Art writing is reinvented in each instance of art writing, determining its own criteria. (Fusco 2017: n.p.)
There is currently still no satisfactory definition of ‘art writing’ – I am often asked to provide one; I will not – it is still a contested term. The most sincere expression of art writing as a field is found in the galore works of those who practise it. (Fusco 2019: 83)
I aspired to write text modules for the ‘thematic nod/tes’ Cultural Toads and Sonic Thinking. (Pablo’s choice fell on the topics Mat/terial Girls and Sonic Utopias, which unfortunately could not be realized due to time constraints.)
‘Cultural Toads’ is a word combination that resulted from a misreading – an interpretive sleight of hand. Silly? Maybe so, but still has served as a catalyst to spark ideas, generate conceptual spaces, make connections between disparate worlds (or conjunctive series of theory-fabulation-sound), and ultimately prompt the act of writing. D&G’s exclamation, ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 24, emphasis in the original), resonates in my explorations utilizing (not so) unconventional techniques such as collage, stream of consciousness writing, and cut-up methods to create unexpected juxtapositions and relations between words, thought-images, and blocks of sound. Deleuze and Guattari define pop as “[a]n escape for language, for music, for writing. What we call pop – pop music, pop philosophy, pop writing – Wörterflucht [word flight]. To make use of the polylingualism of one’s own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it […] to find points of nonculture […] by which a language can escape’ (qtd. in Smith and Murphy 2001: n.p., excerpt modified). Pop podcasting, then, for Deleuze and Guattari, may be a kind of multiplicity, a rhizome which ‘develops by fits and starts, in a messy, practical, improvisational way rather than in a refined, programmatic, theoretical way’ (ibid.). As such, I was not concerned with challenging assumptions about what art writing can be, but rather with figuring out what it can do, or what it becomes in practice, by incorporating alternative media forms such as sound (for digital infrastructure) to probe the intersection of language and sound art. Thus, akin to Maria Fusco above, generative podcasting itself becomes a form of art writing – a style of pop analysis.
My writing for this project was inspired by the slogan: Practice what you preach! The imperative as a call to sound out, to try, to repeat. I oscillated between different styles, structures, and the aforementioned techniques, including blending autobiographical aspects and philosophy. Here are two excerpts from the text fragments or modules, followed by a block quotation, as examples:
Overthinking is a killer. However, I can’t say what exactly I am overthinking (does the term then apply). I guess I’m thinking of many things as most of us do. Constant chatter, taking notice of the hairless cat across the street wearing a type of ‘catsuit’ (Lat. cat ad leotard); straight ahead, force-gazing at the neighbour’s f’ing TV, massive screen. Breath in. Thought. I haven’t spotted a donkey on my street, but – a donkey parade at the park, no joke. OH NO. Breath out. The (so-called) donkey walkers take the animals for a stroll, a break from the tyranny of the petting zoo.
My role may be that of a facilitator with a wand; tsk,
a questionable image.
Let magic overcome – us, pull us from the all-ubiquitous habits
(of seeing, looking, hearing, and always-already judging) to what possibly lies within –
each of us, perhaps.
No, yes. Yes! Waving – with Maidenhair twig, ancient.
The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is underway. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 20, emphasis added)
Cultural Toads contains several modules or categories, named as follows: ‘Monologue’, ‘Dialogue’, ‘Citation’, ‘Music’, and ‘Soundscape’. The first two examples belong to the Monologue category, while the third is a quote that falls under Citation. Played in sequence, the modules, along with the 90-second audio tracks (aka sonic ambiance) and auditory signals on the vertical axis, form a unique narrative thread; more on this later. For Cultural Toads, I completed eleven text modules and compiled a selection of quotes, some of which have yet to be recorded. In contrast, Sonic Thinking is organized differently because of its content. Although both thematic nod/tes are experimental, this may be more true for the first one than for the second, which is academic in nature and takes the written propositions of my PhD thesis as a starting point, followed by my commentaries (i.e., lemmas and scholia) as newly poetic annotations. Here the topic-specific modules are called: ‘Proposition’, ‘Lemma’, and ‘Scholia’; however, the Dialogue, Quotation, Music, and Soundscape modules are common categories and occur as such in both themes. (Note that the Dialogue category consists of excerpts from our conversations, while Music and Soundscapes contain exactly what they are named for.)
As mentioned earlier, my work in higher education is based on practice-based arts research, emphasizing what I call trans-positioning. By this, I mean a heuristic technique to transposing artistic practice into a different context (using a sonic format) to encourage reflection and self-reflexivity; it also means combining practice with theory to discover new aspects of one’s creative process and work and explore novel ways of communicating the findings. This process-oriented approach to artistic research harnesses art writing and philosophy as tools of inquiry to foster the formulation of a distinctive conceptual and pragmatic framework.
Writing for schizopodcast allowed me to test some ideas and probe the limits of trans-positioning – deploying perceptual mannerism – seeking to provoke thought-images in the podcast listener as text fragments become sound blocks and vice versa. Sense-making hinges on the interplay between spoken text fragments (monologues), sonic milieus (sound environments in the broadest sense), and the audience. Deleuze conceives of thought-image as ‘perception of relations’ in the context of cinema: ‘Cinema produces a non-human eye, outside the actions/reactions of generalized responses of the practical body’; it is a perspective that considers thought-image as that ‘which may be set within affects and actions, we are presented with the power to think as such, what it is to think’ (Colebrook 2006: 69–70, emphasis added). The relevance of this notion here lies in the question of thinking(-feeling) the emergent schizo-narrative of the podcast or sonic artwork; how thought-image or sonic-thought, rather, arises from between the sensible and the intelligible; how to intuit sonic movement as sense in its double meaning.