the text and images below are posted from beijing, berlin, buenos aires, hong kong, los angeles, new york, sado island, shanghai, tokyo and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.
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新米节夏季末mix ｜ new rice festival end of summer mix

24 july 2013，西湾 saiwan beach，2:00 am

24 july 2013，西湾 saiwan beach from under my tent，maybe around 6 am

02 august 2013，soundwalk in 贵阳 guiyang city，around 9:30 pm

19 august 2013，music to boost worker morale，肇兴 zhaoxing town，around 11 am

20 august 2013，芦笙 battle，肇兴 zhaoxing town，9:39 pm

“火龙果之歌 dragon fruit song”，from the forthcoming album 《在你面前很无邪 No Evil Before You 》by 孙大肆 Joy SUN

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from the 三行實驗室 three lines laboratory

uncleBIG_taitai大伯的太太

参加了三個艺术家舉辦的“三行實驗室”工作坊，每一個參與者寫了一個三行詩給另外一個不一定認識的人，在磁帶上朗讀錄音。每一個人錄完之後，組織者收集了又按照人名重新發給每一個人寫給他的三行朗讀。發完組織者說“好，那我們今天就這樣結束啦，你要自己回家後找方法播放你的磁帶”。當然家裡沒有，不知道要等多久才能聽到這首詩就拿著這個神秘的小磁帶走。

工作坊之後去找我姑姐一起吃飯，她告訴了我大伯過世了。第二天她和其他阿伯去收拾大伯的屋，要準備把他30年一個人住的房子還給政府。他們回來之後給我一個老行李箱，裡面放了一些大伯的東西。其中有一個小AIWA放音機, 外殼壞了但是還能用。聽了你給我寫的三行詩，聽到在那三行之間我和你之間的距離，也許也就是這個地球上的每一個人與另外一個人的距離。


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i wish i knew how it feels to be free

thank you to king689soulclassics

we wrote twice last year. growing smaller in our livelihood. making reparations, finding ourselves present, losing words of reflection for bullshit become routine. it’s an alienating experience to observe others speaking in endless strings of aphorism and cliché, like miraculously knowing the code for things that you did not care to know about. flooded gates . cinema and the sound of air conditioning . the ballad of the broken birdie records, that was forever.

you can describe things, but you cannot tell them.

she said we made it up to overcome change, that forever . because the passing arcs of the sun and moon were just too much. the drummer’s steady hands were deceiving, when it had only been about the joy and trauma of difference that really counted . “difference and deferral” . counting . rational concepts . and a one. and a one.

like a new way of seeing something.

two, three. counting and singing again, rushing into nines and ten. time was not the matter at hand, and i could only otherwise imagine some kind of spatial parameter (cigarette, balcony, distance from one apartment to another), but of course it’s less rational than that, our descriptions are as infinite as desire. we’ll be 靠谱 one day.

it sounds too prescribed, doesn’t it——sticking to the score——exactly what we didn’t want. so instead we became impulsive, 花心 flowery hearts, the wallow, those hands grabbing at your face, fear, the sort.   no……please ask me to write songs instead, wait for that moment of forever . two times a year at least.

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What can a phrase such as ‘natural course’ mean anymore in a time of such intense production?

At one point during one of our discussions, Jad mentioned something about the need to build systems and structures so that we can break free from them. At the time i did not agree so much, perhaps out of mere exhaustion (the dialectic), and maybe also there has just always been some part of me that desires to find out how far we can just let things go, or to understand the limits of tolerance.

Phasing works in a similar way, though taking a walk in the city makes a clean set of variables into a dirty game. The phase is an easy, fun experiment; it breaks out of itself predictably but still fascinating to listen to — self-contained by reception. But it seems difficult to consider any form of reality anymore in terms of such structure; what is always lies next to and around itself, everything is multiple. Perhaps it’s simply a poor understanding of mathematics, but I never know how to discern exponentiality from noise. Circling now (the dialectic), it’s another form of fascination — like listening to sound upon sound. Or maybe it’s simply the idea of being attentive to the things that have always been there.

This is an audio recording combining several journeys traced from an original route shared by Maral Der Boghossian, who has visited her father’s shop in Bourj Hammoud two to three times a week for over 25 years. At the time of this writing, not a single participant after Maral has been able to successfully follow the audio to reach the shop, and this reveals certain weaknesses in the structure of the game, but I guess it’s also just letting things follow their natural course.

//
Participants in the recording: Maral Der Boghossian, Jad Baaklini, Paul Gorra, George Haddad, Christophe Katrib (accidentally powered off), Céline Khairallah, Lynn Kodeih, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Lina Sahab and the blacksmith around the corner from the tree that Maral’s grandmother planted some 40 years ago.

