14 contacts

18 incoming - 5 missed 

30 outgoing - several dropped -1 pocket dial

3 family - 11 friends - 2 work

8 area codes

2/4 applications plainly refuse

rational - cautious - warranted - revered or hesitant - avoidant - ascetic - antisocial? 

or wanting and reticent? or maybe some other vein altogether?

visited s.f. at the garden house to celebrate. left prematurely - hoping to catch m.r. and his restless pictures. shuffled pleasantries. ate together, and afterwards - 1 last drink. sat aside p.s. and discussed mechanics.

had spent the afternoon sucking teeth (needless / imaginary), only to witness its passing. 

called mum on the way back. rode 4 k - walked 5 to prolong. she said it’s 15 below, but blooming indoors.

keys turned shy of 1. reported to anna that all went well. shook her head. laughed. rolled into sleep. 

-connection is difficult to classify

-privacy, and its costs, are difficult to appraise

-uncertainty too, can satisfy

wrote it down.

by Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw

In a recent lecture I gave at Cambridge, a raven flew into the room. It had been stuck up the ornate chimney all week and chose the exact moment I walked in to swoop out, circle once elegantly around the intricate plaster work of the ceiling, and end at the window closest to me. It banged against the glass and I stood at a distance, not wanting to crowd it, as the other staff members carefully slid open the sash window underneath its flapping wings. They closed the curtains over the enclave, giving it privacy and direction to escape. We all held our breath in a horror composed equally of the possibility of hurting it, and the possibility of being hurt by it.

I give my lecture, which includes talking about a project I made with two of my friends, one of whom died two months ago. The past tense sticks in my throat.

I couldn’t see her in person for the last year and a half of her life because of the pandemic. Before we even knew of this virus I had to wash my hands, put on an apron and gloves, and go through two sealed doors to see her. So now there was no way. I asked if she wanted to move in with me when it broke out, do the isolation thing together, so I could care for her. She (wisely) wanted her own space. I desperately tried to help manage her healthcare at a distance - got in touch with an advocacy agency to assign a case worker, offered to sit in on video calls with doctors, anything I could. It solved nothing and she died before I could see her again.

I don’t mention any of this to the students. When I finish I sit outside in the first proper sunshine this year and look out at the green rolling grounds. I don’t see any more ravens.

by Leah Clements

As a bridge between the journey of bygones and the future, contaclessness seems to be hazy here and now. Are people accustomed to a moment that has been calculated through several rounds of process?

More radically, when perceptions are merely served as communications between neruoelectricity, 'contact' could be the only probe that will be poked into the forehead.

Being a creator lies on the tactile sensation, I am not yet ready to enter this kind of time ahead. How about you?

零接觸似像是一種接連起過去與未來的一段旅程，是迷離奇幻的當下。是否人們習以為常的一瞬，不知背後已經演算幾輪的進程？

再極端一些，當所有的感知僅剩下神經電流的傳訊，剩下的所謂「接觸」就只剩這戳進腦門的探針了。

作為一個觸覺型的創作者，我還無法進入那樣的未來，你呢?

by 王仲堃 / Chung-Kun Wang

Exhibitions in the post-COVID-19 age uncover not only the relationship between contact-free digital technology and art experience, but also the change in human cognitive capabilities. The experiences of separation, inconsistency, and instability for the contemporary people who cannot keep up with the speed and volume of information transmission will no longer be called psychopathological syndromes. This change is because today's art experience requires this psychopathological way of appreciation. Many exhibitions will remain empty without any physical artworks and welcomes the audience with a single QR code or microcode to enter a virtual parallel spaces. The exhibition experience is only possible when the audience separates themselves from the physical world and connects to the virtual link. In a way, we are demanded of a schizophrenic cognition. We now have entered an era in which we can no longer say that we saw the exhibition in person. Modern people's anxiety, which heightens the more they connect, obsessively begets the contactlessness and non-place experiences.

