Telepathic Improvisation | Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz

TELEPATHIC IMPROVISATION

TELEPATHIC IMPROVISATION Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

TELEPATHIC IMPROVISATION Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

AN INTRO Alhena Katsof

In art, as in life, we engage each other across various forms of creative endeavor, intellectual exchange, and political activism. Many of us work within institutional frameworks but we are not defined by them.

We move in and out of these institutions, carrying aspects of their logic and structures with us as we, in turn, modify them through our actions and being. How do feminist and queer practices engage these structures? Through insistence and dissonance. Occasionally, as we work, projects arise that expand the notion of institutional partnership. This exhibition is one of them; it was a breath of air moving through institutional paradigms like smoke across the frame.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz have fostered an artistic practice built on collaboration and exchange, with ongoing commitments to the motion and notion of improvisation. They create works and spaces where defiance and subtlety thrive. They do so, in part, by bringing together performers to activate, interpret, and transgress the scores, texts, and histories that form the basis of their films. At the heart of their work are ever-evolving questions about agency, power, and action. This project grew from the energy and attention that Marwa Arsanios, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch, and MPA brought to set and stage.

It thrived because of the focused work of a group of dedicated artists, curators, and writers who are active and close listeners of participatory, resonant life. Together, we created a uniquely conceived, long-term collaboration that reached across an ocean. Our gathering supported the creation of Boudry / Lorenz’s first US-based film commission and solo exhibitions in New York and Houston, as well as the book you are now reading, which features an insightful new text by AndrÊ Lepecki.

Going against the grain in an overdetermined (art)world, each of these extraordinary people left their egos at the door, but never abandoned a sense of responsibility; they generously allied without demand, sharing their knowledge and resources with trust and vision. Our generous crew included Mason Leaver-Yap, who initiated the project, Wenzel Bilger, Victoria Brooks, Dean Daderko, and Lia Gangitano; their dedicated work, here and all elsewhere, supports complex notions of time, voice, and resonance.

3

AN INTRO Alhena Katsof

In art, as in life, we engage each other across various forms of creative endeavor, intellectual exchange, and political activism. Many of us work within institutional frameworks but we are not defined by them.

We move in and out of these institutions, carrying aspects of their logic and structures with us as we, in turn, modify them through our actions and being. How do feminist and queer practices engage these structures? Through insistence and dissonance. Occasionally, as we work, projects arise that expand the notion of institutional partnership. This exhibition is one of them; it was a breath of air moving through institutional paradigms like smoke across the frame.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz have fostered an artistic practice built on collaboration and exchange, with ongoing commitments to the motion and notion of improvisation. They create works and spaces where defiance and subtlety thrive. They do so, in part, by bringing together performers to activate, interpret, and transgress the scores, texts, and histories that form the basis of their films. At the heart of their work are ever-evolving questions about agency, power, and action. This project grew from the energy and attention that Marwa Arsanios, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch, and MPA brought to set and stage.

It thrived because of the focused work of a group of dedicated artists, curators, and writers who are active and close listeners of participatory, resonant life. Together, we created a uniquely conceived, long-term collaboration that reached across an ocean. Our gathering supported the creation of Boudry / Lorenz’s first US-based film commission and solo exhibitions in New York and Houston, as well as the book you are now reading, which features an insightful new text by AndrÊ Lepecki.

Going against the grain in an overdetermined (art)world, each of these extraordinary people left their egos at the door, but never abandoned a sense of responsibility; they generously allied without demand, sharing their knowledge and resources with trust and vision. Our generous crew included Mason Leaver-Yap, who initiated the project, Wenzel Bilger, Victoria Brooks, Dean Daderko, and Lia Gangitano; their dedicated work, here and all elsewhere, supports complex notions of time, voice, and resonance.

3

INTO MEMORY: TELEPATHIC IMPROVISATION/S Victoria Brooks

The distance might be small or great, i.e., thousands of miles or light years…

Pauline Oliveros, IV, Sonic Meditations, 1974

Boudry / Lorenz’s moving-image work, Telepathic Improvisation (2017), takes as its starting point Pauline Oliveros’s 1974 score of the same name. However, the audience for this filmed performance is not only called upon to telepathically communicate with the performers (as was the case with Oliveros’s original score), but also to communicate with the other elements onstage, from the theatrical lights to a group of white boxes that glide across the stage.

Telepathic Improvisation (1974) is the third of Oliveros’s numerically arranged Sonic Meditations, a series of instruction works she composed for the ♀ Ensemble. Scored as prose rather than standard musical notation, the Meditations rely on a choreographic approach that seeks to produce a place, sound, and experience outside the normative conventions of Western music. The work dispenses with a litany of such notions: the concert hall as ideal space, the primacy of the virtuosic musician, and the hierarchically determined relationship between audience and performer.

To participate in Sonic Meditations is not without effort, however.

It requires commitment adequate to that of a professional musician.

Oliveros imagined the ensemble at once as a group of individual performers and as its counterpoint, with “all the parts of a thing taken together, so that each part is considered only in relation to the whole.” This act of communal surrender to an expansive space of communication is key here, as each person is in support of the group and is reciprocally supported by them in order to “actively imagine sounds” and manifest them. Oliveros intended for the transition from language to thought and from thought to action to produce “heightened states of awareness or expanded consciousness.” In Telepathic Improvisation and its companion work Pacific Tell, the action thus lies as much in the gaze between participants, the very act of willing a nonverbal communication, as in the music that arises as a “welcome byproduct of this activity,” as Oliveros described it.

Oliveros (1932–2016) was my colleague at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she was distinguished research professor of music and

5

INTO MEMORY: TELEPATHIC IMPROVISATION/S Victoria Brooks

The distance might be small or great, i.e., thousands of miles or light years…

Pauline Oliveros, IV, Sonic Meditations, 1974

Boudry / Lorenz’s moving-image work, Telepathic Improvisation (2017), takes as its starting point Pauline Oliveros’s 1974 score of the same name. However, the audience for this filmed performance is not only called upon to telepathically communicate with the performers (as was the case with Oliveros’s original score), but also to communicate with the other elements onstage, from the theatrical lights to a group of white boxes that glide across the stage.

Telepathic Improvisation (1974) is the third of Oliveros’s numerically arranged Sonic Meditations, a series of instruction works she composed for the ♀ Ensemble. Scored as prose rather than standard musical notation, the Meditations rely on a choreographic approach that seeks to produce a place, sound, and experience outside the normative conventions of Western music. The work dispenses with a litany of such notions: the concert hall as ideal space, the primacy of the virtuosic musician, and the hierarchically determined relationship between audience and performer.

