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In Sundering Mauro-Flude transfigures three of Farago’s deeply personal texts, using command line computing to compose a new poetic piece with the raw textual content.
Formerly a sensitive stream of consciousness, Anna’s notes from the writing workshops and a love letter were the original source material. Through abstracting and reconfiguring this data, an evocative piece of poetry has emerged into a new enchanted form of existence, offering new possibilities.
Farago reflects on the journey of their collaboration:
It’s nearly nine months since my partner Adrian died whilst flying down a hill on his bike. I’m pretty sure that if he had been given an option, that this would have been his choice of how to go with no warning. One of our last conversations, the night before he died, had been about my angst over writing the exegesis for my MA. I think he recognised I was just not really wanting to, or capable of, writing a straight, conventional exegesis and he recommended I attend Lucinda’s ACCA writing workshop in February that was on as part of the feminist exhibition. I did, in a very hazy state a few weeks after he died. In the Expanded Field workshop in October I sat inside Eva Rothschild’s sculpture Cosmos , on the ground. It was like sitting inside a cubby or tent. It felt protective, a private space in amongst the other writers walking around the art. It was whilst sitting in Cosmos that I decided to write Adrian a letter, to talk to him about how I have started my MA again and how the workshops had helped to “free me up”. I have since decided I will write my exegesis using an auto-ethnographic methodology.
When seeing and hearing and understanding the process Nancy used to create a performance art piece using other texts as source material at The Expanded Field public forum, I had the sense a collaboration with her could extend my “freeing up” of writing and also continue to connect with Adrian’s spirit.
To let the words I had written flow into a machine that was controlled by someone else felt like a cool challenge, and a way to be even freer with my words. So I sent the letter and workshop notes off into the ether via email to Nancy, thinking of them as data, and knowing that they would be re-formed into a new piece of text. This process also helped me connect with Adrian in an intellectual, post-death way. In a research field trip, just before he died, he told a colleague about his process of recording using a video camera. In the conversation he had explained he wanted to approach the filming as not thinking like a human but like a “photonic measuring device in a camera.” He’d stated “if I were a camera what would I pay attention to?” So he had set up the camera, pressed the button and let it do its job. “I’ve got nothing to do.” He said, “I have decided that. But I’m not thinking, what do I do next or film next – no, I just have to wait for the camera now.” 1 1. David Carlin, 2018, ‘Fieldwork’, Sydney Review of Books, viewed 15 February 2019, link
I felt like this, giving my text over to Nancy, I just had to wait and see what came back. And I felt Adrian’s spirit helped me make this decision.
Nancy reflects on her process in collaboration:
‘I’ve recently begun to not only observe the deceptively simple adage Less is More, but have also been experiencing how More is More (more editing, more production, more designing, more administration, more translation, more consideration) along with practicing this realisation. Coming from a background in Dance Theatre I was often told the “story is already there in the space”. I still carry this approach with me although admittedly often not as loyal to it as I’d like. Encountering Anna’s heartfelt account of her recent life rupture, I was struck with empathy but also by the potential barrier this may be, for a public that are often - brutal, visceral and sometimes savage. The urge to transfigure such stories into a text for everyone to experience was compelling. By transgressing typical user paradigms and implied social protocols, this delicate, careful collaboration can be seen as comparatively loose and anarchic, through the ways we have explored such limits. Although the computer may have pre-emptive responses taken often as a given, when used rigorously - beyond the user-friendly façade - it is also a calculating machine sensitive to commands. Through our embodied gesture, in this way it is also a medium of sorts that doesn’t belie the artist’s hand and embodiment but contains as much ruthless honesty in its coded execution and output.’