Hopium Economy Process Sketch

The following description of this practice should not be understood as a general template or standardized manual or procedure of operation, rather as one possible research trajectory and method next to others. The approach is marked by the conviction that part of any practice is the necessity to invent itself every time, over and over again. Certain strategies or concepts may be repetitive and may be applied repeatedly, modelling the ever-changing subject, the human encounter. The content is in flux and instable, never final or finite, therefore impossible to categorize.

Interview / Recording

Conversation, conducting of interviews, words created in the now. The ephemeral of the spoken word is caught in the recording. Calcified breathing of life. The specific unscripted communication and dialogue that only an actual interaction provides creates a peculiar language, gesture and immediacy, which remains palpable in the recording. Traces of authen­ticity solidifying in the electromagnetic storage. Instantaneous expressions are caught like snapshots, frozen and turned into past in the moment they happen. Everyone is a specialist and a layman at the same time, professional amateurs with expertise.

Transcription

Recorded interviews are transferred into ASCII , hypertext markup language, many dialects, C++, translated text, voice recognition algorithms and written language, 99% accuracy, by human professionals, 80% accuracy with machine generat­ed script. The lightness of the spoken word, the sloppiness, the filler words, the fleeting meaning of an allusion, the mo­mentary energy of transient speech, accent, dialect, rhythm, pace, emotions, all deliberately disconnected from its origin but not from its meaning and for the sake of future connections spruced up aesthetically. Transferred into materiality, digi­tal and analogue, “written in stone”. Text becomes visible, it’s weight palpable like the piece of paper in one’s hand.

Collage

Cutting up words and phrases, sentences and paragraphs, not as a chance operation à la Dada, but as a deliberate re-nego­tiation of perspectives. Hybridizing the textual gestures, denying reality as a constitutional force, favoring the evisceration of form as imaginative force over the linearity of logic. Plays on words, and phrases chosen for their sound and rhythm as much as for their meaning. The author is constructing in this context with absolute power and with aesthetic impunity, yet a tempest in a tea pot, inviting to widen synesthetic connections in neurological matrices.

Staging

Actors reading and acting out the texts. In this step the collaged words are infused with life again, with spirit, soul, emo­tion, difference, presence, illusion of authenticity, all through the human being. There is no ensemble, all cast is recruited locally and every space can be our stage. Creation of intimacy leads through the imposter/actor to an alienating closeness, a staged emotionality, observable, distant and yet inescapable emotion. In this climate of mutual risk reflexivity becomes hyper-intensification.

Mediation

What once were original words are now staged, propped, and rehearsed scripts. Empathy is still felt though, filled with intent and garnished with a mission. Now we record again, this time armed with the programmatic inscription the apparatus provides. Here the authentic flips position again and can be found now in the medium itself, in the mediated realness. The work emancipates itself from its circumstances and Saturn devours his/her/their children.

Confrontation

Coming full circle in the end. We’re standing at the threshold between not yet and no longer. Juxtaposing the initial sit­uation with the processed. Confronting the source with its original, copy, master. Ambiguity, clarity and disorientation collapsing into each other, together with the realization that all intentions seem moribund in wake of the precarity of the circumstances. Social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. This is the threshold between parallel worlds, where we find ourselves at. It is the ritual of the twilight.