To participate in Sonic Meditations is not without effort, however.

It requires commitment adequate to that of a professional musician.

Oliveros imagined the ensemble at once as a group of individual performers and as its counterpoint, with “all the parts of a thing taken together, so that each part is considered only in relation to the whole.” This act of communal surrender to an expansive space of communication is key here, as each person is in support of the group and is reciprocally supported by them in order to “actively imagine sounds” and manifest them. Oliveros intended for the transition from language to thought and from thought to action to produce “heightened states of awareness or expanded consciousness.” In Telepathic Improvisation and its companion work Pacific Tell, the action thus lies as much in the gaze between participants, the very act of willing a nonverbal communication, as in the music that arises as a “welcome byproduct of this activity,” as Oliveros described it.

Oliveros (1932–2016) was my colleague at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she was distinguished research professor of music and

5

the space with dim blue Any number of persons sn in a circle facing the center. /IIuminate an observer. Gradually allow light. Begin by simply observing your own breathing, Always be voice. Allow your vocal your breathing to become audible, Then gradually Introduce your intensity to Increase very cords to vibrate In any mode which occurs naturally, Allow the are quiet, always observing slowly. Continue as long as possible naturally, and until all others your own breath cycle.

Variation: Translate voice to an instrument.

area, Mentally form a Find your place In a darkened indoor space or a deserted out-of-doors on, or the vividness of this sound image .. Assume that the magnitude of your concentration sound image by telepathic sound image will cause one or more of the group to receive this after your attempted teletransmIssion. Visualize the person to whom you are sending. Rest sound image different from pathic transmission by becoming mentally blank. When or If a some one else, then make your own forms in your mind, assume that you are receiving from or return to your own that sound image audible. Rest again by becoming mentally blonk are quiet. mental sound Image, Continue as long as possible or until 011others

To the musicians with varied or like instruments: for a few minutes.

Tuning - each musician in turn sits or stands in front of the audience imagine the sound of his or The audience is asked to observe the musician carefully and try to to visualize the musician, her instrument, The audience is instructed to close eyes and attempt waits until he or she then send a sound to the musician by hearing it mentally. The musician the sound. Members of receives on impression of a sound mentally, then he or she produces as feedback to the musithe audience who have successfully "hit the target" raise their hands cian.

a regular fixture at the institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center as a composer, researcher, performer, teacher, and friend.

She had planned to join us in person for the filming of Boudry / Lorenz’s Telepathic Improvisation at EMPAC in March 2017. Instead, our communication with her resided in memory as we worked. On set one Ploy only long sustained tones day, just before the performers gazed into Boudry / Lorenz’s camera— Play only when you are actually hearing a Pitch, or pitches, mentally Assume you are either sending or receiving to tele-communicate with the film’s future audiences—playwright and the person to whom you are sending. If you are receiving, If you are sending, try to visualizeartist Ione described her life listening you play with Oliveros (and noted that tones of theof listen for the sound and visualize the sender. The quality and dynamics emotional or body sensations, or even impressions of may be influenced by your feelings, Deep Listening Publications long-awaited reprint of Software "time" toastop. seems issued colors, which might come from the audience members. Continue unti/lt for People, the composer’s collected writings, in 2015). She talked about the potential of dreams to open inter-dimensional communication visualize the musician you are sending, pitch. If people between and worlds. As the camera rolled and Marwa Arsanios Focus mentally on a specific A, which to whom you are sending. If you are receiving, listen for the sound musician. the visualize finished reciting Oliveros’s score, there was a moment of stillness Also yours. matches Focus mentally on stopping or starting a sound at a particular time.

B, of tone or softness by animated theproduction. low hum of the film equipment. The term “telepathy” Focus mentally on loudness C. D. Focus mentally on the quality of the tone. tone. is derived from the Greek tele, which signifies distance or the distant, for the character Focus mentally on an emotional E. and patheia, an act of feeling. In this moment of active listening, a connection is formed, a literal feeling across distance with the potential to resist structures of exterior control that are inscribed to memory in that moment.

Boudry / Lorenz’s film is bookended by two monologues: the sound iso- revolutionary Ulrike Oliveros score, and a 1969 text be German andby Divide into two or more groups, Each group must have a tape recorder distance might be small or great, i.e., thousands of miles or lated from the other groups. The Meinhof that prescribesImprovisation resistance in the face of global capitalist , attempting light years, Each group then performs Pacific Tell or Telepathic transmission. A specific time period may be pre-arranged. inter group or interstellar telepathic oppression. In a similar vein, both Telepathic Improvisations attempt to period for later Each group tape records its own sounds during the telepathic transmission comparison. resist historical narratives surrounding normative agency and action. isolated soloist.

Variation: Instead of working in groups each participant works as an It is in these spaces of resistance that thoughts, sounds, words, and images can communicate new worlds collectively.

Copyright © 1974

By SMITH PUBLICATIONS All Rights ReurTJed.

7

the space with dim blue Any number of persons sn in a circle facing the center. /IIuminate an observer. Gradually allow light. Begin by simply observing your own breathing, Always be voice. Allow your vocal your breathing to become audible, Then gradually Introduce your intensity to Increase very cords to vibrate In any mode which occurs naturally, Allow the are quiet, always observing slowly. Continue as long as possible naturally, and until all others your own breath cycle.

Variation: Translate voice to an instrument.

area, Mentally form a Find your place In a darkened indoor space or a deserted out-of-doors on, or the vividness of this sound image .. Assume that the magnitude of your concentration sound image by telepathic sound image will cause one or more of the group to receive this after your attempted teletransmIssion. Visualize the person to whom you are sending. Rest sound image different from pathic transmission by becoming mentally blank. When or If a some one else, then make your own forms in your mind, assume that you are receiving from or return to your own that sound image audible. Rest again by becoming mentally blonk are quiet. mental sound Image, Continue as long as possible or until 011others

To the musicians with varied or like instruments: for a few minutes.

Tuning - each musician in turn sits or stands in front of the audience imagine the sound of his or The audience is asked to observe the musician carefully and try to to visualize the musician, her instrument, The audience is instructed to close eyes and attempt waits until he or she then send a sound to the musician by hearing it mentally. The musician the sound. Members of receives on impression of a sound mentally, then he or she produces as feedback to the musithe audience who have successfully "hit the target" raise their hands cian.

a regular fixture at the institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center as a composer, researcher, performer, teacher, and friend.

