1:

This whole thing is based on separation. A barring based on unity, sectioning off while sticking together. I'm trying harder to explain myself. Like, transcribing orientation. Im sitting on the dining room table watching rain clump together and pool downwards on the window of the car yard next door, no one else can see this so I have to write it down. To speak it would be for it to fall from my mouth and evaporate. There's no one else here and I forget that sometimes. This is the point from which the world unfolds, then shrinks and mirrors back as I situate myself in it. I'll wait till it stops raining so I have a bit more time to think. It's easy to say too much in too few words, especially written. I have a habit of compounding together sentences into heaving masses of information. Piles and piles of bones with no guts or connecting tissue. Maybe I'm placing too much trust in language. 

Your eyes augment everything with grime from your head, we wipe down the back of each retina with a dirty cloth.

2:

I’ll exist in the context of this use, and try to participate in your universe. I have to rely on everything you give me in order to arrive at the place that you’re thinking of. 

Working through static we lean on the rules we’ve been provided with- a way to return, when we know secretly that nothing can be properly undone.

Failing to hold onto a sound, the story is performed into existence. Spoken words are fleeting and I forget the exact script almost immediately. Verbal shrapnel pricking the skin briefly but leaving no real mark. Left with only a gist and a feeling, our conversation exists only as it goes out of existence and interprets itself as it proceeds. 

The older I get the less my skin buzzes at someone else’s touch, my senses have been worn down, getting sort of threadbare. Through muscle memory my skin no longer sparks at new hands, holding enough sensory knowledge that it no longer learns what another feels like, only my head does that now. The thoughts of others are new to hold, and this sense is all that remains when the speaker goes quiet. 

Speaking in anticipation, we try to negotiate an understanding that lies between us, between thought and expression, and the two sides of the conversation. 

Information is held in the meeting of voices and the act of remembering. We speak as a collision, and a hybrid. This is what I bring, this reciprocity. We exchange for mutual benefit, action in kind by action. 

3:

 The last conversation I had was through a screen, does that count? At what point does something become a letter? Is it the length or the time it takes for a reply? I’ve sent countless emails but everything I write seems too serious, too dark. But only heavy things seem to stick, and this lightheadedness that i've cultivated seems irrelevant now. I wonder if i'll circle back without realising. Like how when you close your eyes and try to walk in a straight line, you always walk in a circle by accident. Or even when your eyes are open and there's no landmarks, people still walk in loops, like the anchor point is somewhere at the horizon and we are swinging around on this axis. This is how it feels to misplace context.

 

4:

We orient ourselves to be listened to- filling up our diaphragms on attention and assumption in order to arrive at a point, and search for the point. Redefining continuously as we drag words back and forth. We scrape out a path from which to backtrack in the process of telling; practicality requiring a steady pacing. Dug out in the back and forth, the path is created as it is followed. 

We intake material and then express it, and it is through this process of breathing words that information becomes present. A verbal habitat from which to return. I re-apply my voice to the landscape in the hope that something will stick. There's a connection between speech and landscape I think. By landscape I mean orientations and horizons and wayfinding. It's something about immediacy, recognition in the moment and then immediate change, or recognition only to get to the point. The landscape moves alongside me as I walk along the path carved out by foot traffic, sound travels down the line. My words stick only long enough to be interpreted, before they are warped by your intent. It's a delicate kind of collision that is both inhabited and walked through. The space changes as we work towards it. 

 

5:

We begin as hybrid as our conversation ropes us together, functioning via activity on either side, as through collision we become a new thing, augmented through a process of skewed superimposition. At least until we leave each other's presence. The whole thing is based on separation. Our interactions exist in the identification of difference. The sum of our discursive parts is made both to bind and section off, as the separation is based on unity. It comes into being as a state of transmission. I tell you something and it arrives, whether by speech or phone or writing, the barrier is the entry point, both inhabited and worked through. This structure is composed of interacting qualities, existing as a state between us both.

The gap opens up as a doorway, an interface, a liminal place- a process that is simultaneous and inseparable from us both. Speaking in anticipation of the other. It's a hybrid kind of consequence, putting relations at risk with/of other relations, what I tell you belongs to both of us I think. First it is yours, passively, as I act, as I stick and you are stuck to. 

Only to become active again when you start to speak back. “the passive is the one that holds and is held by the entanglement, only to let it go when the other takes the relay”, a kind of loyalty that sits in the process. Watch as the point is taken back and remodelled in the hope that something will stick or be caught.