#I also like the idea of tiny versions speaking Animal crossing language | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fairytheo · 3 years

Text

enhypen as your boyfriend.

boyfriend!enhypen x gen!reader. fluff. 1.9k. curse words. mention of bugs, food. not requested.

🐈 ⸝⸝ HEESEUNG ˙𐃷˙

super-duper caring !!

he’s so whipped for you — he smiles just by thinking about you

also very giggly around you

LOVES lending you his beanies

(aka. you stealing them..)

+ you steal his earrings as well ! not that he minds

absolutely adores singing for you / he loves singing you to sleep :D

hold up, is being heeseung’s s/o just being his personal ramen cook 🤨🤨

he aaalwaays bugs you to play games with him (especially wii and nintendo switch lmao)

either that or you’re playing animal crossing while eating takeout at your dinner table

you’re the only person in the world who he’ll ever do aegyo for.

he secretly enjoys it, but shhh you didn’t hear that from me

i think he likes calling you names like cutie, cutiepie or just a shorter version of your name <3 (if there is one !)

booping your nose is on his everyday to do list ☝️

lowkey therapist & boyfriend in one ngl

WAIT he loves making playlists for you two,,

“y/n! i made another playlist, do you wanna listen to it? i made it while thinking of you.” <//3

the type to write cheesy lyrics about you, then later cringes at his own writing bUT then leaves it like that because you like it !

you have his cover of lauv’s “i’m so tired” either set as your alarm or play it on loop everyday

(random but for some reason i can picture him giving you a cassette with his cover on it just for the vintage vibes)

🐈 ⸝⸝ JAY ˙𐃷˙

the mom-and-boyfriend in one ;]

f a s h i o n c o u p l e

you are literally fashion icons. no disagreements.

you have matching clothes or accessories ! even if it’s really subtle, the gesture behind it is super adorable <//3

cooking pt. 2 :D but this time there’s a gorden ramsay in your relationship

i can just SEE how you both two impersonate gorden ramsay while cooking which makes everything 10 times funnier !! checks every 5 seconds if the food is ready tho because he doesn’t wanna risk anything

never cleans up afterwards, either you do or no one does

since you’re both fashion icons your social media followers are going 📈📈📈

literally couple goals.

he loves taking pictures of you,, but also wants you to take pictures of him

jay gets flustered easily so please make him flustered with sudden compliments, hugs, kisses, etc. !!

he’s also the only member i can really see calling you babe

confident but shy about pda at the same time ??? he’s both LOL

you always tease him with his RAS moments and randomly quote them when you’re in the middle of a conversation with him lmao

random and idk if this fits here, but he likes making your lunch — leaves you encouraging notes too <3

last but not least: jokingly gets angry at you when he wants something from you, and you do the same thing back ♡

🐈 ⸝⸝ JAKE ˙𐃷˙

sweetest and softest boyfriend to ever exist. i’m so soft for him JSHSHS

definitely calls you sweetie and darling. 100%. fight me if you think otherwise.

shows you pics of layla everyday (it’s become routine for him >_<)

a tiny bit cliché BUT lends you his jacket whenever you’re cold (even when you’re inside !!)

random thought: jake puts his hands in your hoodie pockets...

💔💔💔

it’s his personal goal to peck your cheek and forehead at least twice a day — gets pouty if he wasn’t able to do that ))):::

talks in english a lot because you love his accent !!

if you’re an english speaker, you’ll have conversations in english all. the. time.

if you’re not an english speaker, no worries, he’ll teach you !

+ reads you bedtime stories in english (jake’s australian accent >>>)

dreams of travelling with you to australia <33

if there’s a bug in the house you better know that jake will NOT be removing them and runs out of the house

WILL stay over at one of the other member’s houses untill that bug is REMOVED .

so if you’re afraid of bugs as well,,, i’m sorry bae, but it’ll be your task to remove these little... creatures 😐

ngl you have more photos of layla than of him on your phone lol

(spams you with her pictures and captions them with “y/n!!! look!!! layla with a flower!!!! layla with a butterfly!!!!” it’s just so sweet aaa)

we need some “””drama””” so you make jokes about him being a “🥶💸🔥💪” boy a lot in your relationship LMAO

🐈 ⸝⸝ SUNGHOON ˙𐃷˙

ice skating dates.

this has been mentioned in other headcanons a lot already but i just HAD to include it,,

convinces you to eat ice cream after your date LOL even if it IS winter

btw. fashion couple nr. 2 !!!

MIRROR SELCAS

ugh the visuals and the power you two hold,,,, i can’t,,,,,

has better clothes than you ngl so you share clothes lmao

it started with him lending you his sweatpants, but then you didn’t want to return them forgot to return them and BOOM 💥 here we are

extremely awkward and shy at first — don’t worry though, he becomes much more chaotic in the later phases of your relationship

he teases you SO MUCH. LIKE. SO MUCH.

always has small smile (smirk?) on his face when he’s about to make a cocky remark (so beware)

you tease him back just twice as hard which 1.) results in him in becoming flustered 2.) fails LOL

off-topic but he’d love a s/o that has a similar style to him ??? a more elegant, classy, dark style perhaps

when he’s away / busy he’ll send you some selcas and captions them with “how r u doing??” “did you eat yet?” “cheer up :P”

kinda shy about pda but likes showing off too ???

i mean,, men... 🙄🙄 /lh

whenever someone mentions your name near him, he’ll just try to hide his smile while biting his lip (yk what i’m talking about???) and you’ll see his dimples and the affectionate look in his eyes and just AAAAA

the type of boyfriend that calls you love~

🐈 ⸝⸝ SUNOO ˙𐃷˙

skin care routines with sunoo 24/7 🤝

he does your hair (if your hair is long enough to do different hairstyles with it ofc !!)

send you daily weekly skin care products he thinks you two should try out / that’d be good for your skin <3

spa nights every friday at 9pm — he only lets you in if you wear a stylish pyjama LOL

you buy him peach items because they just remind you so much of him (｡•́︿•̀｡)

SELCA TIME !!! his phone is always ready !!! (apart from his storage maybe?)

PARTICIPATES IN SELCA DAYS OF YOUR FAVOURITE IDOLS AAA

loves to go on walks w u

does A LOT of aegyo,,

and i know that you knew that this point will be in this headcanon.

for eg. instead of saying goodnight or bye he’ll just do aegyo for you not that anyone minds tbh

stages of sunoo flirting (?):

a — tries to compliment you (it sounds more like a flirty remark tbh)

b — realizes then blushes

c — cringes and runs away LMAO

playfully acts jealous, so you know it’s a joke but deep down he’s actually jealous

you two match each others vibes a lot — if one is sad, the other is sad as well

+ tells you your posture is bad when you sit like a banana or tells you to go to sleep early and when you don’t listen to him, he’ll show you an article that proves that (abc) and (xyz) is bad for you and says “i told you so.” 💀

🐈 ⸝⸝ JUNGWON ˙𐃷˙

impresses you by doing kicks (does the kick cap challenge on tiktok and/or you play kick it by nct 127 for the funzies)

poking his dimple is a MUST . 😩😩

though gets super shy when you kiss him and also if you buy him gifts !!

cheers you up whenever you feel down or are upset

compliments you a ton ))): will randomly come up to you and tell you that your fit is cute or that you look brighter today,,, little does he know it's because of him ;]

HUGS!HUGS!HUGS

poking his dimple comes first, then hugging

the other members tease you two everytime you’re over LOL it’s like there are two koalas clinging onto each other

our yang garden gained another sheep +1

you two randomly play sheep,,,, like,,, everyday ???? sheep cosplays 👍

idk why ig it’s just fun to imitate sheep and go “mmmeEeEeeEhh” to annoy others

talking of that, even THOUGH he is a responsible leader he will not hesitate to do stupid shit with you

“hey how about we ring on that house there and yell “sheep for sale!” do you think they’ll open the door?”