She had planned to join us in person for the filming of Boudry / Lorenz’s Telepathic Improvisation at EMPAC in March 2017. Instead, our communication with her resided in memory as we worked. On set one Ploy only long sustained tones day, just before the performers gazed into Boudry / Lorenz’s camera— Play only when you are actually hearing a Pitch, or pitches, mentally Assume you are either sending or receiving to tele-communicate with the film’s future audiences—playwright and the person to whom you are sending. If you are receiving, If you are sending, try to visualizeartist Ione described her life listening you play with Oliveros (and noted that tones of theof listen for the sound and visualize the sender. The quality and dynamics emotional or body sensations, or even impressions of may be influenced by your feelings, Deep Listening Publications long-awaited reprint of Software "time" toastop. seems issued colors, which might come from the audience members. Continue unti/lt for People, the composer’s collected writings, in 2015). She talked about the potential of dreams to open inter-dimensional communication visualize the musician you are sending, pitch. If people between and worlds. As the camera rolled and Marwa Arsanios Focus mentally on a specific A, which to whom you are sending. If you are receiving, listen for the sound musician. the visualize finished reciting Oliveros’s score, there was a moment of stillness Also yours. matches Focus mentally on stopping or starting a sound at a particular time.

B, of tone or softness by animated theproduction. low hum of the film equipment. The term “telepathy” Focus mentally on loudness C. D. Focus mentally on the quality of the tone. tone. is derived from the Greek tele, which signifies distance or the distant, for the character Focus mentally on an emotional E. and patheia, an act of feeling. In this moment of active listening, a connection is formed, a literal feeling across distance with the potential to resist structures of exterior control that are inscribed to memory in that moment.

Boudry / Lorenz’s film is bookended by two monologues: the sound iso- revolutionary Ulrike Oliveros score, and a 1969 text be German andby Divide into two or more groups, Each group must have a tape recorder distance might be small or great, i.e., thousands of miles or lated from the other groups. The Meinhof that prescribesImprovisation resistance in the face of global capitalist , attempting light years, Each group then performs Pacific Tell or Telepathic transmission. A specific time period may be pre-arranged. inter group or interstellar telepathic oppression. In a similar vein, both Telepathic Improvisations attempt to period for later Each group tape records its own sounds during the telepathic transmission comparison. resist historical narratives surrounding normative agency and action. isolated soloist.

Variation: Instead of working in groups each participant works as an It is in these spaces of resistance that thoughts, sounds, words, and images can communicate new worlds collectively.

Copyright © 1974

By SMITH PUBLICATIONS All Rights ReurTJed.

7

16—17

16—17

THE TELEPATHIC DRIVE: THE EVENT HORIZON: THE PROTEST: THE RESISTANT MOVEMENT André Lepecki

—I— „Protest ist, wenn ich sage, das und das paßt mir nicht. Widerstand ist, wenn ich dafür sorge, daß das, was mir nicht paßt, nicht länger geschieht.” Or, as we hear in Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s latest film, Telepathic Improvisation (2017): “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.” Or, since it is always a matter of yet another possibility of translation, of yet another mode of transposing affects, sounds, and their meanings into other affects, sounds, and their meanings into other mouths: “Protest is when I say I don’t like this and that. Resistance is when I see to it that things that I don’t like no longer occur.” Between liking or not liking “this or that,” between putting an end to what I do not like, and seeing to it that things I do not like no longer occur, no longer keep recurring in daily life, there are matters not only of life and how to live, but also of death and how to die. Matters of addressing a situation that one dislikes, but also of transforming fundamentally the very grounds upon which it occurs. These matters are as political as they are aesthetic.

Matters of the heart and its languages, as much as matters of things and their times.

Not to like hegemonic “this and that,” and then to publicly voice that dislike: to protest, to express “dissensus,” to politically activate (dis)taste in order to publicly manifest deep disagreement with the situation. To put an end to the occurrence of the things I do not like: to resist. And then, to push resistance to its limits: not only to end distasteful “this and that,” but more radically and fundamentally to put an end to the whole normative (il)logic that keeps orientating taste, politics, and aesthetics to privilege the endless creation of egregious conditions and intolerable situations—conditions and situations that must be resisted, must not be liked, must not be tolerated. To resist is to work toward a completely different setup for the occurrence of the occurring.

—II— “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.” Ulrike Meinhof’s opening words in her May 1968 text “From Protest to Resistance,” where the German political militant starts to articulate the political views that would lead her to co-found the paramilitary Rote Armee Fraktion two years later.

21

THE TELEPATHIC DRIVE: THE EVENT HORIZON: THE PROTEST: THE RESISTANT MOVEMENT André Lepecki

—I— „Protest ist, wenn ich sage, das und das paßt mir nicht. Widerstand ist, wenn ich dafür sorge, daß das, was mir nicht paßt, nicht länger geschieht.” Or, as we hear in Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s latest film, Telepathic Improvisation (2017): “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.” Or, since it is always a matter of yet another possibility of translation, of yet another mode of transposing affects, sounds, and their meanings into other affects, sounds, and their meanings into other mouths: “Protest is when I say I don’t like this and that. Resistance is when I see to it that things that I don’t like no longer occur.” Between liking or not liking “this or that,” between putting an end to what I do not like, and seeing to it that things I do not like no longer occur, no longer keep recurring in daily life, there are matters not only of life and how to live, but also of death and how to die. Matters of addressing a situation that one dislikes, but also of transforming fundamentally the very grounds upon which it occurs. These matters are as political as they are aesthetic.

Matters of the heart and its languages, as much as matters of things and their times.

Not to like hegemonic “this and that,” and then to publicly voice that dislike: to protest, to express “dissensus,” to politically activate (dis)taste in order to publicly manifest deep disagreement with the situation. To put an end to the occurrence of the things I do not like: to resist. And then, to push resistance to its limits: not only to end distasteful “this and that,” but more radically and fundamentally to put an end to the whole normative (il)logic that keeps orientating taste, politics, and aesthetics to privilege the endless creation of egregious conditions and intolerable situations—conditions and situations that must be resisted, must not be liked, must not be tolerated. To resist is to work toward a completely different setup for the occurrence of the occurring.

—II— “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.” Ulrike Meinhof’s opening words in her May 1968 text “From Protest to Resistance,” where the German political militant starts to articulate the political views that would lead her to co-found the paramilitary Rote Armee Fraktion two years later.

