Studio for Propositional Cinema presents a lecture and a performance of ‘Redundant as eyelids in absence of light’ - a libretto for a five-dimensional dystopian opera set in a society in which all forms of language and interpersonal communication have been mitigated or eliminated. It will be realised in various formats: as a concert, as an exhibition previously at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen and finally as a publication and vinyl record.

The libretto was translated from English to Greek to an endangered Greek whistled language, then transcribed to musical notation, forming the basis of a composition to be played on the organ of the Great Hall on the London Road Campus of the University of Reading by Swedish organist Hampus Lindwall. Each of the six songs of the libretto represents the desperate attempts of the protagonists to relearn various forms of communication.

ENSEMBLE:
Hampus Lindwall, Organist
Studio for Propositional Cinema, Librettist
Panagiotis Tzanavaris, Translator
NOVEL (Alun Rowlands & Matt Williams), Organisers

PROGRAM:
1. Τραγούδι του ρακοσυλλέκτη (Rag-picking Song)
2. Τραγούδι του οπτομέτρη (Lens-grinding Song)
3. Τραγούδι του ηχοσυλλέκτη (Sound-collecting Song)
4. Τραγούδι του χορού (Dancing Song)
5. Τραγούδι της απογραφής (Transcribing Song)
6. Τραγούδι της εκτροφής περιστεριών (Pigeon-breeding Song)

Inter- is the fourth episode of NOVEL’s year-long publishing and curatorial project.

Operator, Patricia L. Boyd, 2017, video (12.56 min, colour, sound)

Operator (2017) was originally produced through a moving image commission from EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Patricia L. Boyd lives and works in New York. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Joins, Cell Project Space, London (with Rosa Aiello, 2019); Other Mechanisms, Secession, Vienna; 1856, Melbourne; Good Grammar, Potts, Los Angeles (all 2018); Operator, 80WSE, New York; Us, 3236RLS, London; Mechanisms, The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; AEROSOL, 500 Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco (all 2017); Metrics, Modern Art Oxford (2015). She has received moving image commissions from EMPAC, The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy (2015-16); and Frieze Film, London (2013).

Artist’s Talk at Reading School of Art:
Partricia L. Boyd

Wed 7 Feb, 1-2 pm
Nike Theatre, School of Agriculture,
University of Reading

'The Riddle of the Imp on the Mezzanine' is a sonic performance that will comprise of text and spoken word within a unique site-specific installation situated within the bowels of Broad Street Shopping Mall, a ritualised site, symbolic of commercial exchange and social demographics. It will be the fifth episode of NOVEL’s year-long publishing and curatorial project A reproduction of three weeks in May 1970.

Part V – Hold On



Oh will no one let me come in
Doors are fastened and the windows pinned
Keep your hand on that plough
And Hold on

No-one said you done gone lost your track
Can’t plough straight and keep a looking back
Keep your hand on that plough
And Hold on

Hold On
Hold On
Keep your hand on that plough
And Hold on

So you had a that golden chain
Every link spelled out freedom’s name
Keep your hand on that plough
And Hold on

Oh that chain can never tire
Every round goes higher and higher
Keep that hand on that plough
And Hold on

Hold On
Hold On
Keep your hand on that plough
And Hold on

If you want to make it through I’ll tell you how
Keep your hand on your own string plough
Yes so keep your hand on that plough
And Hold on

Oh that chain can never tire
Every round goes higher and higher
Keep that hand on that plough
And Hold on

Hold On
Hold On
Keep your hand on that plough
And Hold on
(Sung)

THIS IS

NOT

                   A LOVE SONG

 
Extract from Shouting in Whispers (performance text), Helen Cammock, 2017

Episode #3
Redundant as eyelids in absence of light.
Translator’s Endnotes
A lecture by Studio for Propositional Cinema delivered by Sam Spruell

&

RECITAL: Redundant as eyelids in absence of light.
A concert by Studio for Propositional Cinema (libretto) and Hampus Lindwall (organist/interpreter)

Great Hall
University of Reading, London Road Campus
Duration: 73 minutes

Episode #4
Inter-
Patricia L. Boyd

Eggla / Unit 207
Broad Street Mall, Reading

A solo project by artist Patricia L. Boyd installed in an empty shop unit in Broad Street Mall. Boyd’s work is configured as a response to the exhibition site, and includes a single-channel video installation, Operator (Refinanced I) examining the position of the retail unit within overlapping economic and social contexts.

