Syndicate: mullings and ruminations

["norman" <norman@wanadoo.fr>]

Dear Syndicate,

This is going to be yet another Tanglewood Tale. As usual, slightly
overwhelmed by the recent onslaught of much that needs real reflection, so
this is a swift leap to catch and contribute a few passing points. A
â??sudden sallyâ?? as the expression has it.

The description of Anya Gallacio's two sisters, self-eroding chalk
sculpture, follows up rather strangely Geert's description of the
self-erosion just witnessed in Tirana. It's been good to read the Pirana
reports, thanx Andreas and Geert (and the famous Edi â?? part of our
collective/ my Syndicate imagination at least since eminently re-readable
accounts of the Documenta).

Geert, your encounter with Edi Rama is I think revelatory for those of us
working and living in countries that pretend that self-preservation is our
aim, as opposed to self-destruction, but that remain obliviously blind to
the cultural massacre that their over-endowed, over-organised institutions
have been perpetrating for decades. France is quite clearly one such
country â?? remember the LEAF joke last year about us being further
south-east than Bulgaria on the European map ?  Of course it would be
obscene to say that having to build, as Edi Rama does, forms of cultural
reflection ex nihilo, represents a kind of â??empowermentâ?? compared with
one's sphere of action in a heavily prescriptive system like ours here
(actually, Brian Holmes's contributions to Eyebeam defending certain
aspects of French culture left me both relieved and quizzical, in that they
come from an American and transit via an English-speaking forum; they show
deep â?? shared â?? affection for a lot of the good things about this place,
understanding of its often tortuous mechanisms, respect for some of its
indeed respectable intellectual endeavours, and also resound with a
touchingly fraternal â??wish to belongâ?? â?? nostalgia for the other ? Kick me
if I'm wrong, Brian).  Anyway be reassured, this isn't going to be a
â??bilanâ?? of our situation here â?? Geert, can't you drop the Baudrillard digs,
nobody â??seriousâ?? â?? whatever that means - in France has bothered with the
guy for years, your chronicle is as linear as anything written by Proust,
the linearity of textual expression unless you're doing some kind of
Apollinaire or Lettriste layout is inherent to writing, particularly that
which is bound to screen and keyboard; what creates and allows the overlap
and the layering of things said is the way they're said and resound. 
Anyway, to get back to Rama, when he says that â??the only support we can
give to these newcomers is freedomâ??, he says the only thing that strikes me
as being valid. Immensely valid.  No art magazines, no consolidated
critical theory, no educational programme. Yet. One helluva responsibility.
How to build them up without turning young people into a nation of rampant
imitators. We have all those things in France, have had them for centuries.
Intact, dammit. But we have (practically) no art. A nation of rampant
imitators with nothing left to copy. Le simulacre ultime!!! This is my
personal view, which can be taken down in writing and held up as evidence
against me (often happens).  We just spent 50 million francs on a World Cup
opening show that makes Disney look like the summit of contemporary
culture. A fucking nightmare.

Syndicate seems to be heaving with some kind of strange seismic energy. My
Romanticism? Tirana sounds fascinating. Which sounds like one of those
â??politically correctâ?? ways of saying â??sorry folks couldn't make itâ??. True
nevertheless. But being able to follow it up thus is hugely important.
Windows on the world, let in the drafts. We're in countries that have
windows, and walls, and doors, often locked, coded into inaccessibility. 
The walls that have been torn down (Pink Floyd) too easily lead us to
forget the others just up the road. 

Last weekend we had a seminar on â??Own Bodies, Other Bodies, Virtual Bodiesâ??
at the International Institute of Puppetry in Charleville-Mézières.
Institutions are not necessarily inherently bad, and this one, for all its
handicaps, seems to withhold potential for action which is the only thing
that interests me â?? whether in the realm of active thinking or active
doing. We went from phenomenological analysis of relations between bodies
and objects (Barbara Becker), bodies and their simulacra, through to
discussion of virtual bodies and proxemics in collaborative virtual
environments (Steve Benford, Steve Pettifer). The good old CSCW stuff +
Pettifer's â??alternative physicsâ?? DEVA immersive reality modeling work.
Louis Bec went into a tightly controlled delirium on metagesture and
gestural epistemology. Basically we were all having a great time, whetting
the neurons and using all the right big words, all Saturday afternoon. We
also had an interpreter who whipped between people with an HF mike and
became our ventriloquist by procuration (kind of weird given the central
theme) â?? a labour-intensive and costly undertaking that we can't always
arrange, but it was immensely important for people to be able to rub
shoulders with another language. There's lots of inexplicable meaning that
wells up in the untranslatable chinks, and if you're there with the other
person and Sprach opposite, you somehow grasp it. 

