Project overview
The aim of the project is for audio-visual writing to function and be acknowledged as a highly composed form of writing, where each element of sound, text, site are essential to the composition and are mixed into one reading/viewing environment. The question of language and writing are approached at their intersection of literature, new cultural literacies and installation art. The project seeks to renew our ideas about writing and shared public space, the impact of technology on language use and speech communities, and the impact of new literacies on memory and thought formation. Print has always favoured notions of dissemination, of transportable knowledge, of critical matter in circulation, yet electronic storage and digital practices already favour other kinds of literacies that shift the supremacy of the printed letter towards a realm of mixed reading and viewing codes (visual, audio, kinetic, even perceptual). Language itself always gets transformed and altered by the writing media it travels through. Opening up the spatio-temporal dimensions of writing questions the material and social bounds of readerliness and intelligibility, and the performance of cultural access. The installed project brings a structured multiplicity of approaches to the material, thus engaging the audience in multiple sensory and cognitive relays. This favours a personalised relation to the cultural material presented.
The research involves creating a space-surround environment of textual projections and mixed sound. Illuminated text panels are constructed so as to make the reader-viewer-listener feel that they are entering the pages of a three-dimensional book or a circular pool of animated and audiophonic writings. The piece as a whole is composed as a multimodal choral play, a performative archive of verbal and textual material, a space where multiple narratives interweave across platforms. The main narrative trope I am working from is that of British multilinguality, cultural and linguistic belonging/displacement, verbal inventions: What do we hear when others speak? How are we heard when we speak? How do we share what we remember of a text?
Formally and compositionally, the materials for the piece come from a mixture of methods. It uses established literary models (visual text, multilingual poetics, choral performance, found text), audio technologies (voice recording, sound mix, spatial composition) and electronic tools (3D visuality, visual projections, spatial display techniques). The specific language material of the piece is reliant on a range of contemporary speaking and spelling conventions: from our current Standard English to uses arising from the widespread impact of English as second language, the shorthand of electronic communication such as texting, twittering, other forms of contemporary textual creoles, such as the polemical spellings that have emerged through the music world (hiphop, ragga, reggaeton, eurotrash) and the inventions of bicultural language speakers.
Exploration of writing that goes beyond print-based technologies to include audio-visual and electronic technologies demands both applied practice and sustained critical exploration to develop the artistic and critical tools appropriate for it.
The new languages of media and communication have a wide-ranging and long-term impact on literacy and on literature and are affecting the ways in which reading and writing are approached and perceived. Different modes of reading manifest different kinds of performativity and multimedia uses of language create new forms of engagement with socio-cultural material and processes of memory. Formalised learning and informal social interaction are increasingly taking place through multi-media means. The project seeks to emphasise the role that an expanded method of writing can play in an audio-visually and electronically seeped culture.