Comprised of footage of a single room captured from four different perspectives, Operator (Refinanced I) is partly edited according to a rule-based system. The time-frame of each section within the video is determined by data extracted from the calculations of a loan repayment scheme that imagines the artist’s commission fee as a loan that is paid back, with a 5% interest rate, over the period between the start of the commissioning process and the exhibition’s opening date.

Each time the work is exhibited, the film is restructured according to new repayment calculations that take into account the increased overall commission fee and the new exhibition date. The original version, Operator, was commissioned by EMPAC, Troy, New York, and was exhibited for the first time at 80WSE, NYU, New York in 2017. The exact figures and calculations are deliberately withheld, and like many financial instruments, Boyd’s calculations pursue a logic that cannot be entirely tracked. The drone views and multiple camera angles demonstrably fragment their subject matter, and the mathematical model that drives the editing rhythm is a further abstraction. The anxiety provoked by the work’s absurdly rendered temporal and physical constraints is suggestive of debt’s function as a form of social control.

Episode #5

The Riddle of the Imp on the Mezzanine (My Journey)
Steven Warwick 

Performance event

Saturday, 9 February 2019
Eggla / Unit 207  (Basement), Broad Street Mall, 211 Broad Street, Reading

Reading International presents the latest iteration of Steven Warwick’s mutating Mezzanine series, 'The Riddle of the Imp on the Mezzanine (My Journey)'. Part platform as performance, part live event - Warwick reflects on how forces of social evil, religious retribution and redemption manifest in popular culture and folklore; be it in the Lincoln Imp, Pinhead from Hellraiser or popular literary sleuths such as Poirot.

Episode #6

The Sound of Words
Helen Cammock

Sir John Madejski Art Gallery
, Reading Museum


The Sound of Words, an exhibition by Helen Cammock featuring a recent acquisition by the Reading Foundation for Art entitled Shouting in Whispers (2017), a video work complemented by a series of text-based prints. On the closing day of the exhibition, a group of works produced from a workshop led by Cammock, in collaboration with participants from the Reading area will be introduced.

Helen Cammock explores history and storytelling through layered, fragmented narratives. Using video, photography, installation, print and performance, she interrogates the ways in which stories are told, and acknowledges those who are rendered invisible by the hierarchy of histories. Cammock’s work is prefaced by writing, borrowing the words of others to use alongside her own. Shouting in Whispers consists of a visual essay that collages multiple histories across time and place, encompassing video footage, images, and sound that chronicle the protests in South Africa under Apartheid, the Palestinian struggle, Greenham Common, the Brixton Riots, and Shirley Chisholm – the first black female U.S Democratic presidential candidate. The accompanying text-based prints utilise and repurpose language adopted from the various excerpts in conjunction with words taken from songs, prose, poetry, and conversations with the artist that bring to the fore hidden or unseen histories.

Twelve billboard posters were created as part of the artist-led workshop in association with the exhibition at the Museum of Reading. The texts and images generated by participants are posted to the Crown Street – Southampton Road billboards. The workshop for The Sound of Words sought to address the diverse interpretations of what community means and what people understand by it today. The posters respond to these questions of community – what do we understand by it; what is our stake in it, why our contributions to it can often vary, and why sometimes our individual and community voice can go unheard or unrecognised.

