Infocommunicative Processes
Infocommunicative Processes was a collaboration between myself, Sunette Viljoen and Fumiko Kikuchi. The conception for this site-specific work started with a rundown showroom that we declared a found space. The overarching interests lay in communicative and material processes and their results, the loss of information, lapses in comprehension and conjecture. Embedded within the event was another collaboration between myself and Kikuchi, as well as the respective yet interrelated positions and works by each one of the participating artists.
Viljoen responded to the worn walls with a cladding installation that pointed to traces of production and which set the scene for the collaborative event by myself and Kikuchi, entitled Co-text 25.11.15, 19:00-22:00. As visitors arrived, Kikuchi and I intervened their viewing of the exhibition with our respective modes of communicative interaction. Parallel to our interventions, an array of interruptions and buzzing flow of activity formed part of the work. Two performer assistants executed abstracted tasks that in themselves challenged discourse and communication, but also, in conjunction with the interventions, functioned as a layer of meta-confusion.
My intervention, In Our Time, made use of the wall as an abstract subject for gestural interaction. A partly-memorized, jargon-filled English lexicon, that had been derived from various academic podcasts, was used a source for intuitive verbal utterance in the instance of conversation with visitors. The result was a form of linguistic eloquence that was deprived of its semantic expectations.