DIAGRAMS OF DESIRE (THREE KLEIN BOTTLES CUT IN HALF), 2022
sound installation/portal to fourth dimension
cassette tape players, ecassette tapes (looped, duration variable), plastic cases, dymo embossed label tape
[Ruskin School of Art Degree Show 2022, 128 Bullingdon Road, Oxford]
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
