A SENTENCE CAN BE OURS AND OURS

Commissioned by Playground Festival, Museum M, Leuven, 2016

In Barham’s live production reading groups, meaning proliferates from the physical surface of language - the sound, rhythm & cadence of the voice. The audience is invited to join a circle of readers where texts repeatedly mutate through the participants’ readings and speech recognition software, slipping from version to version over several hours until they fall apart. Syntax and meaning ebb and flow in the unpunctuated blocks output by the software and each reader must ‘re-author’ the text in order to perform it. The work extends concerns with the subjectivities created as language passes between different bodies and technologies.

The selection of texts included those by: David Bowie, Gertrude Stein, Anna Kavan, Jussi Parikka, John Latham, Rebecca Schneider, David Toop, David Böhm, Judith Butler, Samuel Beckett, Karen Barad, Leonard Cohen, Rebecca Solnit