But the real highlight was that on the Saturday evening, students from the
Puppetry School prepared a kind of demo â?? presentation of their handling
techniques. A parade of figures â?? shadows, strings, tringles, rods, gloves
â?? that suddenly filled the old garret at the Villa d'Aubilly, where the
seminars take place. The students spoke with remarkable finesse and
subtlety about what changes in their relationships to the figures, as a
function of how â??hands-onâ?? they are. Notions of immediacy and mediation (we
were working on interface issues). It was moving and somehow poignantly
close to the bone. The figures were coming alive one after another, being
discarded in a corner as their successors took over, and all the
multisyllabic discourse around body and embodiment that seems to weigh so
heavily on us â?? oh so heavy-headed are they/we, the academics (and onetime
ecclesiastics) who deal with things of the body!!! â?? dissolved as we got
caught up in the exhilaration of creative gesture.  After that evening, the
students leapt in to the discussion and astutely pinpointed all the grey
areas where we were trying to cover up for mindless mindfulness at the
expense of what we were really meant to be discussing â?? body and gesture.
Michel Waisvisz's â??squeezable sound mirrorâ?? catalysed another round of
exchange on â??coming to grips with the bodyâ?? inscribed in an electronic
landscape.  During the Saturday night demonstration, one Italian puppeteer
sat for a long time to one side, on a wicker chair, watching her fellow
puppeteers, a fairly big glove puppet of an elderly, ageless figure
demurely seated on her knees. Alessandra manipulated the puppet throughout
this period â?? over an hour â?? they became accomplices, one could almost hear
them whispering their comments, their thoughts about what was going on, it
was a totally disconcerting, almost spine-chilling relationship that took
place so discreetly behind our backs, yet at moments seemed to completely
dominate the room (perhaps especially at the moments where thunder and
lightning raged outside!!!).  The avatar, simulacrum, inter-species
discourse takes on new meaning when you've been drawn into a situation as
uncanny as this one. Can't intellectualise it for the moment, perhaps never
will, this was something archaically animist. 

A good encounter. An indication perhaps that small but powerful, urgently
necessary  things can be done in small structures or in small corners of
small structures. Within our (likewise small) group of participants, there
was another contrast which will perhaps allow me to loop the epistolary
loop despite the linearity of this mail. One French participant spent the
whole seminar with his Cyclopean eye glued to a very choice piece of Sony
technology. A nice little digital camera. Something that I initially found
violently irritating â?? on several occasions had to be talked out of
becoming too physical with this slick world poacher. Fortunately by wiser,
further-sighted people who realised that this guy was so sick with his
record-the-world pathology that he didn't have a hope of really doing
anything with the traces. Probably labels and stores them like biological
specimens, maybe sends them to some shrink's lab for analysis. As it turned
out, he did gradually metamorphose and become a kind of metaphor for an
observer, not Vertov, not a creative observer, just a tragic cumulationist.
 You know the situation : I record therefore I am not required to listen. 
His eyes have gone blank. They don't exist without the camera prosthesis. 
He even filmed himself posing questions to us â?? turning the camera on his
open mouth, to testify to his active participation (actually, I was
half-hoping he would do a Stelarc number and swallow it). But our physical
encounter on and around physicality could not reach him. Too bad.

Then the other extreme was our resident researcher from Bratislava, who
must leave the Institute this week after two months with us.  Ida Hledikova
has been working on strolling players in the Bratislava region, two
centuries ago; their mutual cultural interferences, transfers of
techniques. She has progresssed with her research and we'll miss her. A
quietly intense presence. Ida followed the seminar, and her huge eyes
seemed to be burning into and out of her head. She watched and listened
with acute concentration, fearful to lose something, to miss something. A
stark contrast with the human camcorder who missed everything.  Registers
of presence is a notion I'm obsessed with. These two days were all about
that notion. Through and through.

Andreas, I've promised Ida that I would introduce her to my Syndicate
extended family. She craves contacts, is quite active in Bratislava (even
though I've had to tell her that much of the political maneuvering that's
going on within the research and university structures there oddly
resembles what one can see this side of the Alps â?? fortunately we both
believe in the power of laughter). I'm sure she'll be happy to introduce
herself, and am cc-ing this mail to her, but for anyone in the area,
geographic and/or disciplinary, Ida works on theatre history and puppetry,
has an actress/ active background and interests, follows up the local film
and video scene too, particularly through her partner Peter Hledik, whose
email Ida uses, and which is as follows :

Hledik@artfilm.sk

Best wishes to all of you
Keep the ball rolling 

Sally Jane Norman