“i don’t know... let’s find out!” 🤝

let’s just say that this didn’t end well..

also kinda bullies you (in a loving way ofc !!) pand teases you nonstop

either calls you asshole or love aHA

in conclusion: a very unpredictable relationship,, would 10/10 recommend.

very random but i feel like his love language is acts of service

🐈 ⸝⸝ NI-KI ˙𐃷˙

oh look it’s our tsundere 😼

can’t go a day without dancing so you two have vibing sessions at 2am everyday ft. the others telling you to go to bed

you’re the only one that can make him soft lol

if you’re older than him, you would definitely take care of him like your own baby !!

if you are the same age as him or younger it’d be awkward for him at first, because he isn’t used to taking care of someone younger, so he’d treat you as if you were his best friend at the beginning

you love to watch him dance !! it’s so satisfying,, LITERAL asmr.

pranks you 24/7. boy has NO mercy. will not care if the others will scold him later. he will do the prank smoothly (?) — doesn’t care about the consequences LMAO

probably sets your alarm to someone screaming or a cringy aegyo song <//3

wants to film dance covers with you !! you don’t have to be the best dancer either !! as long as you have fun ^__^

the other members find you really cute but are also vERY TIRED OF YOU,, two energized teens in a relationship was not a good idea ☝️

likes to randomly hold your hand and swing it around

probably distant at the beginning of the relationship because a.) he doesn’t want to pressure you/make things awkward b.) he doesn’t really know what to do either ???

(if you’re not japanese or don’t know how to speak japanese) he’ll definitely teach you some japanese phrases and words !! introduce you to his culture as well :DD and he really wants to know more about your culture too <3

teaches you phrases like “sunoo is a dumbass” for the funzies LOL

randomly makes micheal jackson impressions,,, it’s hilarious LMFAO

2K notes · View notes

spamzineglasgow · 4 years

Text

‘slippery things’: An Interview with Rosie Roberts

SPAM are delighted to announce the publication of portals: an exciting new sequence of notes and lyric musings from writer, artist and filmmaker Rosie Roberts. To be released early this summer, portals will be our first foray into full-length nonfiction. From the author:

portals is a rained through text set in Glasgow, it makes curtain twitchy inquiries into the disintegration of collective observation and thought in time. Through Glasgow's associate objects the collection seeks to invoke a breath, a space and a motion between thinking and sounding in a particular place informed by writing and reading from out with. This is an act which draws in time, like the chord of the chime, in order to understand a place as undefinable, in relation to passing moments, themselves undefinable things, that are slippery and constant.

> Encountering Rosie Roberts’ work is like finding yourself in a canopy of trees, looking up at the sky and deciding that bristling sound is as much the clear azure as it is the leaves. Or maybe the sky wouldn’t be pure blue, but a hazy Highland bluster of grey. And you’d talk to it. I’m not saying it’s going to start warping into a vortex, Twin Peaks: The Return-style, just that it’s going to get a little bit blurred. The canopy is a commodious space for composing a thought; it feels like a paragraph. Crossing forms, genres and registers, swerving between spaces, voices, sources and times, Roberts’ approach to writing and filmmaking is dialogic and reparative as much as it is playful and multi-sensory: putting affect, attunement and intimacy at the forefront of her narrative, essays and images. Her style is firmly grounded in the everyday as well as myth and dream: attention to material detail abounds and yet there is always something aslant, an object or idea just a smidge out of place. A tiny dustmite, glowing oddly blue instead of red as it blinks cursorial across your screen. Roberts shows you how nothing is ever quite what it seems, but there is a delicious contingency in the shimmering version of things she presents.

> Roberts is writing and filming into space: making clearings for what we can or can’t know of the object world and of ourselves (not to mention ourselves-as-objects). There is a vulnerability, a kind of trembling to her work; an emphasis on the beauty of the everyday that puts you in mind of Margaret Tait or Margaret Salmon. Her films are lyric essays, while her essays feel like films. She seduces by a casual enchantment that feels like an opening commons in a weird world of uncanny encounter. Objects are lively with mutual agency. Characters seem trapped in a loop or a virtual definition of enaction itself. I think of this essay ‘LOOP (a geography)’ (2010) by Hayden Lorimer and John Wylie, an emphasis on the this of encounter: ‘This exposure of bodies to each other, this sharing and partaking means that being is first and foremost being-with’. In her poem ‘Aphrodite’s Hole’ (published in SPAM issue 8: Cruise Liner), the speaker details simple bodily and physical actions that become abstracted, some of which are more-than-human: ‘china / bounces on paisley carpet; prawns splat’. There is a submersion and a swim, there is a wavering: ‘Swimming to shore I do not know: where exactly we are, and what I will do after’. Something is always slightly clipped from the meaning, leaving the reader space to inhabit the scenario. Bodies and forms draw together. She often works with parataxis, giving things and events their equal measure, refusing to draw neat conclusions of meaning or value.

> In Roberts’ short film, Maud Gonne Nuts (2019), the protagonist (played by Catriona Smith) crawls out of a loch and enters the human world, only to splash back in again, and the cycle repeats: ‘but it happens in a loop / and you wash up again’. She is a fish, transformed into a woman by a ‘hapless unseen male Aenghus’. We are invited into a tender place, a hazelwood. The use of the second-person ‘you’, referring to Maud, heightens our identification with this entrancing yet recalcitrant woman/fish hybrid. Over images of flickering blue, interspersed with scenes of Maud wandering the countryside, chewing hazels, Rachel Lena Nicolson sings a gentle song of the possible and the strange: ‘if trees can sing / then maybe I’m / going nuts’. There’s something vibrating in the hazelwood, an unseen presence. But the film is not exactly eerie; there’s a quietly joyous quality to Roberts’ myth of Maud. She really pushes what it means to go-nuts, in a kind of Deleuzo-Guattarian sense of really becoming those hazels, becoming within the hazelwood. In the cafe-bar, the locals have their glasses filled not with beer but hazelnuts. As the small brown nuts are ancient symbols of fortune, wealth and happiness, it’s not so much that the characters drink to the goodness of each others’ future as they squirrel its possibility. So here we have metonymy. But it’s only really Maud we see eating the nuts, nourishing herself. She gets caught in these loops: endlessly she eats, she even accidentally indulges in some fishy cannibalism at the chippie. Over Fifth Harmony’s euphoric pop song ‘That’s My Girl’ (Epic/Syco 2016), Maud drifts around the bar, eyeing her hazels, striking a match over and over. I keep thinking of that Virginia Woolf quote from To the Lighthouse (1927):