April 2011, Beirut

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展览题为“如何独处” The Title of the Show is ‘How to Be Alone’


1// 《但愿我能为您描绘得更好》第二期里献给友子的歌: “菜单／那么今夜何处是京都／猫咪马琳”（演唱者：“声音向导”乐队，声音介入部分：何颖雅、何京蕴） From the publication iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter number two, for Tomoko: “Menu/So Where Is Kyoto Tonight?/Mullin The Mog” by DirectorSound with inserts by Elaine W. HO and Anouchka van DRIEL
2// “解手与生产”，尝试为高灵口头翻译Paul CHAN的文本  “Pee and Production”, trying to orally translate a text by Paul CHAN to GAO Ling


3// 爸爸骑着摩托， 儿子坐在后座上打着快板， 我们一起在儿童电影夜场喝了点酒，家作坊2010年  The boy comes home with his father playing kuaiban, we had been drinking at the kids’ movie night, HomeShop 2010
4// “你好呀，劳伦斯老师！” 这段对我外婆的采访录音是1991年我中学历史课上的家庭作业——“口述历史”，我妈妈也在“其间”。 “Hellll-o Mizz Lawrence!” An oral history project, my grandmother, mother and me, 1991


5// 五岁的我，在数数和唱歌  When I was 5 years old, counting and singing
6// 我在购买的迷你SD卡上找到了70多首歌，从中选了十首歌并通过数码处理，把它们的节拍统一成每分钟120拍（特殊感谢Ryan KING在数码处理） Music found on the micro-SD cards purchased to create this work, whereby among 70 songs in total ten were chosen and digitally synced at 120 beats per minute (processing courtesy of Ryan KING)

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装置在《第三房：如何独处》展览，站台中国，2010年11月11日－2011年1月24日
Installation part of The Third Party: How to Be Alone (or nowhere else am i safe from the question: why here?), on view at Platform China, 11 November 2010 – 24 January 2011

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father’s father Posted by 丫 | reply »


THE WORK (for 絵美 and a friend of hers, and for everyone amidst iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter)

How could this be institutionalised? In describing, putting the words to entities, in finding vocabularies and knowing where to look, we are trapped already. How couldn’t we be? Should I write such that you never understand; should I make work that never needs to be seen; should anything other than question marks arise?

Is this a work? Would we rather toss it all off to a little game, scoff at those who take themselves too seriously, never be so ridiculous as to consider the nests of “art” and “life”? Are the words one is using as important as the to whom one is speaking? “What is the work of man?” And why not say it, invest oneself with intention, make the attempt? Flail? This is not an institution, as could it ever be, with time, with the fulfillment of certain criteria of Work. We are tied to a production as always, since before we were aware of it, since we were animals. And the guillotined bumblebee, as Agamben asks, is he as busy as ever, do we continue amidst work, does time fly when…?

Should anything other than question marks arise?

What-is-the-work?

Should the work be defined by a trade, a certain amount of craftsmanship, the ergon of man, a list of projects and venues to which one must be flown? Does work define our activities or does activity define work? Why should vita contemplativa be placed above vita activa in a society with no God? Is this the captivation of the bumblebee, are we productive enough, should we make particular dialogues in work-group fashion? Because if I play, or if i dangerously mix words like “art” and “life”, like you know, when

Every afternoon he goes there to see a big painting for two hours, and he says, ‘I’m doing the work to see the work’. That’s ok, I think it’s no problem. He did another work where he pays for three months of traditional Chinese music lessons, on the erhu.  – 马永峰 MA Yongfeng, Forget Art

Can a situation be Work? Our particular arrangement to one another, did you try that out, were you networking? Is the amount of control in any given situation a Work? Is control a result of the fact that there is no one around to help us, or that we are ‘mere’ fascists? Is the controlled situation a place of God or science or politics? Why do you question, why go beyond captivation? What did you question, what did you create, where did you control the situation and where was spontaneity a lie? 艾未未 AI Weiwei calls it the “vocabulary” that “can also be the total meaning of the concept”; Pierre Huyghe says a one:to:one ratio of idea:to:form. These are control experiments, perhaps, but not without the certain seepages that blur the distances between the Work and our ethics, our politics——our everyday. We take ourselves too seriously. In the fullness of the situation, yes. And yes, he is right, we could not presume it to be so before its occurrence, where there is thus the very small moment when the lack of control has perchance to touch upon the work’s going beyond itself. An eventfullness…

Have we said too much already? Really, should anything other than question marks arise?

Are these thinly veiled treatises, and what have you really got to say?








Stopping oneself… (slow, slow loading, please be patient)

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