A&Q&
Response – Hannah Geil-Neufeld
This piece is sponsored by Springboard for the Arts
in response to bs: conversation (work-in-progress) a collaboration between Rachel Jendrzejewski, Terry Hempfling, and John Marks.
A: This is not a beginning. A conversation is underway that started before we got here. The room is dark. Rachel is off to one side at a keyboard typing. The words appear large and white on a screen in the middle of the room and Rachel’s voice speaks the words aloud, slightly trailing her blinking cursor.
Q: If I am typing words on a keyboard, do the words propel the movement of my fingers? Or does the movement of my fingers propel the words?
A: Terry, wearing a plastic suit, moves around and between two small walls. The sounds of her suit are present with each movement. Images of her moving body are projected onto the walls, sometimes on top of her actual moving body. Rachel asks Terry questions and Terry’s voice answers them.
Q: If I am wearing a plastic suit while dancing with a wall and someone is asking me questions, do my answers propel the dance? Or does the dance propel my answers?
Q: And do the questions propel the answers? Or do the answers propel the questions?
A: The flashing cursor goes forward, then back to fix a typo, then forward. The words left behind create a record of the movement of fingers, of air moving around tongues and lips and teeth, of knees bending, of a head and arms (covered in plastic) sliding against wood.
A: A few weeks later I am standing in front of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Babbage Nanopamphlets” at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain. In this installation Lozano-Hemmer reprinted excerpts from Charles Babbage’s 1837 Ninth Bridgewater Treatise in which Babbage posits that we could retrace every word that has ever been spoken throughout human history by rewinding the movement of air molecules in the atmosphere. Lozano-Hemmer printed the excerpted text onto microscopic gold nanopamphlets and released them into the ventilation system of the museum to be inhaled by visitors. Some of the nanopamphlets are also on “display” in a small glass vial filled with seemingly clear liquid.
Q: Could we use Babbage’s same logic (I don’t know what the logic is, I have inhaled the treatise but I have not read it.) to retrace the movement of the air if we had a written record of a conversation? And from the movement of the air could we then deduce how the mouths and fingers and bodies moved? Could we see the dance?
A: Rachel types, “But here’s the real conversation.”
Q: If I am upside down in a trash can, will the words that come to mind be different than the words that would come to mind if I were standing right side up next to the trash can?
A: Now Terry is upside down in a trash can. Questions and answers start to become blurred. Questions are asked and not answered, and questions are answered that aren’t asked. Sounds that aren’t voices fill the space. The trash can rolling, some recorded mechanical/factory sounds, and looped snippets of what has already been said. Words are losing their hold of control here. Wordsstarttospilloutwithoutspacesbetweenthem.
Q: DoIcontrolthesewordsoraretheyjustspillingoutofmybody?
A: Cells on the insides of our bodies grow and multiply to create new things that were not things before. (Things that were previously unimaginable.) Sometimes these things are desired (e.g. babies) and sometimes they are not (e.g. cancer). Sometimes we can make these things go away, or go somewhere else, but most of the time they leave some kind of trace, or memory, in or on our bodies.
Q: whathappenswhenwordsontheoutsidesofourbodiesgrowandmultiplytocreatenewwoordssthatwerenotwordsbefore? (wordsthatwerepreviouslyunimaginable)
A: sometimesthesewordsaredesired
andsometimestheyarenot sometimeswecanmakethesewordsgoawayorgosomewhereelsebutmostofthetimetheyleavesomekindoftraceormemoryinoronourbodies
A: A few days later, back home in Chicago, I type up the entire contents of a notebook as one word. The new word is an inviting and mysterious mess, a complete transformation of the worn out thoughts and jumbled feelings of the notebook. I throw away the notebook and hold onto my new word.
A: Rachel and Terry’s conversation stops appearing as text on the screen. I have to catch it with my ears as my eyes read an interview with Susan Sontag that Rachel simultaneously types out. My brain struggles to keep things organized. As if answering some request, Rachel types the definition of the word “net.” I use it to catch what I need from this conversation around a conversation.
Q: Is it possible to have a conversation that is not happening between the lines/around the edges/in the folds and creases of another conversation? A conversation without any reference or material from past conversations? A conversation that is happening all on its own?
A: Terry repeats the phrase “utilizing our limited knowledge of physics” as she continues the dance. Rachel types out this quote from physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf: “By shaking the world hard enough, we would be able to move from one possible world to another, changing what we consider the immutable laws of nature.” I am reminded of the closing paragraph of the book Conversations by César Aira:
“Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world.”
The two quotes mix together in my mind to read: “By shaking the words hard enough, we would be able to move from one possible world to another, changing what we consider the immutable laws of nature.” The words have done their job. We can’t go back to the world that we inhabited before this conversation. (Just ask Babbage.)
A: The blinking cursor starts moving backwards to delete all of the text Rachel typed over the last hour, continuing on into text typed at some earlier time that we are now seeing for the first time. (This was not a beginning. A conversation was underway that started before we got here.)
Q: What happens to a conversation deleted from a screen?
Q: If no one spoke it, was it ever there at all?
Q: If someone spoke it, where does it live now?
Q: If someone danced it, where does it live now?
Q: If bits were caught in a net, in a notebook, in a body, in a sound, in the air, who will find them next?
A: We/words move forward after the end.
Hannah Geil-Neufeld is a writer, performer, and visual artist based in Chicago. She lived in the Twin Cities for seven years and returns bimonthlyish to experience performance and attend weddings.
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