Photocopied poster-books, three trestle tables, nine participants, staples, contact microphones, amplifier, projector and headphones.
A failed method of resistance: turning books into posters and then back again into books, until the process has degraded all the paper and is no longer possible.
IMAGE 3: Megaphone for Anti-Vertical Demonstration (2010)
Megaphone, eco-brick, 888 flag (produced by Victorial Trades hall Council in 2006 for the 150th anniversary of the 8-hour working-day campaign. Supplied by Brian Boyd, Secretary VTHC), 80 cm x 40 cm x 30 cm.
IMAGE 4-5: Stenotype (2010)
Conversation transcript: six A1 posters, digital video with projector arm, audio 00:46:49.
A stenographer simultaneously transcribed a conversation between two participants in Free Associations; their discussion was private except for the presence of the stenographer. The ‘transcript’ of their conversation was presented as a silent video of the stenographer, a sound recording of the inside of her stenotype machine and as blocks of stenographic code.
As the stenographer presses each syllable key on the stenotype machine, a roll of steno-paper is simultaneously stamped with the corresponding stenography symbol. This paper emerges from the machine as an unequivocal record of the syllables the stenographer has heard. This roll was then scanned after the conversation and compiled into A1 blocks of code – the 45 minute discussion filled five and a half sheets.
The audio recording of the inside of the “silent” stenotype machine was captured using a contact microphone, which recorded the usually inaudible mechanical movement of the printer as it recorded the stenographic code.
IMAGE 6: The Scene (2010)
Aluminium and glass, three framed images and one-on-one workshops, 1.8m x 1m x 1.8m The Scene (comprised of two similar glass triangles, framed in aluminium that are joined but occupy different axes of space) is the context for a negotiation. The negotiations consisted of an instructional task to hang/install/place one of three identical framed images in the space. One-on-one workshop participants included an astro-physicist, an architectural theorist and a Lacanian psychoanalyst who declined to attempt the task. Each framed image includes a certificate with details of the negotiation of its installation.
IMAGE 7: Collective Biography II: a box archive of aerial protests and Collective Biography III: a box archive of protests on the ground (2011)
Acrylic glass, laminated laser prints, photocopies, 37.6cm x 23cm x 41.8cm and 36.5cm x 32.1cm x 42cm.
As part of An expanded documentary of women’s work for democracy in South Korea, these two tiny museums trace the history of both aerial protests and the rallies that accompanied them on the ground below. Arial protest is a way to gain visibility and, quite simply, to be heard above the crowd. Solo aerial protests are a clear vertical architecture of seeing and being seen, representing and being represented, and highlight the key tension in democratic collective politics between leadership and membership.
IMAGE 8: Encounters: Conversation in Practice (2010)
Spatial arrangements of furniture, conversations and publication.
This series of discursive one-on-one encounters ran as a parallel programme at the Sexuate Subjects Conference (a feminist conference on Irigaray’s work), University College London 3-5 December 2010. I facilitated conversations between keynote speakers and delegates who were not presenting. Short transcripts of their conversations and rough floorplans of the architecture of their encounter have been published in Lilo Nein (ed), The Present Author: Who is Speaking in Performance? (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2011).
