SCORE FOR THE PRACTICE OF CONVERSATION-AS-MATERIAL*
Conversation-as-Material is a tripartite practice (or 'field of practices') comprising three parts or perhaps even three separate though interrelated practices: (Part 1) Conversation; (Part 2) Transcription; (Part 3) Distillation.
PART 1 – Conversation
- Aim: For engaging in a period of framed conversation as a way of touching upon, getting in touch with or turning over together some aspect of (shared) experience.
- Agree on whether the conversation has a specific object/focus of exploration or whether the focus will arrive or arise in and through the process itself.
- Take time to become aware of your own body, even engaging in a Practice of Attunement prior to beginning the process of conversation.
- Take a moment to tune into the chosen object/focus of exploration. This could involve a period of recollection, or looking back at notes, sketches, wordings that relate to the object/focus of exploration, or by noting/drawing/diagramming.
- Throughout this practice cultivate the act of conversation in an aesthetic mode. Try to remain in touch with the object/focus or exploration, the direct experience of one’s own body and the experiential presence of others as a sensory-perceptual event. When this quality of attention fades, pause or stop the process. Begin again when refreshed.
- Feel free to speak before knowing what it is that you want to say: thinking through speaking.
- Feel free to speak in single words, partial phrases, half sentences, and thought fragments.
- Allow for vulnerability and embarrassment; for wrestling with, stumbling and falling over one’s words.
- As the conversation unfolds, feel free to explore the etymology of the appearing words and to look for synonyms, antonyms and associated words also in other languages.
- Consider different speeds and rhythms. Allow for silence.
- Consider one’s approach to listening to others as an aesthetic practice.
VARIATION: Conversation (accompanied by artefacts or documents)
- In this variation of the practice, different artefacts and documents generated through previous ‘ecologies in action’ can be used as mediating agencies to further facilitate or enable the process of conversation. Rather than engaged with in advance of the conversation, in this variation the artefacts and documents accompany or are accompanied by the conversation itself: conversation proceeds in touch or through contact with. The artefacts and documents provide a different way of returning to, getting in touch with, or for extending the resonance of the lived experience of various practice(s) or ecologies.
Example:
Conversation in contact with, or accompanied by, video documentation of an ‘ecology in action’. The same broad principles apply as for the first variation of conversation such as:
- Take time to become aware of your own body, even engaging in a Practice of Attunement prior to beginning the process of conversation.
- Throughout this practice cultivate the act of conversation in an aesthetic mode. Try to remain in touch with the object/focus or exploration, the direct experience of one’s own body and the experiential presence of others as a sensory-perceptual event. When this quality of attention fades, pause or stop the process. Begin again when refreshed.
- Option 1: Synchronous/coinciding - Begin to play the video recording. As the video continues playing, feel free to speak, allowing one’s speech to emerge in touch with the unfolding video recording. Feel free to speak before knowing what it is that you want to say: thinking through speaking.
- Option 2: Pausing – Begin to play the video recording. When you feel the impulse to speak, request that the video recording is paused. Allow time for the emergence of conversation. Resume playing the video when the conversation subsides. Repeat this process.
* The Practice of Conversation-as-Material was brought to the project by Emma Cocker. Engage more with this practice in other contexts here.
Part 2 – Transcription
- Aim: For transcribing the recorded conversation generated in Part 1 Conversation.
- Take time to become aware of your own body, even engaging in a Practice of Attunement prior to beginning the process of transcription.
- Throughout this practice cultivate the act of listening/writing in an aesthetic mode. Try to remain in touch with the object/focus or exploration, the direct experience of one’s own body and the experiential presence of others as a sensory-perceptual event. When this quality of attention fades, pause or stop the process. Begin again when refreshed.
- Private or Public: Decide whether the practice of transcription will be activated as a private activity, or else made public through the showing/sharing of the screen during the act of live typing/transcription (e.g. by projecting the screen, through an online platform).
- Decide through which mode you wish to activate the practice of transcription: (1) Close focus or attention (very slow) - listening very slowly and carefully to the recording of the conversation and recording it word for word, repeatedly listening to sections of the recording as necessary; (2) Close focus or attention (real-time) – listening to the recording whilst typing concurrently without repeatedly listening to sections of the recording, accepting that there will be parts of the conversation that are missed; (3) Close focus or attention (fragments) - listening to the recording and typing out only those fragments that call your attention (This specific mode fuses the practices of transcription and distillation as a single practice); (4) Open focus or attention – undertaking the act of transcription whilst open to one’s wider environment, transcribing only those sections/fragment of the recording that resonate with the present experience of one’s environment. These different modes can be explored within the act of transcription itself, moving between the different options.
Part 3 – Distillation (See also Practice of Reading: Distillation)
- Aim: For distilling the conversation transcript towards an emergent poetics, that gradually appears or become revealed through the process
- Take time to become aware of your own body, even engaging in a Practice of Attunement prior to beginning the process of transcription.
- Throughout this practice cultivate the act of distillation in an aesthetic mode. Try to remain in touch with the object/focus or exploration, the direct experience of one’s own body and the experiential presence of others as a sensory-perceptual event. When this quality of attention fades, pause or stop the process. Begin again when refreshed.
- The practice can be activated as a private solo activity or as a collective activity.
- Decide through which approach you wish to activate the practice of distillation, for each approach find somewhere comfortable to engage with the text – you could be sitting, standing, walking, lying or some other posture: (1) Distillation through marking: Allow your attention to lightly move through the text and as you are doing this mark/highlight/underline all those sections (words, phrases, lines, sentences) that draw your interest or seem to resonate; (2) Distillation through speaking: Allow your attention to lightly move through the text and as a word, phrase, line, sentence draws your interest or seems to resonate, speak it aloud (this process can be recorded).
- Towards generating a new text: (1) Distillation through marking: extract/gather all those words, phrases, lines, sentences marked from the previous stage; (2) Distillation through speaking: transcribe the spoken distillation.
- The above process (full distillation) can be repeated towards further distillation/densification to further activate or amplify the vocative potential of the text.