21

But also the words with which Boudry / Lorenz conclude Telepathic Improvisation, the film included in their most recent exhibition Everybody talks about the weather… We don’t (2017), at PARTICIPANT INC in New York. But since “Telepathic Improvisation” is also the title of a 1974 score by American composer Pauline Oliveros, we can say that Boudry / Lorenz’s latest film already disturbs normative notions of time and the usual understanding of where a political voice is located and from when it resonates. The film shows how, through the short-circuitries of time’s unhinged motions, a 1974 invitation by a feminist American composer to engage in telepathic improvisation leads right to the mouth of a German militant in 1968 and then, in the same disorientating move, the militant’s words jump to the mouth of a queer performer in 2017, who addresses us, thousands of miles or many years away, through a film whose intrinsic mechanism, we are told, is fueled by telepathy.

This film, featuring objects that appear to move autonomously and four performers whose actions are supposed to be coming directly, telepathically, from the audience viewing the projected film, offers a guide on how to undo the illusion of autonomous subjectivity, of autonomous objectivity, and the illusion of linear-straight time.

—III— The film opens with a projected white circle of light briefly ascending the black backdrop of the theatrical space where the whole of Telepathic Improvisation is shot. After a red blot also appears projected on the backdrop for a few seconds, it is quickly replaced by a projection of triangular shards of white light arranged in a circle, while electronic sounds modulate the environment. A performer in red overalls (Arsanios) walks to a solitary microphone center stage and, looking straight at the camera, delineates what is about to follow, which she calls “an experiment in interstellar telepathic transmission.” She reminds us that the audience, in this case being filmgoers, must be distanced from the film not only in terms of time (they could be “thousands of years away”) but also in terms of space. Regardless, the film acknowledges and addresses its many potential audiences as being contemporary, since the film’s own temporality, in its many mysterious manifolds, follows another kind of chrono-logic, or law of occurrence, what Boudry / Lorenz call “queer, trans-chronic practices.” In its queer

22

practice of trans-time but also of queer-sense and of trans-sensation, the film asks its viewers to “close [their] eyes and send an action to the performers by seeing or hearing it.” Meanwhile, the film’s performers “wait until they have received an impression of the actions mentally and they produce the action.” Finally, if anyone in the audience sees his or her action being enacted by one of the performers in the film, they should signal the performer by raising an arm, thereby offering feedback on the success of the trans-chronic, telepathic transmission.

At this point, there are no doubts: This is the postulation of a completely new world, where the laws of time and the laws of physics, the laws of subjects and objects, the linear orientation of logic and its grammars, the rules of senses with their likes and dislikes, no longer obtain.

—IV— “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.” We know how Jacques Rancière identified the political in “the aesthetic regime of art” with the production of “dissensus,” the latter being both “the essence of politics” and “the very kernel of the aesthetic regime.” Art’s political function is to reveal the conditions under which hegemony becomes normalized in such ways that it turns political life into what Rancière called “police.” The opposite of the political, “the essence of the police,” is to reify a very tight “matching of functions [including bodily, sexual, reproductive functions], places [reified ‘proper’ places for art but also ‘proper’ places for women, children, minorities], and ways of being [including ways of being political beings, sexual beings, artistic beings] so that there is no place for any void. It is this exclusion of what ‘is not’ that constitutes the police principle.” Meanwhile, “the essence of politics consists in disturbing this arrangement.”

In both the film and in the exhibition, the presence of something we may call police—a transcendent principle, or archi-force, orienting all that occurs—is quite explicit. As we enter the narrow gallery space, which the artists have astutely transformed from white cube into black box (with all the theatrical implications of such a transformation, like the undecided state of objects between sculpture and props, the theater spots, the little rotating stage supporting seven microphones mounted on stands), we first go through a curtain-sculpture made of hair and

23

But also the words with which Boudry / Lorenz conclude Telepathic Improvisation, the film included in their most recent exhibition Everybody talks about the weather… We don’t (2017), at PARTICIPANT INC in New York. But since “Telepathic Improvisation” is also the title of a 1974 score by American composer Pauline Oliveros, we can say that Boudry / Lorenz’s latest film already disturbs normative notions of time and the usual understanding of where a political voice is located and from when it resonates. The film shows how, through the short-circuitries of time’s unhinged motions, a 1974 invitation by a feminist American composer to engage in telepathic improvisation leads right to the mouth of a German militant in 1968 and then, in the same disorientating move, the militant’s words jump to the mouth of a queer performer in 2017, who addresses us, thousands of miles or many years away, through a film whose intrinsic mechanism, we are told, is fueled by telepathy.

This film, featuring objects that appear to move autonomously and four performers whose actions are supposed to be coming directly, telepathically, from the audience viewing the projected film, offers a guide on how to undo the illusion of autonomous subjectivity, of autonomous objectivity, and the illusion of linear-straight time.

—III— The film opens with a projected white circle of light briefly ascending the black backdrop of the theatrical space where the whole of Telepathic Improvisation is shot. After a red blot also appears projected on the backdrop for a few seconds, it is quickly replaced by a projection of triangular shards of white light arranged in a circle, while electronic sounds modulate the environment. A performer in red overalls (Arsanios) walks to a solitary microphone center stage and, looking straight at the camera, delineates what is about to follow, which she calls “an experiment in interstellar telepathic transmission.” She reminds us that the audience, in this case being filmgoers, must be distanced from the film not only in terms of time (they could be “thousands of years away”) but also in terms of space. Regardless, the film acknowledges and addresses its many potential audiences as being contemporary, since the film’s own temporality, in its many mysterious manifolds, follows another kind of chrono-logic, or law of occurrence, what Boudry / Lorenz call “queer, trans-chronic practices.” In its queer

22

practice of trans-time but also of queer-sense and of trans-sensation, the film asks its viewers to “close [their] eyes and send an action to the performers by seeing or hearing it.” Meanwhile, the film’s performers “wait until they have received an impression of the actions mentally and they produce the action.” Finally, if anyone in the audience sees his or her action being enacted by one of the performers in the film, they should signal the performer by raising an arm, thereby offering feedback on the success of the trans-chronic, telepathic transmission.

At this point, there are no doubts: This is the postulation of a completely new world, where the laws of time and the laws of physics, the laws of subjects and objects, the linear orientation of logic and its grammars, the rules of senses with their likes and dislikes, no longer obtain.

