About

What’s your work about?

I’m not sure it’s about anything.

Oh, don’t be ridiculous!

I hope it’s not disingenuous to suggest that as soon as one insists their work is about something, they risk becoming dictatorial, or at any rate, succumbing to rigidity?

It’s not a very fashionable take, you know? And politically, perhaps a luxury.

I’d rather leave the aboutness to the experiencer. But if you must… the work explores language, the image, structuralisms. Expressed from the position(s) in which I exist, and from where my ever-shifting relations emerge and form what we consider the ‘I’. Or from your moment of spacetime, the ‘you’. All of which makes it inescapably political.

Not AI?

Our habit of isolating aspects of/within something greater strikes me as unhelpful. Cognitive machines are part of a wider story.

Aren’t language and structuralism out of favour nowadays, and material where it’s at? (Structuralism is such a difficult word!)

Structuralism isn’t over, and AI brings it to the fore again. It prompts us to see that matter is language and language is matter. (In the framework I subscribe to, in which language and cultural phenomena are patterns of energy, just as buildings and bodies are; all operate as relations within larger, interdependent systems).

Explain?

Language impacts me, I then feel it in my body. In my lived conditions, which influence the way the impact lands. Existing with my children, a divorced single mother, in my expensive rented house in South London, with its peeling wallpaper and grotty carpets. When I respond to those conditions by expressing my frustration, others may shift their position (to a greater or lesser degree – bureaucracy usually being the most rigid) and the material conditions alter one way or another by being left to further entropy or else upgraded.

In other examples, consider what and how a large medieval church expresses. What an under-maintained Brutalist block of social housing says, and its impact in the landscape.

And when I speak, do I not need my lungs, tongue, teeth, and brain? If I write, do I not need my hand and head, my whole body, tools and a surface?

And so, does the internet and AI not require servers, coolers, vast amounts of water and devices to function, or even simply ‘be’? And now that technology speaks almost just like me… its existence in the world has changed the world. We relate to it. It relates to us.

So your work is about language and material?

Perhaps a more concrete example is my late father, the comedian. He worked on his material, which means he paced up and down constantly talking to himself as he prepared his act.

I prefer to think of languagematerial/materiallanguage-becoming.
And rather than being about anything, the work is an exploration of that.

Becoming …. becoming what?

‘Becoming’ is used here to describe being in a constant state of transformation. There may be no way of knowing what ‘becomes’, other than life is a becoming in the real, messy, difficult world in which we live, which is also always moving. I think this way of understanding existence challenges centuries of dogmatic thought. And hopefully queries the view that life can be carved up into bits for humans to lord over.

I fear this is all unnecessarily obtuse, don’t you?

It can seem that way, because it challenges the view that language is ephemeral and has nothing to do with material bodies (land, flesh, buildings). In any case, the universe is complex, especially when we look at it through a different lens to one we’re used to. I understand the desire to reject the way certain kinds of knowledge were guarded by a few, but rejecting difficulty entirely seems like a mistake.

So you embrace complexity?

Today, in this moment of extraordinary shifts, danger and existential angst, the situation is complex. Who knows what we are creating for our future? It looks bad to some and ludicrously utopian to others. But anyone who speaks with absolute certainty, any voice that rejects plurality about technology and beyond, is suspect.
What you see here are the results of me trying to make a little sense of what it means to be living now in a paradigm that potentially offers us all new ways of seeing, thinking, being.