What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

In her gulping breaths, it’s like Maud is asking the world a question. O, O, O: the loop, the cry, the breath but she can’t begin. The match is a little daily miracle, obsessively repeated. ‘[H]ere was one’, looping back on the revelation of the ‘never did come’ itself. You might say of Rosie Roberts’ work in general: there are all these illuminations, matches struck in the dark by surprise. I think of sliding my iPhone out of my pocket, the back-lit glow of notification like a spell. Because Roberts’ work allows for that simultaneity, distraction; she suggests its lateral drift might even be a comfort. We are constantly warned that the waning of attention correlates with cultural and personal anxiety, but Roberts’ work sensitively unpacks the phenomenology of medial living between times and perspectives and voice. In her poem ‘help loop - a script for introduction’ (published in chains zine, 2019), she quotes Lotte L. S.’s recent essay series, published by Poetry Foundation: ‘The We of A Position’ (2019): ‘“Have you thought of the night, now, in other times, in other foreign countries?”’. There is this playfully vague Lotte L. S. refrain of ‘someone in literature once asked’, that Roberts modulates to an ask in her extended essay or ‘proposal for synchronicity and relational epistemology’: ‘Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell — a sigil for a city in the round whole: animal object, plant and sound’ (2019). The point is to pluralise one’s position, to laterally cite and to do so in body: as in Roberts’ film Pan (2018), where two human actors enact the playful ambles of their double canine companions. What would it mean to see from that landscape, knowing the humans and dogs were as much a part as the hills? And all those mammalian and geologic times at once! And in Maud Gonne Nuts, there are the hazels in the hazelwood, rendered in sound as a looping crunch crunch crunch.

> Roberts’ work is in many ways obviously new materialist, object-oriented in some of its themes. But there is a lovely domesticity to this: no speculative obsession with black holes and mineral obscurity as such. Her analogue, Pasolini-inspired film just / only (2019) was hand-processed in a developer made from strikingly everyday items ‘Vitamin C, coffee and baking soda’. Her alchemic aesthetics are not simply statements of agential being, but show up the strange desire economies of a familiar object-world, held shakily and estranged in the hands of its human viewer, wielding the camera. There is the repeat: ‘wants / a structure that just wants / to be another structure’, overlaying the flickering image, repeating again with a move from ‘just’ to ‘only’. These little affective shifts call attention to how we construct value, identity and perspective in language. The camera attends to the nuts on the windowsill; bulbs of light glow and retract as in a time lapse; scratches of matter play across the screen. We are asked to think of what is held in a form, in structure; but also what slips.

> In addition to her new materialist and ecological tendencies, Roberts uses registers and tone adopted from a feminist and queer practice of reparation, catharsis and care. References to Jack Halberstam and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (especially the notion of ‘paranoid reading’) abound in her work. Additionally she asks, alongside Donna Haraway, what it might mean to ‘try speaking with things’. This is not an act of ventriloquism or projection so much as a tune and a chime, a whimsical gesture with the weight of sincerity behind it. I like to think of the fleetingness of her work (not just in length, but the way a sentence turns back on itself, a section repeats but somehow also refuses continuity; the way she stages a loop) in relation to something else Lotte L.S. writes: ‘What we had in those moments was an anti-literature of life, an afterthought reaching to become the first and foremost’. Once again, the loop which is literature’s (anti)possibility. I think of that famous quote from Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature is heading toward itself, towards its essence, which is its disappearance’. Roberts’ work asks what would it mean to be in a work that was dissolving itself, reduced to seed or grain as if that were origin, dying and sprouting almost helplessly. In Samuel Beckett’s play on memory, media and self-archivisation, Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Krapp asks the question: ‘The grain, now what I wonder do I mean by that, I mean…’

> What does it mean to trail off this way, to not stay present and sweet, like a perfect rhyme continually ringing? ‘What happens to the seed that isn’t eaten, that doesn’t grow’, Roberts asks in ‘Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell’. Riffing off Jack Halberstam, she suggests that ‘conversations parse out seeds of thought and offer a way of being in relation to another form of being and knowing without seeking to measure’. With her shimmering cinematography, her looping, veering prose-poetics, her reflexive questioning of what it means to write, present and talk, Roberts goes some way to teasing out the qualitative, affective relation between the way andform of being and knowing. Its special secret chime. That her work sometimes feels like a script, scene setting and reeling little moments or depictions of peripheral characters, speaks to the reciprocity and intimacy of her practice. With Pan, Roberts wrote the script ‘simultaneously to the cinematographic process in order to subvert the relationship between script writing and image making’. There is perhaps the idea of a blur, a ringing tone, a veer; a colloquial space of exchange, an intermedial zone of transition and translation.

> Of ‘chatting’, Roberts writes, ‘as a form of knowledge making’, she asks what it means to bring in voices of informal wisdom within the formalised essay; she questions what is readable of a thought transmitted as image or text. Sometimes, being distracted or between-times is where the potential lies: where the trembling seed might split and grow, where the kelp washes up treasures at the edge of the water, where the mobile blinks its message of elsewheres going on and on.

> Ahead of publication, and following the screening of Roberts’ film Pan at the Beastly Modernisms conference, held at the University of Glasgow in 2019, SPAM editor Maria Sledmere got in touch to find out more about her practice.

A lot of your recent films and writings formed part of your coursework for the inaugural MLitt in Art Writing at the Glasgow School of Art. Can you talk a bit about your experience with the course and how it shaped your understanding of creative-critical work?

The Art Writing studio is a space shaped at the intersection between conversation, reading and creative responsibility/flexibility. I think it’s the kind of ‘sapling space’ I talk about in RFBTB (Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell — a sigil for a city in the round whole: animal object, plant and sound).

‘Sapling’ in itself is a vulnerable form bound up in time, a kind of transitional ephemera – in the Winnicott sense – and this is the way I experienced the course. As in, there is a designation of an intermediate area of experience, between primary creative activity – doing, making, writing, filming, talking etc – and a projection of what has already happened, and is going to happen in a practice, so, then there is this kind of unawareness of indebtedness and the acknowledgement of indebtedness that is constantly happening because it’s a learning environment that is based explicitly on sharing knowledge through conversational praxis. And this can be leaned into or resisted as it suits the individual/subject matter/time of year or whatever, I found it a transformative, challenging and furtive ground for thinking.

I’m excited by the course’s definition of art writing as ‘an interdisciplinary studio practice’. What does the notion of ‘studio’ mean to you, perhaps as a generative space but also an institution, a laboratory for thought, an ‘inside’ as opposed to ‘outside’? Are those notions stable?

You may have covered it, um I think of it as a place to think and make and do, but possibly also as a place that is other to the more function-set sites of life or places dominated by neo-liberal or capitalist production. But this is flawed thinking too because of co-option. I’m not sure, so maybe the notion isn’t stable, but that might be what is good about a studio? Sorry about this answer...

I know Margaret Tait [twentieth-century avant-garde film-poet, born in the Orkney islands] is an influence. Can you talk about when you first discovered her and how you’ve grown with her since?

I can’t really remember when I first heard of her, maybe it was through my mum sharing a radio show about her work with me? In terms of growing, maybe it’s something like, I feel like her work holds a creativity that has a light but meaningful touch and this is something that comes with confidence and practice, and perhaps once you trust your touch you can make work that holds the tenderness and authenticity of the subject (if you have one) well, because much of Tait’s work is almost documentary, so her light but meaningful method, feels like an ethical choice. I am also interested in how her films work as a constellation of visual thinking, often the practitioners I am most drawn to work like this, each piece deepenens the context, affect and meaning of the last. You can feel the exploration of ideas unfolding.