—IV— “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.” We know how Jacques Rancière identified the political in “the aesthetic regime of art” with the production of “dissensus,” the latter being both “the essence of politics” and “the very kernel of the aesthetic regime.” Art’s political function is to reveal the conditions under which hegemony becomes normalized in such ways that it turns political life into what Rancière called “police.” The opposite of the political, “the essence of the police,” is to reify a very tight “matching of functions [including bodily, sexual, reproductive functions], places [reified ‘proper’ places for art but also ‘proper’ places for women, children, minorities], and ways of being [including ways of being political beings, sexual beings, artistic beings] so that there is no place for any void. It is this exclusion of what ‘is not’ that constitutes the police principle.” Meanwhile, “the essence of politics consists in disturbing this arrangement.”

In both the film and in the exhibition, the presence of something we may call police—a transcendent principle, or archi-force, orienting all that occurs—is quite explicit. As we enter the narrow gallery space, which the artists have astutely transformed from white cube into black box (with all the theatrical implications of such a transformation, like the undecided state of objects between sculpture and props, the theater spots, the little rotating stage supporting seven microphones mounted on stands), we first go through a curtain-sculpture made of hair and

23

felt, appropriately titled Wig piece (whose body? – whose thoughts?). Then, looking ahead, we see at the end of the gallery, suspended by invisible wires, a very large object cutting across the width of the room as if it were its horizon. A huge pair of gray handcuffs hovers seven feet above the ground. Simultaneously object, theatrical prop, sculpture, symbol, the handcuffs are also—definitively—an event. As such, they scar. They nauseate. They emanate the obscenity of law and order under the nonpolitics of policed life. Actually, their obscenity is the occurrence of police force. In occurring, the handcuffs as objects and event-horizon not only cut across the space of the gallery, marking the exhibition’s dead end, but also stand as if they were the film’s privileged, captive, audience—they do, after all, resemble a pair of spectacles. Indeed, the set-up of the exhibition creates a narrow space where the film is projected directly in front of the handcuffs, as if for them. If we are to watch the film, we must sit between the hovering handcuffs and Telepathic Improvisation.

Thus, film and object co-occur in their face-to-face eventfulness.

They affect each other. I am reminded here of a letter by Boudry / Lorenz to curator Virginie Bobin where they refer to “film as toxic”: “[W]hat interests us especially about the toxic is its unpredictability and the way in which sometimes it is used as a cure.” I like to think that this set-up of a film persistently looping the political power of 1970s feminist performance, of a 1960s woman guerrilla call for active political militancy, and of “queer, trans-chronic practices” in 2017 before an oversized, gray, obscene sculpture of police handcuffs/ gaze is telepathically transmitting queer-feminist-militant-resistant toxicity-cure right to the core of police power. I like to think that the film’s trans-chronic queerness warps time such that it directly induces hegemonic powers to fall under its political spell, under its black magic of resistance—a political affect operating through the “this and that” of everyday existence in order to precipitate another mode in which life can occur.

along too.” Ulrike Meinhof, 1968. But since in the sentence immediately following, not uttered by MPA in Boudry / Lorenz’s film, Meinhof attributes those words to “what a black speaker from the Black Power movement said at the Vietnam Conference in February in Berlin,” it follows that back then Meinhof was already (as she is right now, via MPA’s mouth), a conduit, a vessel, a ventriloquist, of a trans-chronic, political force. We will have to call this force, coming from a Black Panther, black resistance. But black resistance as trans-chronic black magic, scrambling away the “reasonable” (il)logics of police and their gray instruments of submission and surveillance. Boudry / Lorenz’s cinematically toxiccurative transmission of Meinhof’s text—which we now know voices the words of Black Panther Fred Hampton through a performer’s mouth, so that all of them together in a fantastical-political reassembled-collective body may address an audience. This audience is in turn asked to change the filmed performers’ actions, so it may stop going along with the premises of the choreo-cinematic order—performing black resistance as incantation. Or perhaps, resistance as art of radical hosting: an opening of bodies, mouths, minds, things so they may be inhabited by the bodies, mouths, minds, things of others and their struggles. Others to whom and things with which we may also want to dispatch our bodies and mouths and minds and words and acts and arts in order to join their fight which then becomes also our fight—in total telepathic surrendering, in active resistance against self-serving life.

Boudry / Lorenz, as well as Marwa Arsanios, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch, MPA , Ulrike Meinhof, Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers, Pauline Cisneros; the obscure actions of light spots; the choreographed motions of robotic white boxes; seven silent rotating microphones; modulated electronic sounds; hair and felt; and a film on interstellar telepathic experimentation projected on loop in a dark, slightly overheated downtown Manhattan gallery to an oversized pair of gray handcuffs, all assemble to resist: opaquely, queerly, transchronically, and tele-black-magically.

—V— “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stop going

24

25

felt, appropriately titled Wig piece (whose body? – whose thoughts?). Then, looking ahead, we see at the end of the gallery, suspended by invisible wires, a very large object cutting across the width of the room as if it were its horizon. A huge pair of gray handcuffs hovers seven feet above the ground. Simultaneously object, theatrical prop, sculpture, symbol, the handcuffs are also—definitively—an event. As such, they scar. They nauseate. They emanate the obscenity of law and order under the nonpolitics of policed life. Actually, their obscenity is the occurrence of police force. In occurring, the handcuffs as objects and event-horizon not only cut across the space of the gallery, marking the exhibition’s dead end, but also stand as if they were the film’s privileged, captive, audience—they do, after all, resemble a pair of spectacles. Indeed, the set-up of the exhibition creates a narrow space where the film is projected directly in front of the handcuffs, as if for them. If we are to watch the film, we must sit between the hovering handcuffs and Telepathic Improvisation.

Thus, film and object co-occur in their face-to-face eventfulness.