HAVING HEARD FRAGMENTS SUCH AS:

Increasingly we have seen the human predicament as the result of a
world filled with words, piled with images, networks of signs and gestures and noises, for an inter-subjective dialogue designed to fail; all marks of difference ensure estrangement from one another, tribalising societies into
alienated individuals and groups, with result of permanent war.

AND:

Depictions erode the experience of the fleetingness of reality, surrogating the world, causing us to live fragmentarily, as projections: multiplying our (treacherous) world permits permutations outside of our controls, encouraging the populace to imagine realities that are unnatural or antithetical to those that we desire and we require.

AND:

The species error of speech, having thus lunged us down the path of organising ourselves into social super-bodies
by promising comprehension through the transcension of our individual subjectivities, facilitated
habitual coupling and banding based on false perceptions of shared qualities, which prolonged the realisation of affinity’s impossibility.

AND:

We must transcend the absurd folly of believing it possible to create
consensus regarding the meaning of
the unconscious movements of our bodies, those twitches and blinks and flicks and curls that we think make our bodies readable; as false codes are untruths, we must cease all codifying and ritualising
of gesture and fully detach ourselves
from the tyranny of our selves as flesh.

AND:

As translation’s impossibility
has proven the fallacy of language,
we must realise that the chasm is
not just between languages but between humans themselves: unbreachably distanced, the comprehension gap between us is
a weaponised negative space from which
all estrangement, untruth, and discord flows; to avoid cyclical repetition
Babel must become a permanent State.

AND:

We must envision a world in which we are free from the binds that are tying us together, free from obligatory inter-subjectivity, free from the constant reading of and writing with our illegible and inarticulate
human forms, from the terror of being together: we must de-articulate, unlearn, and disassemble all forms of communication to become ourselves.”

Extract from Redundant as eyelids in absence of light Translators Endnotes, Studio for Propositional Cinema, 2018

Warwick’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Spike and Urbanomic. As a musician working under his own name and, previously, as "Heatsick", he produces and performs a hybrid live/ DJ set, releasing recordings with the club/experimental label PAN and has played at Berghain, Berlin; London Contemporary Music Festival; Trouw in Amsterdam; Bergen Konsthall; LAMPO/ Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Issue Project Room, New York; and the Mutek and Unsound Festivals. His visual work has been shown at KW Berlin; SMK, Copenhagen; The Modern Institute, Glasgow ; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Cleopatra's, Brooklyn; Beach Office, Berlin ; Balice Hertling, New York.

Warwick’s practice is paradigmatic of an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses DJing and theatre-making along with art, music and writing. His work is disseminated on a multitude of platforms including records, galleries, nightclubs, publications and the Internet. Across these contexts, Warwick creates assemblages of performance, image, sound and language that speak to the ways in which ideologies construct and inhabit spaces, online and offline – from co-working spaces to clubs, television shows and online chat rooms. In its pluralistic live forms, Warwick’s work redefines the expectations and conventions that accompany events such as concerts and public lectures

He also has recently presented a series of 'Mezzanine' projects, including a  musical performance series choreographed with dancers. Other collaborative projects include 'Elevator to Mezzanine' (with DeForrest Brown Jr), together they have produced exhibitions, a look book and recently a Western musical titled 'Performing America (Iconic America)', and the audio-visual performance-lecture series 'Fear Indexing the X- Files' with writer Nora Khan, recently issued as a book by Primary Information, with excerpts published by NOVEL.

The Sound of Words by Helen Cammock is the final episode of NOVEL’s year-long publishing and curatorial project  A reproduction of three weeks in May 1970, it has featured contributions by Renee Green, Studio for Propositional Cinema with Hampus Lindwall, Patricia L. Boyd, and Steven Warwick. The episodes will be compiled and re-presented as a publication in Summer/Autumn 2019.

Helen Cammock and NOVEL would like to thank Reading International, Elaine Blake and all the staff at Reading Museum, the Reading Foundation for Art, Mary Genis at CultureMix, Jeff Jones and the Barbados and Friends Association of Reading (BAFA) and the Reading Foundation for Art.