We were saturated for a while there, with Tait’s work though, so it will be interesting to come back to it in a couple of years, and see how that level of exposure - to a particular artist with a finite body of work - will affect visual and poetic practices going forward.

I’m particularly interested in descriptions of Tait’s films as ‘lyric essays’, which could obviously also be applied to your work. How do you understand the lyric essay, which is often a fraught topic in both creative writing departments and publishing contexts?

My understanding of lyric essay maybe has something to do with my background in painting, perhaps because painting mostly involves an attempt at visual poetics and often a failure. Lyric, like painting is also situated within a white male canon and so we teach ourselves against it.

I guess I am interested in the medium and method of the flow of language or something, but also to be keenly tied to meaning, questioning and the relational qualities of a piece of work. Maybe this is what I play with a bit in ‘Aphrodite’s Hole’, the work is about revenge as much as it is about escape, but also its about the flow of a whipped off table cloth, and the swing of a dead dog in a carrier bag.

Sometimes I think of myself as a sort of mordant art person trained to look at literature through the lens of a creative practice whose pedagogical experiences were almost all visual/relational/spatial and this can create a cognitive dissonance, which I value.

But essentially I’m an essay imposter, something I felt keenly when I went to Glasgow University for a class for the first time. But then that feeling petered out, we all have something to offer in the essayistic sense because it is about ‘trying’. Perhaps lyric leaves space for the reader/watcher, can let meaning flow the way thought might? I’m not sure, perhaps it is a space born of oral traditions where dissonant information could pass between people without leaving a trace for power to use for persecution.

I wonder if there is a connection to be drawn between the idea of an art that draws you into multiple, conflicting and simultaneous directions and what Timothy Morton means by an ambient poetics: ‘a poetic enactment of a state of nondual awareness that collapses the subject-object division, upon which depends the aggressive territorialisation that precipitates ecological destruction’. There are so many ambient qualities in the way you use sound, image, text overlay and transition, the material traces still visible on film, the idea of presence and speech blurring in and out of focus. Sometimes there are wisps of sound and song, other times the melody and message is bursting like a sugar-rush — that moment of ‘THAT’S MY GIRL!’ in Maud Gonne Nuts, for example. Morton argues that ‘ambient images offer a sort of gate into another dimension, a dimension that turns out to be none other than the nowness that is far more radically “here”’. I see many portals in your work: from the loch of Maud Gonne Nuts to the images of ‘Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell — a sigil for a city in the round whole: animal object, plant and sound’, to the use of blank space and other motional ‘veers’ in your prose. What does ambience mean to you, as an aesthetic strategy and/or mode of being (and being ecological)?

Possibly ambience is the mode I am attempting to work towards, or maybe more work into. Ambience comes from ambire first used in the 14th C to denote a live thing which ‘goes around’ or ‘encircles’, which could be music or movement, temperature etc. The meaning slowly evolved through French to mean the ephemera – possibly particularly in relation to art works – that supported the effect of the central focus of a piece. I like the idea of creating the supporting network of ephemera without pointing to a clear focal point. I have thought about this in relation to conversation and to Hannah Arendt’s prevailing table metaphor:

‘To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men [sic] at the same time,’ she wrote. (Arendt, The Human Condition)

I think I’m interested in the feeling of the world of things between those who have it in common, and perhaps I see this as ambience; but of course, and I guess this is what I focus on in RFBTB, the perception of this ambience is experienced from the site of a subjective body and therefore at an intersection of infinite difference.

On the subject of your amazing propositional essay, ‘Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell’, can you talk a bit more about what the images are doing in that text, or what the curatorial decisions around including them were?

Two things – one, I wanted to take something almost cliché or kitsch as a site for thinking because of the charge that cliched things arrive with they are a generous site for affective exploration, and I mean this is a method taken pretty directly from Denise Riley and a workshop that Daisy Lafarge lead on Riley’s work last year.

And two there is a question of situated access, like, I am talking about the images we see in Glasgow every day. I think in RFBTB I use the examples of bus stop, tea towel, tile mosaic but I mean they are literally everywhere. So, people have prior knowledge and experience of/with them so perhaps the writing can then add a certain complication or attention to these everyday encounters. As I work towards a distillation of this thinking into portals, my pamphlet book thing for SPAM, I want the images to act as structural anchors within the flow of thought (hopefully!)

I absolutely love this line from Maud Gonne Nuts, ‘now she is an elsewhere document / a little lost you know’. Can you talk about the kinds of elsewheres you strive for or try to hold in your art, film, poetry and prose?

Elsewhere is a word that always comes up when I’m writing, I guess it has a relationship with the ambient thing, as in it's not ‘the place where the focus is’ or something. In the film Maud is an elsewhere document because she is a fish who has been transfigured into a woman by accident. Her perceiving body is a person’s but her thinking mind, her home, her element has always been that of a fish. There’s something sort of macabre and audacious about the way her actor, Catriona Smith, inhabited this dichotomy in her performance of Maud in the film, which I loved. Limbs move quickly through air compared to water.

I’ve recently been reading the letters that Maud Gonne wrote to Yeats from Holloway Prison and these are ‘elsewhere documents’ in so many ways, a past place, a private discourse, documents of injustice. I think elsewhere can be useful as an imaginative space in which to hash out thinking about how to be, without dragging friends/family/daily relations etc into the fray of it all the time. Does that make sense? And at that time letters were elsewhere, as in not with the writer or reader, for weeks or even months at a time, perhaps even intercepted and inspected by malicious eyes. That delay is an interesting or intrusion changes the language, makes it fester.

We’ve talked before about the idea of a ‘snap’ in film or literature. I was reading a recent essay by Jonty Tiplady on the topic of ‘Psychic Extinctness’ which referred to this concept Sarah Ahmed has called ‘the feminist snap’: ‘By snapping you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think should be borne’. Can you talk a bit about your decisions around snapping register or like following some kind of thread to the point of a pressurised break? Is the snap a gesture towards what we can’t or shouldn’t preserve or give birth to, or something else?

Yeah, I mean this is essential to me, especially because the snap doesn’t have to be a sudden action, it can be a slow realisation? Like, “I’m not going to do this because I think it is structurally flawed”, “so instead I will try this.” Whatever that ‘this’ might be, I think it’s that kind of feminist/queer-sci-fi or speculative poetic thing of saying “What else could there be?” or “What else could this look like?” when faced with something unbearable. And sometimes that ends up being embarrassing because you are not reproducing a norm or a ‘this’ that you know will already be acceptable.

That is an anxiety I have about MGN because its weird af the whole fish thing and a really earnest gesture at something which I wanted to resemble embodied empathy, questioning and experimentation through a very specific feminised animal/human snap. And because I did bring my friends and family into the making of it, the product is charged with relational meaning for me and them but maybe that is part of what the point of it was. My brother Tom did the sound, Cat (Maud) is his partner, Joel the assistant producer is my other brother’s partner, Rachel who sings ‘glistening’ and I worked in a cafe together (the cafe where the final film is shot) and the cafe is our friend Claire’s -- she let me shoot there for free, all the extras were pals etc. So I felt emotionally indebted and this was valuable to push the process, to try and make it good for them, maybe all that imbrication is just peak Capricorn behaviour though haha.