They affect each other. I am reminded here of a letter by Boudry / Lorenz to curator Virginie Bobin where they refer to “film as toxic”: “[W]hat interests us especially about the toxic is its unpredictability and the way in which sometimes it is used as a cure.” I like to think that this set-up of a film persistently looping the political power of 1970s feminist performance, of a 1960s woman guerrilla call for active political militancy, and of “queer, trans-chronic practices” in 2017 before an oversized, gray, obscene sculpture of police handcuffs/ gaze is telepathically transmitting queer-feminist-militant-resistant toxicity-cure right to the core of police power. I like to think that the film’s trans-chronic queerness warps time such that it directly induces hegemonic powers to fall under its political spell, under its black magic of resistance—a political affect operating through the “this and that” of everyday existence in order to precipitate another mode in which life can occur.

along too.” Ulrike Meinhof, 1968. But since in the sentence immediately following, not uttered by MPA in Boudry / Lorenz’s film, Meinhof attributes those words to “what a black speaker from the Black Power movement said at the Vietnam Conference in February in Berlin,” it follows that back then Meinhof was already (as she is right now, via MPA’s mouth), a conduit, a vessel, a ventriloquist, of a trans-chronic, political force. We will have to call this force, coming from a Black Panther, black resistance. But black resistance as trans-chronic black magic, scrambling away the “reasonable” (il)logics of police and their gray instruments of submission and surveillance. Boudry / Lorenz’s cinematically toxiccurative transmission of Meinhof’s text—which we now know voices the words of Black Panther Fred Hampton through a performer’s mouth, so that all of them together in a fantastical-political reassembled-collective body may address an audience. This audience is in turn asked to change the filmed performers’ actions, so it may stop going along with the premises of the choreo-cinematic order—performing black resistance as incantation. Or perhaps, resistance as art of radical hosting: an opening of bodies, mouths, minds, things so they may be inhabited by the bodies, mouths, minds, things of others and their struggles. Others to whom and things with which we may also want to dispatch our bodies and mouths and minds and words and acts and arts in order to join their fight which then becomes also our fight—in total telepathic surrendering, in active resistance against self-serving life.

Boudry / Lorenz, as well as Marwa Arsanios, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch, MPA , Ulrike Meinhof, Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers, Pauline Cisneros; the obscure actions of light spots; the choreographed motions of robotic white boxes; seven silent rotating microphones; modulated electronic sounds; hair and felt; and a film on interstellar telepathic experimentation projected on loop in a dark, slightly overheated downtown Manhattan gallery to an oversized pair of gray handcuffs, all assemble to resist: opaquely, queerly, transchronically, and tele-black-magically.

—V— “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stop going

24

25

A DEMONSTRATION FOR A DEMONSTRATION Mason Leaver–Yap

“Close your eyes and send an action.” So begins Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s Telepathic Improvisation. This isn’t just a film that wants to connect with an audience; it wants its viewers to be complicit in its very production. “If you see or hear your action appearing in the film,” an actor goes on to explain, “raise your hands as feedback to the performer.” Call-and-response, transmission and feedback—these things will happen telepathically. Even if the format of this request—a prerecorded video, broadcast to an online audience—forecloses any possibility of physical interaction between the film and its viewers, the instruction is dead serious. One may doubt the efficacy of such a command, but let’s not forget: Closing one’s eyes is not just a method of evading the confines of reality. In conscious life, it is a way of listening harder; in unconscious life, it is a prelude to dreaming. Telepathic Improvisation asks for both.

Adapted from the late composer Pauline Oliveros’s musical score of the same name, Boudry / Lorenz’s film reflects and extends the ethos of it precursor. Oliveros’s 1974 version sought to disassemble the hierarchies of traditional Western music and its distinction between musician and listener, using communal group meditation as a compositional model. With no discernible rhythm, the 1974 score attaches no value to the notion of virtuosic play; it’s an investigation into collective attunement. Boudry /Lorenz extend Oliveros’s desire for an inclusive listening space into a broader consideration of how different people, objects, and times may relate to one another. Here, the idea of relating to something or someone is not simply limited to describing the meeting between subjects and things. Rather, it is engaged in the moment of encounter, where subjectivity is both produced and transformed. It is this relational quality—as well as one’s capacity to pay attention to such relations—that is at the core of Telepathic Improvisation in 2017.

With its minimalist props and simplistic approach to physical movement that, at times, deliberately teeters on the edge of slapstick comedy, Boudry / Lorenz’s film attempts to make relations visually plain, even if the cause and effect of such relations is more complex.

Telepathic Improvisation adopts the format of a demonstration. The performance cycles through a set of actions, sequences, and gestures

27

A DEMONSTRATION FOR A DEMONSTRATION Mason Leaver–Yap

“Close your eyes and send an action.” So begins Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s Telepathic Improvisation. This isn’t just a film that wants to connect with an audience; it wants its viewers to be complicit in its very production. “If you see or hear your action appearing in the film,” an actor goes on to explain, “raise your hands as feedback to the performer.” Call-and-response, transmission and feedback—these things will happen telepathically. Even if the format of this request—a prerecorded video, broadcast to an online audience—forecloses any possibility of physical interaction between the film and its viewers, the instruction is dead serious. One may doubt the efficacy of such a command, but let’s not forget: Closing one’s eyes is not just a method of evading the confines of reality. In conscious life, it is a way of listening harder; in unconscious life, it is a prelude to dreaming. Telepathic Improvisation asks for both.

Adapted from the late composer Pauline Oliveros’s musical score of the same name, Boudry / Lorenz’s film reflects and extends the ethos of it precursor. Oliveros’s 1974 version sought to disassemble the hierarchies of traditional Western music and its distinction between musician and listener, using communal group meditation as a compositional model. With no discernible rhythm, the 1974 score attaches no value to the notion of virtuosic play; it’s an investigation into collective attunement. Boudry /Lorenz extend Oliveros’s desire for an inclusive listening space into a broader consideration of how different people, objects, and times may relate to one another. Here, the idea of relating to something or someone is not simply limited to describing the meeting between subjects and things. Rather, it is engaged in the moment of encounter, where subjectivity is both produced and transformed. It is this relational quality—as well as one’s capacity to pay attention to such relations—that is at the core of Telepathic Improvisation in 2017.

With its minimalist props and simplistic approach to physical movement that, at times, deliberately teeters on the edge of slapstick comedy, Boudry / Lorenz’s film attempts to make relations visually plain, even if the cause and effect of such relations is more complex.

Telepathic Improvisation adopts the format of a demonstration. The performance cycles through a set of actions, sequences, and gestures

27

that exemplify certain operations: how to move, how to turn a light on, how to look into the camera, how to look away. But within those operations, causation is elusive, direction opaque. Do the pristine white pedestals move in response to the action of the performers, or do the pedestals exhibit and arrange the performers in relation to another schema? Do stage lights switch on and off in relation to the performer’s movements, or is it more that the performers move in relation to signal of the lights? Who or what is performing whom?

Unlike in their previous film works—where the artists briefly make cameos, appearing before the camera to place objects, snap a clapper board, or interrupt their performers to ask questions—here they artists are completely absent, seemingly abdicating the role of director altogether. As they noted prior to shooting Telepathic Improvisation, the actions depicted in the film “are not subjected to our will, control or mastery,” but rather have their own systems of action and value. “It is about the tension between the desire to act, the fantasy of a political action, and the acting itself.”

