DIAGRAMS OF DESIRE (THREE KLEIN BOTTLES CUT IN HALF), 2022
sound installation/portal to fourth dimension
six cassette tape players, eleven cassette tapes (looped, duration variable), eleven plastic cases, dymo embossed label tape
This research period also led to a[n undocumented] solo performance titled inhale-exhale parallaxical chiasm (X + Y). Live and recorded gesture and amplified breath were combined to form a resonant surface which continuously looped between the artist’s body and the body of a VHS camcorder/the recorded body inside it.
OVERVIEW:
The archaeologist and anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan proposed that language and speech have evolved in parallel with the development of handheld tools (or technical objects) and their supporting gestures. Language and human thought act on and influence one another across time. Thought is externalised, expressed, and elaborated through language. In return, language nourishes the human mind, defining our cultural and historical worlds.* The written alphabet is a technical object which spatialises language. Algebra utilises the written alphabet to describe shapes, surfaces, and dimensions, some of which might be impossible to imagine without this mathematical process. However, algebra to some extent still requires language or speech “to constitute and account for it”.**
The research behind this piece draws on algebraic topology to investigate subject/object formation through, around, and within text, spoken word, and gesture. Building on Jacques Lacan’s use of topological models, I look at non-orientable surfaces such as the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle to represent the feedback loop language facilitates between the interior mind and the external world: a continuously modulating surface which interiorises the exterior, and exteriorises the interior. Within my practice, language as technical object is filtered through other, often dated/redundant, technical objects such as hand letterpress, Xerox, cassette tape, VHS, and risograph.
Diagrams of Desire was intended to embody the topological surfaces I have been researching. The piece comprises 6 cassette tape players, each playing a tape loop. These tape players are arranged as 3 pairs. Similarly, the tape loops have been made in pairs, and are each sonic mirror images of each other. That is, each tape is its partner played backwards.
Although a Klein bottle can only exist in 4 dimensions, it can be sliced in half to create 2 Möbius strips, which are mirror images of each other. These can be easily constructed within our perceivable 3 dimensional space.
I made a series of pairs of cassette tape loops. Inside each cassette, the tape itself was twisted before being recorded onto, in order to form a Möbius strip. When the cassette is played, the part of the tape that is twisted briefly plays the other side of the tape in reverse.
For each pair, one strip was twisted anti-clockwise, the other clockwise – so that each half is a mirror image of the other.
Sound samples were recorded onto these, and they were then re-recorded onto pairs of longer tape loops to form sound collages. These longer loops are played in the installation.
If Möbius strip + Möbius Strip = Klein bottle, each pair of cassette tape players represents a Klein bottle.
* Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, ‘Du mort qui saisit le vif: Simondonian Ontology Today.’ In A. De Boever, A. Murray, & J. Roffe (Eds.), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (pp. 110-120). Edinburgh University Press, 2021. p112
**Will Greenshields, Writing the Structures of the Subject : Lacan and Topology. Cham: Springer, 2017. p11
THE CONTENT OF THE CASSETTE TAPES:
i. REQUIEM
Versa best in luctum cithara mea,
Et organum in vocal flentium.
My harp is tuned to mourning,
And my music into the voice of those that weep.
This pair of tapes combines excerpts from a recording taken on a handheld microcassette Dictaphone at a performance of Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum in the chapel of the Queen’s College, Oxford, with fragments of Surilang by Suhada Dan Sanusi, a 1950s/1960s Indonesian pop song in the Kroncong tradition. The mystical, emotional intensity of Victoria’s polyphonic requiem becomes intertwined with the more overt sentimentality of the pop genre.
ii. AUGUSTINE
You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you.
I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you.
You touched me, and I am set on fire
- Saint Augustine
In her doctoral thesis, Love and Saint Augustine, Hannah Arendt explores three concepts of love in the writings of the fourth/fifth century saint. Of these, I was fascinated by the implicit physicality of amor qua appetitus - love as craving, along with that of Arendt’s own burden carrying her manuscript with her when she fled Nazi Germany for Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and eventually France, later bringing the same copy with her to New York. Considered in this context, Arendt’s words take on a poignant physical weight.
Mirroring the contrary motion of the cassette and its twist, the language spoken in the script runs in two directions, splicing together regular speech, and language spoken backwards and then reversed in the editing process - language that is both difficult to produce and difficult to understand. Due to material corruption in the recording process, the human voice on the cassette sounds machinic and glitchy, like a stuck record, as it declares “I tasted you, I tasted you.”
iii. SABOTAGING INTIMACY
This recording layers several versions of the line “I am sabotaging intimacy,” along with the standalone word, “intimacy,” taken from my piece Mange ton Dasein. I invited someone I felt attracted to, an object of my own unrequited desire, to record multiple readings of the script with me, their voice intersecting my own. I wanted to put myself in an uncomfortable situation, and to physically/sensibly experience ideas similar to those articulated by the piece as a whole. The affective traces remain in my recorded voice, shifting the implied meaning of the repeated words outside of the organising systems of representation in the process. My voice in turn physically enters the body of the listener, carrying these traces with it.
