An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
LOST REMOTE: Pilot Season (2020)
Online variety show (video, animation, visual works, performance)
An international, collaborative performance, which took the format of an online variety show. Lost Remote's pilot season featured collaboration between 10 artists from their homes in Finland, Indonesia, Canada, the USA, and Brazil.
Activities included:
- A homemade animation stand was used to capture the screen of a nintendo switch. In the game, visiting host Stefan Gruber met another artist, who took the audience on a tour of artworks created inside of the game. Audience members were also invited to join Gruber in the game space, which allows for multi-players.
- Artist Hasnan Habib read excerpts from his handmade thesis on the topic of handmade media, of which the host had the only remaining copy. Habib had excerpts sent to him as photos over Whatsapp, while visiting artists made live visuals to accompany the reading.
- Hosting a fan art of the fan art contest
- Musical improvisations that made use of digital delay as an improvisational tool.
The show set out with a triple intention:
1) To create a viewer experience that felt chaotic and creative, and like a space where everyone was invited to hang out, or to be together without needing a clear purpose. I looked to gaming communities, community broadcasting aesthetics, slow TV, and the backstage portions of The Muppet Show for inspiration.
2) I wanted to create an alternative to the frenetic pace of consumer-media, and instead offer a viewer experience that moved at the pace of human rhythms. I was interested in the alternate experience of time offered by creating a show where both the audience and the viewership was located across many timezones, which, combined with the strangeness of lockdown, held good experimental potential for exploring temporality. I designed imagery for the show that began to explore this, and together we started work on a time-zone independent colour clock.
3) I wanted to experiment with online modes of collaboration—curious, especially, about how to navigate communication between artists who had never met. Were there ways to use features specific to that platform to create something meaningful? Could the entire show be a sort of improvisation along with our inevitable technical glitches? Were there specific potentials to collaborating live from inside our very distant homes?
Reflections on Lost Remote
I can’t pretend that Lost Remote effectively builds the commons I am after. Its scope is limited, and effectively it inhabits the worldlessness that Arendt warns against just by nature of being on the internet. But what it does do is gently move towards alternate modes, ones that act in support of the commons, and ones that gently tug at the loose threads of a digital reality overrun by commerce.
Lost Remote’s methods are mostly about weirding (or even exiting) linear time, embodying play, and inclusion across difference. It also, arguably, works to overlap the worldlessness of the internet with the shared world-full-ness of meandering, real-time conversation and engagement with people living, and presently very moored in, vastly different geographical contexts, but nevertheless sharing some aspects of their concerns and lived experience. In this way, Lost Remote serves as a tool, or experimental ground for what attention economy reasearcher Jenny Odell calls the need for “escaping laterally towards each other” (PP). It seeks to establish a context whereby participants, through play, can experience a mode of both creativity and being able to relate as their genuine selves: it is a valuable act (and also, I would argue, a feature special to the online platform) to house this type of interaction as a public performance.
In line with Odell, the show disrupts the hold of the attention economy by revealing itself only slowly—its magic rests somewhere between boredom, attention, and a tangible care. It is asking if the benefits of friendship, and genuine encounter, can exist or be supported through the use of this badly manipulated shared space by reclaiming it as a zone of genuine encounter and vulnerablity. Can it engender—through its strange form of slowing time down, disrespecting or completely disregarding the frenetic paces of the attention economy—a broader sense of time? This I explore through gentle play with time zones, a resistance to speeds that would mimic measurable productivity, and by embracing a meandering schedule that is based on feel and not the clock.