RE-TRACING BURO (Somi Sim & Julien Coignet)

Text by Somi Sim, March 2022

This is an excerpt from fieldwork writing and journal by Han & Mona, as part of their research in ruin imagery and gallery space.

In this text they attempted to discuss the representation of the subjective experiences, while working in the waste urban space.

At the particular moment when I press the shutter to release, the initial reaction that triggers me can be driven by the representation of the encounter, and it includes more than just the visual kind. I am interested in the mediation between the physical presence and the ephemeral senses. There are often moments when I pick up the camera after becoming aware of something perceptual in ruins. This came through it in its most productive in the capturing of the patina of a flat surface of a building. The abstract visual result often challenged the familiarity of traditional landscape photography and visual documentation in ruins. Through the working method, I tried to distance the ‘scenic’ or picturesque in my work, similarly to Mitchell’s (1998) ‘Landscape’, as a purely culturally loaded construct. My aim is to re-focus on a perception, a way of looking that does not isolate vision from the seeing, knowing and feeling body.

by Han & Mona

Send to: Everyone in Meeting

11:32:49: fuzzy

11:32:56: chewing

11:32:56: feeling

11:32:59: breath

11:33:00: Feeling hot

11:33:02: warm

11:34:34: typing typing tap tap tap

11:34:38: lower back

11:34:41: lower

11:34:42: swirling on the keyboard

11:34:48: Ground lowering

11:36:41: typing as a kind of dancing

11:38:26: button presing

11:38:26: pres sing

11:38:29: imagine if

11:38:32: down

11:38:33: Imagining the body

11:38:34: down

11:38:40: imagingng the body as a site of wisdom

11:43:01: again and again

11:43:03: repeat

11:43:06: repeat

11:43:08: brush it

11:43:08: repeat

11:43:46: is the world moving or are we

11:43:49: No waves

11:43:51: on land now and walking

11:44:05: Boggy ground

11:44:13: sticky

11:44:14: sucking

11:44:25: slippy

11:44:38: ice skating

11:47:50: computer very loud

11:47:59: Computer whirring

11:48:01: whirring

11:48:04: Can we move a sound?

11:50:11: show me your favourite bit of your body

11:51:52: Imagining getting wetter and wetter

11:51:57: front the top of the head down

11:52:30: floating in water

11:53:26: imagine ceiling is top of water

11:54:59: stillness

11:55:33: can we ever be still when we’re breathing

11:55:42: Can we ever be still if all our cells keep moving

11:55:46: are all of your cells moving?

11:56:06: Can you move all of your cells in the same direction at once?

11:56:41: We never stop blinking

11:56:43: too much breathing

11:56:49: heart beating

…..

Adapting to the online space in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic,‘Typing as a kind of dancing’ is one of several outcomes of ‘Reading the Room’- a movement-research project exploring the video call as a site of performance.

Using the chatbox function on Zoom, we investigated how text might act as a score for movement, and in turn, how this chatbox dialogue becomes a form of movement in itself.

‘Reading the Room’ consisted of 6 sessions over 5 months (February - June 2021). Led by Alexandra Davenport with Amelia Tan, Kirstin Halliday, Rachel Coleman & Sara Stenbæk.

by Alexandra Davenport

I never met the artist called Criminal. After they saw the billboards of the work I made in East-London on Instagram they contacted me.