There’s the people snapping fingers in Maud Gonne Nuts. Their synchronicity isn’t dehumanising so much as bringing the technics of time as such back to the human body? I mean there’s something comforting and banal in the gesture, where you could have made it uncanny or mechanical. It’s not that they’re just marking time exactly, but almost registering the immanent break of film’s inherent durationality, which Maud somehow slips by finding herself in this ecotonal loop in being — caught between land and water. Different kinds of shoal and society, which you also explore in ‘Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell’. How do you understand the snap? Does it interrupt the loop? And does it have anything to do with what you call ‘my cinematic hand’ in ‘Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell’, moving hypothetically ‘through the swirling momentary air’?

So to answer the first part, I have an interest in a plain metaphor, synchronised action for instance. I think cinematically it’s like adding an illustration into a dense text, the direct action creates space and perhaps also relief, so the clicking is about that. But it is also about rhythm, what are the rhythms of a space like a pub or a café how are they laid out by the workers and users of that space, does this effect our reading of what’s happening in the film? What could it be like to experience that situation as alien or incoherent? This is where perhaps the film speaks most directly to one of its thematic undercurrents: the feeling of being isolated from a quotidienne situation because of difference, in this case mental instability. It adds a direction and stylisation to ambient happening to draw attention to the strangeness of social contract. I think after working in service for so long you observe how easily this can be broken or how privilege and patriarchy play out in these scenarios which is often pretty grim.

I think of the cinematic hand I refer to in RFBTB as an explicit invitation to suspend disbelief, again maybe to draw attention to it, to say something like, this space does not exist actually and here that’s part of its value, textually.

I’m thinking about gesture in general here. The hand versus the face. Do you make any conscious decisions about showing certain affects and withholding others through these gestures? Is there an ethical impulse behind that?

Most of the images that accompany RFBTB are closely cropped, almost to the point of abstraction but often to highlight a gesture. I wanted the images to be untraceable to their sources so that they functioned as contextless visual notes, perhaps to think about the futility of reference or paratext. I like how they exist in the same way a box of old newspaper clippings might - these are things selected by an individual, and collated - they invite conjecture and I’m quite into that.

Your work, in various tangential and more direct ways, explores art’s relationship to mental health. ‘Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell’ deals with the relationship between time and depression. I love that line that ‘the perception of a butterfly generally interrupts time’. The tender idea of the unexpected flicker. Can you talk a bit more about how the temporalities and intensities of writing and film relate to depression and anxiety, or indeed provide moments of escape, reprieve or otherwise?

I think sometimes one of the challenges of depression and its symptoms are that they change the experience of time for both the person experiencing them and those around that person. For instance, a depressed mind can be working on overdrive, very quickly coming to difficult and often unhelpful conclusions, in what would seem like a very ordinary situation; or depression can significantly slow the passage of time and the functions of the mind so that time becomes imperceivable, both happenings can be very painful for friends and family to witness.

Connection to a present can be very fragile, a fleeting glimpse at something other may offer a way back. I suppose there is also a type of symptom-relief based thinking where you put the mental products of your symptoms into a wider context in order that they decrease in importance or horror. The synchronicity of life and all its happenings can be both overwhelming and helpful, this aspect of my relationship with depression is what is covered in the ‘Ring’ chapter, that the plurality of encounter and the hidden nature of many disabilities and traumas, is a reason why we should approach one another with compassion.

RFBTB is in its plainest reading is about taking a moment, in the place which you inhabit, to think outwith the nefarious structures and systems you may find yourself feeling trapped within.

Place is significant in your work. From the lovely readings of Glasgow’s geography and history in ‘Ring, bird, fish, tree, bell’ to the Ballachuan Hazelwood in Maud Gonne Nuts, your work is often situated in specific locations. What kinds of ecological thought and/or ideas of belonging, identity and mythmaking go into your relationship to place? Is it an openness or an anchoring?

Aaah so many! This is the hardest question because in order to answer it I would have to reveal how soppy I am about where I live and it would be embarrassing and probably not good discourse but essentially YES forever haha. Definitely both open and anchor though. The Hazelwood though comes specifically from The Song of Wandering Aengus:

I went down to a Hazelwood because a fire was in my head

And I suppose these lines hold a feeling of the experience of needing to be elsewhere to think clearly, to be able to reflect or decompress - whether that be a woods or a doctor’s office or a nightclub. Perhaps each elsewhere highlights the ambience of identity, as in it may not be made up of the things you were focused on or planned to do.

Congratulations on graduating from the MLitt! What are you working on now?

Thaaanks! It was well intense! I’m enjoying being outside of ‘institution’... I’m working on portals for SPAM!! and a piece for Dostoyevsky Wannabe, and alongside Alison Scott as Reviews Editor at MAP Magazine which is fantastique and plotting a new film about gardeners and clocks.

Anything amazing you’ve been reading lately?

A couple of weeks ago I spent my aunties birthday money at Good Press and bought: iilwimi lipsing from paperwork magazine; Sink Holes, an illustrated adaptation of Annie Proulx’s ‘The half-skinned steer’ by Sasha Delmage; Threads by Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya and Bhanu Kapil and Sophie Collins’ small white monkeys and I have literally been loving them all. Also Matthew from GP kindly gave me both issues of A Plume and they are really exciting and feel like such a positive vision of what proximity can mean/achieve.

P.s. as in the money that my aunty gave me not like her birthday money that I took haha

Where can people find some more of your work?

http://alexanderhetherington.com/project/talking-counting-blinking-noting-with-rosie-roberts/

https://mapmagazine.co.uk/

https://theyellowpaper.org.uk/

https://vimeo.com/rosieroberts

https://www.instagram.com/Rosie__rob/

https://twitter.com/Rosie__Roberts

Text: Maria Sledmere and Rosie Roberts

Image: Rosie Roberts

Published: 16/2/20

#interview #interviews #feature #portals #SPAM poetry #Cruise Liner #poetry #Rosie Roberts #Maria Sledmere #hazelnuts #Daisy Lafarge #Margaret Tait #Lotte L.S.#Denise Riley

0 notes

airoasis · 5 years

Text

The nightmare videos of childrens' YouTube ? and what's wrong with the internet today | James Bridle

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/the-nightmare-videos-of-childrens-youtube-and-whats-wrong-with-the-internet-today-james-bridle-4/

The nightmare videos of childrens' YouTube ? and what's wrong with the internet today | James Bridle

