Daria Fain & Robert Kocik are unveiling the next installment of their Prosodic Body collaboration these next few weeks downtown on Wall Street. Below is the low down...
BUILDING A PERINEUM
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has granted us (Daria Fain and Robert Kocik) a workspace in which to continue our prosodic research.
We will be using the space to design a building based on prosody. Some aspects of this residency will be public. For example, we’ve built a rudimentary anechoic darkroom. From 2/13 to 2/24, anyone can reserve time in this room. Suggested uses include: darkroom retreat, tracing the origins of language, wakeful hibernation, hypometabolic attention, swinging open the door of life and death. I call the
darkroom a 'perineum' not only because it has been built in a basement bank vault—but because the perineum (in the subtle body)is the still point and the point of entry for words, and thus the basis of a building based on prosody.
Tuesday February 12: we are having an opening from 6pm-8pm. We will be on hand to speak about darkroom, perineal practice and prosodic architecture.
Sunday, February 17: I will discuss WHAT IS A WORD--the 4 stages of speech and the cosmogony of phonemic emanation in nondual Kashmiri philosophy (particularly the writings of Abhinavagupta) as example of ‘word’ at its fullest)—in contrast to English, psychoanalysis (especially Lacan’s parole pleine) and the neurocentric problem-of-origins in contemporary linguistics (is language acquired or hardwired?). The talk will start at 3pm. The space will be open as a public reading room, with relevant reading materials provided, from 10am on.
Thursday, February 21: the above event will be repeated. The space will serve as public reading room starting at 10am. The talk will start at 6:30pm.
Sunday February 24: we will orchestrate ALL AT ONCE—a voicing of all the phonemes, using permutations such as exhaustion, resorption, forced, unforced, vocalic, consonantal, unstruck, etc. R. Steiner wrote: “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” Even better (nonlinearly,
atemporally)—in nondual Kashmiri linguistics the phonemes are energies, awarenesses, atoms, that give rise to the objective world. Sound-sum, buzz-bundle, heard at once to see what it does. (I’m also in need of volunteers for the phoneme choir. English employs 40 phonemes!)
Lastly—I’d very much like to meet with anyone who’d like to talk about designing a building that meets the needs of poets.(To my knowledge, there is not a structure on the planet designed specifically for full realization of poetry.)
The address is 14 Wall Street. LMCC Swing Space, level B. Due to security, all visits require appointment. My cell: 718 503 4246.
Yours, Robert.
Big questions in the perineum! --origins of language, prosodic architecture, poetry and space...that's enough to make one curl up in the dark and ponder for sure...
ReplyDeleteI wish I could attend your talks, but I cant. If I were able to, I would inquire into what seems to be an assumption that language is speech, ie phonemes as the primal energies. I would like to see how this project would entertain the gestural theory of langauge origins--that the word energies bubble up from the body, movement--primal dance of gesture.
I have been working on a project that links sign language (in this case, American Sign Language, and architecture, in what we at Gallaudet University are calling the "Deaf Space Project"
Though we have not set out to explore architecture of poetry, we have set out to inquire into a gestural poetics of architecture. What is a visual/tactile archictecture for Deaf folk.
We have been working with an architect, who would clearly love to engage poetry and poetics of buildings...
perhaps we can discuss further... in the meantime, enjoy ...