TO BE WE TO BE / Leaking Container (Index Festival 19.09.20)
 

TO BE WE TO BE is a series of reading encounters that take place online using video conferencing software.

TO BE WE TO BE continues an enquiry into various forms of collective reading that could be described as slow, close, repetitive, embodied, and occur between human and machine as well as between humans.

TO BE WE TO BE questions what we means in relation to a text.

TO BE WE TO BE focuses on what the experience of reading together can be when we are not sharing the same physical space.

TO BE WE TO BE uses strategies to heighten the materiality of reading via video conferencing. These reading methods may include taking turns or reading in unison, simple manipulations of the reader and their computer (video on / off), interpretation by speech2text software or other computational language technologies.

TO BE WE TO BE resists reading as a smooth transmission of meaning. It is interested in tempo, time delays, stutters, vocal tone, gesture, background noise.

TO BE WE TO BE is concerned with non-standard sense.

TO BE WE TO BE is a series of readings from Patriarchal Poetry (Gertrude Stein, 1927). Patriarchal Poetry is in itself an act of resistance within language. It has been described as unbearable, unreadable. It is a text which demands an improvisatory approach to reading: a collaboration between reader, writer and language. Patriarchal Poetry resists linear interpretation in favour of an immersion in multiple and speculative possibilities. Words are loosened from the old order, the old stories and meanings.

TO BE WE TO BE uses Patriarchal Poetry as a virtual space within which something is produced.

TO BE WE TO BE was originally commissioned by Infinite Conversation for Quote-Unquote

TO BE WE TO BE - a manual (PDF including full text of Patriarchal Poetry)

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