I’m James. I’m a author and artist, and i make work about technology. I do things like draw life-dimension outlines of navy drones in city streets all over the world, so that individuals can start to feel and get their heads round these fairly really hard-to-see and difficult-to-believe-about technologies. I make matters like neural networks that predict the outcome of elections centered on climate reports, on the grounds that i am intrigued about what the precise prospects of those bizarre new applied sciences are.Last 12 months, I built my possess self-using auto. But for the reason that i don’t really trust technological know-how, I also designed a entice for it. (Laughter) and that i do these matters almost always when you consider that I to find them entirely fascinating, but also for the reason that I feel once we speak about science, we’re mostly speakme about ourselves and the best way that we have an understanding of the arena. So this is a narrative about science. This is a "shock egg" video. It can be sincerely a video of any individual opening up lots of chocolate eggs and displaying the toys inside to the viewer. That’s it. That’s all it does for seven long minutes. And i need you to realize two things about this. To start with, this video has 30 million views. (Laughter) And the other thing is, it comes from a channel that has 6.Three million subscribers, that has a complete of eight billion views, and it can be all just more movies like this — 30 million folks looking at a guy opening up these eggs.It sounds lovely bizarre, however if you happen to seek for "shock eggs" on YouTube, it should let you know there is 10 million of those movies, and that i consider that’s an undercount. I believe there is manner, far more of these. In the event you keep searching, they are endless. There’s thousands and hundreds of thousands of these movies in more and more baroque mixtures of manufacturers and substances, and there is increasingly of them being uploaded day by day. Like, it is a strange world. Right? But the thing is, it is no longer adults who are watching these movies. It is youngsters, babies. These videos are like crack for little kids. There is anything in regards to the repetition, the steady little dopamine hit of the expose, that entirely hooks them in. And little kids watch these videos over and over and over again, they usually do it for hours and hours and hours. And in case you try and take the display far from them, they are going to scream and scream and scream. In case you do not think me — and i’ve already obvious folks in the viewers nodding — when you don’t suppose me, find any person with young children and ask them, and they will be aware of in regards to the surprise egg movies. So this is where we start.It can be 2018, and anyone, or lots of individuals, are utilising the same mechanism that, like, facebook and Instagram are making use of to get you to keep checking that app, and they’re utilizing it on YouTube to hack the brains of very young children in return for advertising income. At the least, i am hoping that’s what they’re doing. I hope that is what they’re doing it for, because there’s less complicated ways of making ad earnings on YouTube. That you would be able to just make stuff up or steal stuff. So if you happen to seek for rather popular children’ cartoons like "Peppa Pig" or "Paw Patrol," you’ll be able to in finding there is hundreds of thousands and thousands of these online as good. Of direction, most of them don’t seem to be posted by the usual content creators. They arrive from loads and loads of extraordinary random debts, and it can be not possible to understand who’s posting them or what their reasons probably.Does that sound type of acquainted? For the reason that it can be exactly the identical mechanism that is taking place throughout most of our digital services, where it’s unattainable to know where this know-how is coming from. It’s in actual fact fake news for youngsters, and we’re training them from delivery to click on the very first link that comes along, regardless of what the supply is. That is does not appear like a very just right idea. Here is one more factor that is fairly huge on children’ YouTube. That is called the "Finger loved ones song." I simply heard anybody groan within the viewers. This is the "Finger loved ones tune." that is the very first one I might in finding.It can be from 2007, and it only has 200,000 views, which is, like, nothing on this recreation. However it has this insanely earwormy tune, which i’m not going to play to you, due to the fact it will sear itself into your mind within the equal way that it seared itself into mine, and i am now not going to try this to you. However like the surprise eggs, it is got inside of kids’ heads and addicted them to it. So inside a number of years, these finger loved ones movies begin showing far and wide, and also you get versions in distinctive languages with trendy youngsters’ cartoons utilising food or, frankly, utilizing some thing variety of animation factors you appear to have lying around. And once once more, there are thousands and hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of those videos on hand on-line in all of those variety of insane combinations. And the extra time you start to spend with them, the crazier and crazier you to think that you just possibly. And that is where I form of launched into this, that feeling of deep strangeness and deep lack of information of how this thing used to be built that seems to be awarded around me.In view that it’s impossible to understand where these matters are coming from. Like, who is making them? A few of them appear to be made of groups of legit animators. A few of them are just randomly assembled via software. Some of them are quite wholesome-looking younger youngsters’ entertainers. And a few of them are from folks who particularly naturally shouldn’t be round kids in any respect. (Laughter) And once once more, this impossibility of finding out who’s making this stuff — like, it is a bot? Is this a character? Is that this a troll? What does it imply that we cannot tell the change between these things anymore? And once more, would not that uncertainty think form of familiar right now? So the principal approach humans get views on their videos — and consider, views mean money — is that they stuff the titles of these videos with these popular terms.So you are taking, like, "surprise eggs" and then you add "Paw Patrol," "Easter egg," or whatever these things are, all of these phrases from other popular movies into your title, until you become with this kind of meaningless mash of language that doesn’t make experience to humans in any respect. Considering the fact that of course it is simplest quite tiny children who are gazing your video, and what the hell do they recognize? Your actual audience for these things is application. It’s the algorithms. It is the application that YouTube makes use of to decide upon which videos are like different movies, to make them fashionable, to make them encouraged.And that’s why you emerge as with this form of fully meaningless mash, both of title and of content material. However the thing is, you must remember, there really are still individuals within this algorithmically optimized system, men and women who’re kind of more and more forced to behave out these increasingly bizarre combos of words, like a desperate improvisation artist responding to the combined screams of 1,000,000 children at once. There are actual individuals trapped within these methods, and that is the opposite deeply unusual factor about this algorithmically pushed culture, on account that despite the fact that you’re human, you have got to turn out to be behaving like a computing device simply to outlive. And also, on the opposite part of the reveal, there nonetheless are these sons and daughters gazing these items, stuck, their full awareness grabbed with the aid of these weird mechanisms.And most of these kids are too small to even use a website. They may be simply type of hammering on the screen with their little arms. And so there’s autoplay, where it simply keeps enjoying these videos over and over and over in a loop, without end for hours and hours at a time. And there is a lot weirdness within the process now that autoplay takes you to some pretty strange locations. That is how, within a dozen steps, that you could go from a lovely video of a counting educate to masturbating Mickey Mouse. Yeah. I’m sorry about that. This does worsen. This is what happens when all of these extraordinary keywords, all these different pieces of awareness, this determined new release of content material, all comes together into a single position. This is where all those deeply weird keyword phrases come house to roost. You cross-breed the finger household video with some reside-motion superhero stuff, you add in some weird, trollish in-jokes or whatever, and all of a sudden, you come to an awfully bizarre position certainly. The stuff that tends to upset mum and dad is the stuff that has variety of violent or sexual content material, correct? Kid’s cartoons getting assaulted, getting killed, bizarre pranks that sincerely clearly terrify kids.What you’ve gotten is program pulling in all of those unique influences to routinely generate youngsters’ worst nightmares. And this stuff particularly, rather does affect small children. Mothers and fathers report their kids being traumatized, fitting afraid of the darkish, becoming frightened of their favorite cool animated film characters. If you take one factor far from this, it can be that when you’ve got young children, preserve them the hell away from YouTube. (Applause) but the other thing, the object that particularly will get to me about this, is that i’m now not definite we even really understand how we received to this point.We now have taken all of this impact, all of those things, and munged them together in a way that nobody quite intended. And yet, this is also the way that we’re building the whole world. We’re taking all of this information, quite a lot of it unhealthy data, plenty of old data filled with prejudice, filled with all of our worst impulses of history, and we’re constructing that into colossal information units and then we’re automating it. And we’re munging it together into things like credit reports, into coverage premiums, into things like predictive policing techniques, into sentencing recommendations. This is the way in which we’re sincerely establishing the sector today out of this information. And that i have no idea what’s worse, that we developed a system that seems to be fully optimized for absolutely the worst features of human conduct, or that we appear to have achieved it by chance, without even realizing that we have been doing it, on the grounds that we didn’t particularly fully grasp the programs that we had been building, and we did not fairly realise find out how to do something otherwise with it.There’s a couple of matters I think that relatively appear to be riding this most entirely on YouTube, and the first of these is advertising, which is the monetization of attention without any actual other variables at work, any deal with the individuals who’re simply establishing this content material, the centralization of the power, the separation of these things. And that i suppose nevertheless you feel about the use of advertising to kind of aid stuff, the sight of grown guys in diapers rolling around in the sand in the hope that an algorithm that they don’t really realise will provide them cash for it means that this mainly isn’t the article that we must be basing our society and tradition upon, and the way where we will have to be funding it. And the opposite thing that is sort of the important driver of this is automation, which is the deployment of all of this science as quickly because it arrives, without any sort of oversight, after which as soon as it can be available in the market, type of throwing up our palms and going, "hello, it is now not us, it is the technology." Like, "We’re now not worried in it." that’s no longer fairly excellent sufficient, on the grounds that this stuff is not only algorithmically ruled, it’s also algorithmically policed.When YouTube first started to pay attention to this, the very first thing they said they’d do about it was that they’d set up better computing device studying algorithms to average the content material. Well, desktop studying, as any knowledgeable in it’s going to inform you, is basically what now we have started to name software that we don’t rather understand how it works. And that i believe we now have enough of that already. We is just not leaving these things up to AI to decide what’s appropriate or not, considering the fact that we know what happens. It should begin censoring other matters. It would begin censoring queer content material. It should censoring legit public speech. What’s allowed in these discourses, it is just not anything that is left as much as unaccountable techniques. It is a part of a discussion all and sundry must be having. But i’d depart a reminder that the substitute isn’t very high-quality, both. YouTube additionally introduced just lately that they’re going to release a version of their kids’ app that will be entirely moderated by using people.Fb — Zuckerberg stated a lot the identical factor at Congress, when pressed about how they have been going to average their stuff. He stated they’d have people doing it. And what that really approach is, as an alternative of having little toddlers being the first man or woman to peer these things, you are going to have underpaid, precarious contract staff with out proper mental wellbeing help being broken by means of it as well. (Laughter) and that i feel we can all do relatively much better than that. (Applause) The inspiration, I feel, that brings those two things collectively, fairly, for me, is company. It is like, how so much can we really recognize — with the aid of company, I mean: how we know how to behave in our possess satisfactory pursuits. Which — it is virtually impossible to do in these programs that we don’t rather thoroughly appreciate.Inequality of power continuously leads to violence. And we can see inside of these systems that inequality of understanding does the equal factor. If there is one thing that we are able to do to to strengthen these systems, it can be to make them more legible to the folks who use them, so that every one of us have a long-established working out of what’s clearly happening right here. The article, although, I feel most about these systems is that this isn’t, as i hope I’ve defined, quite about YouTube. It’s about the whole lot. These disorders of accountability and company, of opacity and complexity, of the violence and exploitation that inherently results from the concentration of power in a couple of palms — these are so much, so much larger disorders. And they’re problems no longer just of YouTube and no longer simply of technology in most cases, they usually’re now not even new. They’ve been with us for a while. However we finally constructed this approach, this global method, the internet, that is truely showing them to us on this exclusive method, making them undeniable. Technological know-how has this individual capability to both instantiate and proceed all of our most amazing, most commonly hidden wants and biases and encoding them into the sector, nevertheless it additionally writes them down in order that we are able to see them, so that we are not able to pretend they don’t exist anymore.We have to stop desirous about technological know-how as a solution to all of our issues, however think of it as a guide to what these problems virtually are, so that they can begin enthusiastic about them thoroughly and to address them. Thanks very much. (Applause) thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: James, thank you for coming and giving us that talk. So it’s exciting: while you feel in regards to the movies the place the robotic overlords take over, it is all somewhat more glamorous than what you’re describing. However i’m wondering — in these movies, you’ve gotten the resistance mounting. Is there a resistance mounting in the direction of these things? Do you see any constructive signs, inexperienced shoots of resistance? James Bridle: I do not know about direct resistance, considering I think this stuff is tremendous long-time period. I suppose it is baked into culture in rather deep ways. A friend of mine, Eleanor Saitta, always says that any technological problems of sufficient scale and scope are political issues to begin with. So all of those matters we’re working to deal with within this aren’t going to be addressed just with the aid of building the technological know-how better, however surely with the aid of changing the society that is producing these technologies.So no, correct now, I feel we now have received a hell of a long solution to go. However as I mentioned, I suppose with the aid of unpacking them, with the aid of explaining them, by speakme about them super actually, we will truly start to at the least begin that system. HW: And so when you talk about legibility and digital literacy, I to find it tricky to imagine that we ought to place the burden of digital literacy on customers themselves. But whose accountability is education on this new world? JB: again, I feel this responsibility is variety of up to each person, that the whole thing we do, the whole lot we construct, the whole lot we make, needs to be made in a consensual dialogue with every body who’s warding off it; that we’re now not constructing programs meant to trick and surprise persons into doing the proper thing, but that they are absolutely concerned in each step in instructing them, given that every of those programs is academic.That is what i’m hopeful about, about even this fairly grim stuff, that if you can take it and look at it adequately, it can be genuinely in itself a section of schooling that allows for you to start seeing how problematic programs come together and work and perhaps be capable to use that skills elsewhere in the world. HW: James, it’s such an main discussion, and i know many humans listed below are really open and prepared to have it, so thanks for establishing off our morning. JB: Thanks very a lot. Cheers. (Applause) .