A connection has been made, partners in crime.

by Rut Blees Luxemburg

KNOWN NETWORKS WILL BE JOINED AUTOMATICALLY. IF NO KNOWN NETWORKS ARE AVAILABLE, NO KNOWN NETWORKS WILL BE JOINED BUT YOU WILL BE NOTIFIED OF AVAILABLE NETWORKS KNOWN TO THE SYSTEM. THE SYSTEM WILL CONNECT YOU TO THESE NETWORKS AUTOMATICALLY. YOU WILL BE JOINED AUTOMATICALLY INDEPENDENT OF YOUR EXISTING CONNECTION. IF NO KNOWN SYSTEMS RECOGNISE ANY AVAILABLE NETWORKS, YOU WILL NOT BE CONNECTED. YOU WILL THEN BE DISCONNECTED FROM ANY KNOWN NETWORKS UNTIL A KNOWN NETWORK IS FOUND. UNDER SUCH DIM CIRCUMSTANCES ONE CAN ONLY HOPE TO BE DISCOVERED IN THE DARKNESS. BUT ONLY IF THE LIGHT IS AUTOMATICALLY LIT. AS OF NOW, THERE IS NO SWITCH. SO BE IT.

LET THERE BE LIT

by Hanne Lippard

Un perro cachorro se acerca a un pato, lo abraza, se monta en su lomo y el pato lo traslada a otro lugar.

Alguien hace puré de papas con Pringles.

Jim Carrey analiza la diferencia entre tristeza y depresión.

Una persona perfora la ubre de una vaca impresa en una caja de leche, aprieta el envase, sale un chorro desde la ubre hacia un vaso.

Putin habla con subtítulos en italiano.

Una mujer modela la consciencia que tiene de sus manos.

En un día soleado, dos jóvenes felices saltan desde unos riscos al mar.

Un chef corta siete pepinos a la vez mirando el techo.

Snoop Dogg dice “quiero agradecerme por creer en mi”.

Un auto choca contra el acoplado de un camión, lo arrastra, del interior del auto se asoma una mano saludando con la simpatía de una abuela que se despide de sus nietos.

Estoy en Instragram narrando Reels.

by Alejandro Leonhardt

video work

Tehching Hsieh and On Kawara sleep and work at the same time. This DIY instruction-performance reenacts River Lin’s work Sleeping in between Tehching Hsieh and On Kawara in a context of “working from home” and being alone at home. Through staging alarm clocks with cycles of waking and sleeping, and transience and labour, audiences are invited to reflect on how they spend time or are spent by time.

by River Lin

The potential arrival leaves every presence hanging.

What is 'real'? What is 'reality'? Reality is what continues to exist even if one stops believing in it; it is what lies independently outside one’s mind and thinking.

When contemporary technology gives birth to the virtual body – a fresh sensory system co-produced by the corporeal body program and machines – it manifests its existence in the form of ambiguous, elusive 'ghosts'.

潛在的來臨，懸置了一切的在場。

「真實」是什麼？「現實」是什麼？現實是當你停止相信它之後，它卻依然存在的，它是獨立存在於你思維之外的東西。

當代科技所形成的虛擬身體是肉體與機器、程式共同創造的嶄新知覺系統，將以一種隱晦的、無法捉摸「幽靈」的面貌出現，來預示祂的存在。

by 陶亞倫/ Ya-Lun Tao

Twelve Questions for You or Someone

1. If you could travel through time, would you go forward or backward?

2. What are your daily rituals?

3. How do you memorialize someone who has died?

4. What would be scarier: if you were never left alone or if everyone ignored you?

5. How does your family grieve?

6. Do you feel closer to your identity as an artist or to the work that you make?

7. How do you self-soothe?

8. What was your first experience with death?

9. How do you create a comfortable workspace?

10. When was the last time you lost your train of thought?

11. What was told to you as a child about the afterlife?

12. How did you make your first friend? Your most recent friend?

by Anne Wu

Work from home and near home. Work in home and on home. Work at home and over home. Work from him and near her. Walk away from home and near him. Work from her and work from here. Work near home and over him. Walk away from him and walk away from work. Work and walk him home. Work him and home is him. Walk her away from work and work on him. Work wear. Wear it at work. Near home and work on. Work near and home in. Him on her work is over. Hear him and work is near. Over work and near death. What is work? Home is where work is near. Walk away. From here. To?

Her.

by Hanne Lippard