A thread of pauses
by Gemma Gore
I
Hi,
Can you hear me?
[Pause]
Thanks for your email. Did you expect such a fast response?
[fade to black]
II
I’ve been thinking about the ways in which digital realms, like this email exchange, shadows, intersects and affects our human relations. Affecting capacities for listening. Listening, as an act of intimacy within these often reductive bureaucratic communications. Where does this emails’ immaterial information travel and reside?
[Pause]
Transmitted through air.
Along cables.
Below oceans.
Under earth.
Entering buildings with cooling cabinets to be rerouted once again towards
you. And here it is now.
[Pause]
Iteratively pulled together. Drawn apart.
[Pause]
How do these material and immaterial objects and infrastructures affect our relations, our bodies, our futures? What are the discontents of digital intimacies?
[Pause]
What does it give? What does it take? How much is too much?
[fade to black]
III
Communicating through my body now.
[Pause]
Enchanting my natant thoughts, down along my fingers, as they haphazardly tap out letters onto my laptop keyboard. Inputting words, feelings, pauses into a digital file composed for you.
[Pause]
My fingers spend so much time stroking and caressing the plastic squares on my laptop.
[Pause]
How will these different phrases be spoken?
How are mouth-words and non-mouth-words felt differently?
[Pause]
I wonder if you will hear my intentions across this disembodied space.
[Pause]
How will you feel this digital touch? What gestures will your body render as you listen to this reply?
[fade to black]
IV
The act of listening is a vital state of mind.
[Pause]
How can I build capacities to listen amongst the cacophony of late-capitalist western living? To listen to. Without becoming overwhelmed. To listen amongst the rush of noise? How can I use my whole body to listen? How can I use my whole body to listen whilst I am sat down at my laptop, wading through the words in a state of digital dissociation as I sip more tea?
[Pause]
Can I listen? Just listen. To listen and not form connections, comments, responses or questions. Can I listen so the processing comes later?
[Pause]
Buffering.
[Pause]
How will I respond? And how will you?
[fade to black]
[end]
Join the thread:
Gemma Gore is a visual artist, arts educator and writer based in Southampton, UK. Gemma’s work creates intimate, sensuous spaces of unknowingness through storytelling, drawing, video, installation and conversation and works in various collaborative forms. Grounded in positions of multiplexity, queer ecology and radical vulnerability concerned with exploring dialogue through the questions: How can we all be different together and build trust? How can we care all the time? What possibilities might digital technologies present to aid us back towards ourselves and earth? Awarded Arts Council England Develop Your Creative Practice fund in 2021 for self-initiated R&D project Tender. Exhibitions include John Hansard Gallery (Southampton, UK), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland), Ormston House (Limerick, Ireland) and Station Independent Projects (New York, USA).