0 notes

nataliehegert · 5 years

Link

In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river… This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. — T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Man

Ah well, what matter, that’s what I always say, it will have been a happy day, after all, another happy day. — Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

In Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, On the Beach, his characters—among the last people alive in the world after a hemispheric atomic war—live out their final days waiting for an inevitable cloud of radiation borne by global air currents to finally make its way to the southern tip of Australia. The book is boring and hopeless, as are these last humans puttering in their gardens to plant flowers that no one will ever see, taking on last minute efforts at self-improvement, worrying about sex and fidelity.

“Couldn’t anyone have stopped it?” the wife asks helplessly in their final hour.

“I don’t know…” her husband replies patronizingly. “Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop,” he says, referring to the nuclear war that annihilated the planet.

The much-acclaimed opera-installation Sun & Sea (Marina), in the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, likewise portrays passive, helpless bystanders to the end of the world, but it is a much more ambiguous apocalypse. A group of disconnected vacationers lounge on the sand of a nameless beach—at first nothing seems amiss, but as they sing, the details of their world come into focus. “The colors of the sea and sky have changed,” they sing. The sea is “as green as a forest”—owing to the process of eutrophication1—the Great Barrier Reef is a “bleached, pallid whiteness.” They complain of sunburns and strange weather, airport delays and trash on the beach. Their concerns are immediate and minor, while the world is clearly falling apart around them.

