I was working with last week. This week we worked most on developing our respective vocabularies: mine in manipulating the material and his in describing my manipulations. In this video we've found a good breadth of movement and the timing looks fine, but I'm keen to reintroduce more grammatical and functional signs to clarify the distinction between my gestures and his. Last week we were having difficulty keeping our gestures sufficiently synchronized; this week I think we've gone too far and caused them to match too closely.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 Spools for the wire. There have been very bad tangles without them. Some of these cut-up cardboard tubes might get incorporated into the structure if they’re reluctant to come loose from the wire. We’ll try them out this weekend and see how they work. They make me think of Simryn Gill: tubes for words in anticipation of their use.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 Here we are back at the Rich Mix trying out the wire on its new spools. Still not quite right: they manage to unspool and get so tangled we have to cut the wire. I think the trick is to have many many spools, each one holding very little wire. But we've made some good progress. In this video there's more exchange between us: sometimes Alex holds the spool and passes wire to me, sometimes I hold it, sometimes he supports the sculpture in his hands while he's signing, sometimes I copy his gestures even when instead of signing he's having to untangle the wire. At present we're planning to perform throughout the evening of April 19th, sitting at one of the tables in the audience and occasionally finding a spotlight around us. Performing for so long will mean there will be plenty of mistakes and unexpected things, as well as several moments of inactivity between us as we're distracted by the other performances and readings going on in the room. I like how conversational it's becoming.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772 I had some good news a couple of months ago: a curator at Tate Britain got in touch asking to programme "Doing Words with Things" for a BP Saturdays event this October 22nd. Marianne the curator and I have talked about how the work was first performed for the London Word Festival at the RichMix earlier this year, and agreed some adaptations for the environment and audience of Tate Britain. When Alex and I originally performed the work together at RichMix we were restricted by my limited knowledge of BSL. This time round I've been looking for two fluent users of BSL who can work together to sign and sculpt simultaneously in continuous knowledge of what one another are saying and doing. After a long search I've made contact with two Bristol-based BSL poets Richard Carter and Paul Scott. I haven't yet met them in person but I've enjoyed watching their performances online with the help of some written translations and linguistic commentaries (part of a BSL poetry research project at Bristol University): http://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/research/sites/... Tomorrow I'm going to Bristol to meet them both for the first time for an initial conversation and rehearsal. Richard has found an interpreter, I've found a meeting room, Tate have agreed the rehearsal costs, and all the practicalities seem pretty much under control. Now it's just the actual WORK we have to worry about.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1054772