The timing of the film is key to comprehending its different forms of political and historical address. Developed by Boudry / Lorenz in the second half of 2016 and shot in New York in February 2017 during the initial rollout of the US government’s executive order 13769 (the so-called “Muslim travel ban”), the work’s interest in finding ways of participating in “intergroup or interstellar telepathic transmission” (as the opening monologue suggests) is concurrent with urgent political desires to seek freedom of movement, speech, and thought. From the very beginning, Telepathic Improvisation declares itself intimate and distant, possibly even “light years” away from the viewer, though it is notably ambivalent about whether it comes from the past or the future.

Although Oliveros’s underpinning score dates to 1974, Boudry / Lorenz’s version is also host to other times and actions. The motorized units reference choreographer Deborah Hay’s 1966 Solo performance (itself an echo of artist Robert Breer’s groundbreaking automated “float” sculptures, first made in 1965), while the closing monologue is adapted from a 1968 article by Ulrike Meinhof. The latter text, “From Protest to Resistance,” was published at a critical moment both in German political history and in Meinhof’s own life, between her transformation

28

from left-wing journalist into militant guerrilla in the Rote Armee Fraktion. Widely circulated in the political magazine konkret, her article responded to the first major violent demonstration of the German student movement. The text bemoans the material indifference of the protest against a capitalistic system (“Arson in a department store is not an anti-capitalist action,” Meinhof notes. “On the contrary, it maintains the system and is counter-revolutionary.”) But it also acknowledges that the students’ actions succeeded in targeting symbolic value: the demonstration brought into question the right of bourgeois ownership.

Also embedded within this mosaic of aesthetic, political, and personal histories is the most visually explicit reference of Telepathic Improvisation: the temporary apparition of a pair of suspended handcuffs. This comically over-sized prop seems to mirror a peculiarly contemporary moment, one where the line between political farce and actual threat begins to blur. The handcuffs are in fact a replica, drawn from director William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), a crime thriller starring Al Pacino as an undercover NYPD cop hunting down a serial killer of gay men. The cuffs serve as a droll party prop during the movie’s most infamous scene, where Pacino visits a BDSM leather club only to find its occupants in drag as policemen. Once picketed by activists who claimed it stigmatized depictions of gay men, Cruising has more recently been reassessed (and, in places, recuperated) as a rare depiction of American queer life just prior to the spread of AIDS. The handcuffs that resurface in Telepathic Improvisation serve not only as a complex symbol of past sexual liberation on the cusp of crisis, but also as a modern emblem of carceral environments that seek to restrict and surveil the existence of racial, religious, or sexual difference.

The late artist and writer Harun Farocki spent much of his life analyzing the symbolic power of images within the overlapping structures of prisons, governments, militaries, and consumer worlds.

Of prime fascination for him was surveillance, a mode that raises “the question of what status, significance, meaning—and intention—are supposed to be.” Surveillance is a way of seeing that abolishes the need for a human controller or an on-location witness, and Farocki was attentive to the fact that its images are made neither to entertain nor to inform. Such “operative images,” Farocki explains, “are images that

29

that exemplify certain operations: how to move, how to turn a light on, how to look into the camera, how to look away. But within those operations, causation is elusive, direction opaque. Do the pristine white pedestals move in response to the action of the performers, or do the pedestals exhibit and arrange the performers in relation to another schema? Do stage lights switch on and off in relation to the performer’s movements, or is it more that the performers move in relation to signal of the lights? Who or what is performing whom?

Unlike in their previous film works—where the artists briefly make cameos, appearing before the camera to place objects, snap a clapper board, or interrupt their performers to ask questions—here they artists are completely absent, seemingly abdicating the role of director altogether. As they noted prior to shooting Telepathic Improvisation, the actions depicted in the film “are not subjected to our will, control or mastery,” but rather have their own systems of action and value. “It is about the tension between the desire to act, the fantasy of a political action, and the acting itself.”

The timing of the film is key to comprehending its different forms of political and historical address. Developed by Boudry / Lorenz in the second half of 2016 and shot in New York in February 2017 during the initial rollout of the US government’s executive order 13769 (the so-called “Muslim travel ban”), the work’s interest in finding ways of participating in “intergroup or interstellar telepathic transmission” (as the opening monologue suggests) is concurrent with urgent political desires to seek freedom of movement, speech, and thought. From the very beginning, Telepathic Improvisation declares itself intimate and distant, possibly even “light years” away from the viewer, though it is notably ambivalent about whether it comes from the past or the future.

Although Oliveros’s underpinning score dates to 1974, Boudry / Lorenz’s version is also host to other times and actions. The motorized units reference choreographer Deborah Hay’s 1966 Solo performance (itself an echo of artist Robert Breer’s groundbreaking automated “float” sculptures, first made in 1965), while the closing monologue is adapted from a 1968 article by Ulrike Meinhof. The latter text, “From Protest to Resistance,” was published at a critical moment both in German political history and in Meinhof’s own life, between her transformation

28

from left-wing journalist into militant guerrilla in the Rote Armee Fraktion. Widely circulated in the political magazine konkret, her article responded to the first major violent demonstration of the German student movement. The text bemoans the material indifference of the protest against a capitalistic system (“Arson in a department store is not an anti-capitalist action,” Meinhof notes. “On the contrary, it maintains the system and is counter-revolutionary.”) But it also acknowledges that the students’ actions succeeded in targeting symbolic value: the demonstration brought into question the right of bourgeois ownership.

Also embedded within this mosaic of aesthetic, political, and personal histories is the most visually explicit reference of Telepathic Improvisation: the temporary apparition of a pair of suspended handcuffs. This comically over-sized prop seems to mirror a peculiarly contemporary moment, one where the line between political farce and actual threat begins to blur. The handcuffs are in fact a replica, drawn from director William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), a crime thriller starring Al Pacino as an undercover NYPD cop hunting down a serial killer of gay men. The cuffs serve as a droll party prop during the movie’s most infamous scene, where Pacino visits a BDSM leather club only to find its occupants in drag as policemen. Once picketed by activists who claimed it stigmatized depictions of gay men, Cruising has more recently been reassessed (and, in places, recuperated) as a rare depiction of American queer life just prior to the spread of AIDS. The handcuffs that resurface in Telepathic Improvisation serve not only as a complex symbol of past sexual liberation on the cusp of crisis, but also as a modern emblem of carceral environments that seek to restrict and surveil the existence of racial, religious, or sexual difference.