While other depictions of a post-climate-disaster world succumb to visions of the apocalyptic sublime—such as Waterworld (1995), or Mad Max (1979)—Sun & Sea is decidedly restrained, non-epic, banal. Instead of a deliciously outlandish doomsday scenario, it is just a rather disappointing day at the beach. In both setting and attitude, the installation more closely recalls the absurdist play Happy Days by Beckett,2 which finds its protagonist buried in a mound of sand, furtively trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy in her life. Likewise, the characters of Sun & Sea, though they find it strange, have clearly adapted to the new normal. And while it is clear that “Everything is out of joint” in the climate, it seems there is nothing to be done (“There is so little one can do,” laments the protagonist of Happy Days). So, you might as well try to enjoy yourself: “After vacation, / Your hair shines, / Your eyes glitter, / Everything is fine,” they sing.

Staff Writer Natalie Hegert speaks with theater director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, playwright Vaiva Grainytė, and composer Lina Lapelytė about their Golden Lion-winning production and the message behind it.

Natalie Hegert: Not only has Sun & Sea received abundant and unanimous praise among the critics and the most prestigious prize at the Biennale, it is also proving to make a most lasting impression on spectators and continues to be talked about. Did you have any idea your contribution to the Biennale would be received like this?

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė: This was beyond our expectations of course. Vaiva Grainyte˙: If you ask me, I felt our opera-performance might look distinguishing in the context of Biennale, but we did not have much time to think about success—the logistics and preparation were quite challenging and intense.

Lina Lapelytė: It was not an easy project and it was risky on many levels—so the jury team in Lithuania already was brave enough to select it. What happened during the first week of biennale feels like something that almost does not belong to us. Someone said, It is a Cinderella story.

This was definitely not written in our scenario. Before the opening, we were preparing our performers to be ready for an almost empty pavilion and find a joy in performing if there was only one member of the audience. Now during the performance days, we receive an average of 1,300 people. Every role on the beach has to have at least three people able to perform it.

NH: Why did you create this as an opera, as opposed to another kind of performance art, theatrical spectacle, or visual art? How did you approach its staging within the context of the Biennale—to place it among what is primarily a showcase of visual arts? Was it much different from its first staging, in Lithuania (besides the language)?

Vaiva Grainytė: Our trio started with debut piece Have a Good Day! (2014)—a contemporary opera for ten singing cashiers, supermarket sounds, and piano. I find opera to be the perfect genre for us to unite our artistic practices (text, music, and visuality). Nonetheless, the durational version of Sun & Sea crosses the boundaries of other arts. ‘Opera,’ I would say, indicates the marriage of different arts, but this piece itself can be called something else: installation, architectural poetry, concert…

LL: Opera is a very particular place for the three of us—we kind of invented a method of working in this genre. Opera is as visual art as any other kind of installation, sculpture, or painting. The genre itself often belongs to the music world but personally, in my own practice, prefer to look at music—opposed to the idea that it is only for listening. Opera is literature; it is music; it is fine arts. It is a gesamtkunstwerk, and none of the features are more important than the other.

RB: Sun & Sea grew from the visual, and still is a very visual work. Other elements—mainly text and music—bring different layers, form-wise, so the work becomes more complex. However, in this complexity we seek for simplicity.

NH: One of the things that is so striking is the opera’s placidness. There seem to be no great highs or lows, no climax or crescendo, no great emotion expressed. The singers are, for the most part, singing while lying down. There is very little movement, most of it being incidental, and the musical accompaniment is minimal. Even the scenery is quite pared down—there is simply sand, with no unusual lighting or representation of the kind of toxic sea that is suggested by the libretto. It is anti-apocalyptic, but also almost anti-theatrical. Can you tell me why you decided to present it in this way?

RB: You have put it in very right words. We have static bodies, but very often their minds are active, transforming from reminiscences to reflections, dreams, etc. Waves of these inner monologues grow into choirs, then flood back into solos again. Performers are static while they are singing, but other times they are free to move alongside kids, dogs, and other volunteers who are building castles, playing beach games, eating, etc. This brings uncontrolled reality into the fictional construct.

LL: In our case, the representation is based on a very clear conceptual grounding—all the further details of the work follow that concept. We try to restrain ourselves from using self-oriented tricks and effects; therefore, most of the details are there because of the true necessity.

VG: The light picture of lazy holidays is just a surface: we are sunbathing while the world is crashing.

NH: What kind of research into climate change and its effects did you undertake to imagine the world of Sun & Sea?

LL: The research spanned from mainstream media, scientific investigations, personal views, experiences and dreams, and conversations and reflections.

VG: Before writing the libretto, the research was done. It was necessary to understand what CO2, emissions and food miles are, and why our planet is in its current state. After dealing with that scientific information, we came up with the realization that catastrophe is caused by our—homo sapiens—uncontrollable consumption. Consumption, which is so pleasant and stands as the core of our lives. The idea was to reveal the tragedy by personal approach, employing micro-stories, as ecology is such a huge topic. That is to say, disastrous pictures of dying and choked-in-plastic animals seem to be too anonymous, too difficult for our brains to process what is happening.

RB: Climate change is such a popular topic, but we did not want to manifest scientific facts, or to be moralistic. It was important to deepen the knowledge in this field. We were reading specific literature, but Sun & Sea is not about facts at all. It is about mundane narratives of holidaymakers, surrounded by apocalypse. But on a daily basis [it reflects something] other than that.

NH: What kind of message did you set out to impart? Do you feel that the installation gives any sense of hope for our future? Or is this scene something of a foregone conclusion for our world?

VG: It is up to each spectator to read the message on their own. The mosaic of characters and their songs suggest a kaleidoscopic approach, so there is no conclusion or “one truth” as such.

RB: To expand the beach topic in a global perspective: sunbathing may soon become available where polar bears used to live. I think we are neither giving a sense of hope for the future, nor taking it away. We do not know the right answer, and this is probably our luck.

LL: The work is a question, but also a reflection, on where we are and who we are, but the hope is in every one of us. In the tiny things, the love that we all share. Though that love must also be super critical and questioning many things that are taken for granted. It is hard!

NH: You three have worked together before, on the opera Have a Good Day!, and Sun & Sea is your second collaboration. In light of your spectacular success, do you have plans to work together again?

VG: Success might breed rush and greediness, but our trio is rather slow in terms of developing a new piece. Each piece needs time and mental energy so it could grow in a healthy way. After this prolonged Venetian adventure (the performance is running twice a week until the end of October) we need some time to reflect on what has happened, plus a tour with Sun & Sea will require special attention. We have some ideas for a new work, so probably one day it will be embodied.

RB: Each of us have individual practices, which are extremely important for our common work; everything we learn separately we bring in as an experience. I think we all need some separate creative space and time before considering going into the next trio work.

LL: We do not force the situation and it may take some time for us to come up with a new idea for a collaborative work. The fact that we all have individual practices makes things slower, but also creates a real need for coming back together.

The Pavilion of Lithuania, Sun & Sea (Marina), at the Venice Biennale runs through October 31, 2019.

1. An effect of particular concern to the Baltic Sea, on whose coast Lithuania is situated.

2. Whose title, perhaps coincidentally, finds echoes in the Lithuanian artists’ first opera, Have a Good Day! (2014).

Interview Posted on 9/19/2019, Printed in THE SEEN Issue 09, September 2019

#Highlights #interview #in print

0 notes