The late artist and writer Harun Farocki spent much of his life analyzing the symbolic power of images within the overlapping structures of prisons, governments, militaries, and consumer worlds.

Of prime fascination for him was surveillance, a mode that raises “the question of what status, significance, meaning—and intention—are supposed to be.” Surveillance is a way of seeing that abolishes the need for a human controller or an on-location witness, and Farocki was attentive to the fact that its images are made neither to entertain nor to inform. Such “operative images,” Farocki explains, “are images that

29

do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation.” While Farocki did not live to see the vast reach of such technology today, his writing serves as a compelling and often remarkable forerunner to considering the implications of the modern drone—the apogee of mobile surveillance and decentralized war. Noting the increasing complexity of war machinery and the way it analyzed information (including human interaction), Farocki frequently pointed out the failure of surveillance as a field and an industry to abide by ethical imperatives. In Bilder der Welt und Inschift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War) (1988), he examined surveillance’s capacity for humane vision. The film documents the CIA’s discovery that the Allies had successfully taken aerial photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944—and yet somehow failed to uncover the nature of the camp’s operations. Despite producing images so crisp that prisoners’ footprints in the snow were discernible, Farocki notes, the Allies “were not under order to look for Auschwitz, and so they did not find it.” The film and many of his later writings take pains to show that the disembodiment of vision is a distortion that can extend the time of war. One must pay greater attention not only to what is pictured but also to assessing the command of an apparatus that can enable (or preclude) humane vision.

The eye of the drone is featured at the very heart of Telepathic Improvisation. In a radical break halfway through the film, the traditional proscenium view briefly switches to something far less certain—a mobile and vertiginous view from a camera mounted on one of the motorized platforms. No longer a static composition distantly observing the comic interactions of actors and clunky automated machines, this “operative image” suddenly surveils the scene from within the space of the stage, reducing the performers to statuesque objects. At one point, the unmanned camera circles behind a figure that sharply raises its arms, either in submission or as a signal to stop.

In the mode of mechanized stalker, the camera’s capricious menace is palpable. The stage lamps and fans whirr and click with dizzying alarm, the sound of their industrial processes no longer simply an aural byproduct of their operations, but a choral impulse within the film’s soundtrack—an unlikely “siren song” or alien hum delivered at

30

a fever pitch. It should come as little surprise to anyone IT-literate that the initially playful and retro sci-fi ambience of Telepathic Improvisation can so quickly turn into something closer to horror. As Farocki writes, “Machines can perform more complex works today, the war machinery will then similarly set itself more complex tasks.” *** If telepathy, at its most basic, is an attempt to intercede upon sensory channels and physical realities regardless of time and space, then Telepathic Improvisation desires to interrupt and haunt the present with objects, voices, and gestures from the late 20th century. Such historical materials—the Meinhof text especially—have the capacity to tip over into a mode of prophecy, though only if one chooses to listen. As the film shuttles back and forth between different times—political past, the just-past, and the future—this film’s staging of cultural anachronisms presents the viewer with a historical toolkit of radical latencies that, in their demonstration, hover between performance and rehearsal. As the drone eye stalks its subjects, so too does the half-life of historical memory; the operative image comes up against the politics of resistance.

The feeling of Telepathic Improvisation is that of being primed— being primed to listen, to communicate, and to work within the logic of an impossible interaction. It is a demonstration for a demonstration.

Within a contemporary Western context of political inversions, alternative facts, and mass surveillance, telepathy surfaces as a viable mode for future acts of radical solidarity. “Raise your hands as feedback to the performer,” commands Telepathic Improvisation. The film wants to know if this is a moment of participation or surrender.

31

do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation.” While Farocki did not live to see the vast reach of such technology today, his writing serves as a compelling and often remarkable forerunner to considering the implications of the modern drone—the apogee of mobile surveillance and decentralized war. Noting the increasing complexity of war machinery and the way it analyzed information (including human interaction), Farocki frequently pointed out the failure of surveillance as a field and an industry to abide by ethical imperatives. In Bilder der Welt und Inschift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War) (1988), he examined surveillance’s capacity for humane vision. The film documents the CIA’s discovery that the Allies had successfully taken aerial photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944—and yet somehow failed to uncover the nature of the camp’s operations. Despite producing images so crisp that prisoners’ footprints in the snow were discernible, Farocki notes, the Allies “were not under order to look for Auschwitz, and so they did not find it.” The film and many of his later writings take pains to show that the disembodiment of vision is a distortion that can extend the time of war. One must pay greater attention not only to what is pictured but also to assessing the command of an apparatus that can enable (or preclude) humane vision.

The eye of the drone is featured at the very heart of Telepathic Improvisation. In a radical break halfway through the film, the traditional proscenium view briefly switches to something far less certain—a mobile and vertiginous view from a camera mounted on one of the motorized platforms. No longer a static composition distantly observing the comic interactions of actors and clunky automated machines, this “operative image” suddenly surveils the scene from within the space of the stage, reducing the performers to statuesque objects. At one point, the unmanned camera circles behind a figure that sharply raises its arms, either in submission or as a signal to stop.

In the mode of mechanized stalker, the camera’s capricious menace is palpable. The stage lamps and fans whirr and click with dizzying alarm, the sound of their industrial processes no longer simply an aural byproduct of their operations, but a choral impulse within the film’s soundtrack—an unlikely “siren song” or alien hum delivered at

30

a fever pitch. It should come as little surprise to anyone IT-literate that the initially playful and retro sci-fi ambience of Telepathic Improvisation can so quickly turn into something closer to horror. As Farocki writes, “Machines can perform more complex works today, the war machinery will then similarly set itself more complex tasks.” *** If telepathy, at its most basic, is an attempt to intercede upon sensory channels and physical realities regardless of time and space, then Telepathic Improvisation desires to interrupt and haunt the present with objects, voices, and gestures from the late 20th century. Such historical materials—the Meinhof text especially—have the capacity to tip over into a mode of prophecy, though only if one chooses to listen. As the film shuttles back and forth between different times—political past, the just-past, and the future—this film’s staging of cultural anachronisms presents the viewer with a historical toolkit of radical latencies that, in their demonstration, hover between performance and rehearsal. As the drone eye stalks its subjects, so too does the half-life of historical memory; the operative image comes up against the politics of resistance.

The feeling of Telepathic Improvisation is that of being primed— being primed to listen, to communicate, and to work within the logic of an impossible interaction. It is a demonstration for a demonstration.

Within a contemporary Western context of political inversions, alternative facts, and mass surveillance, telepathy surfaces as a viable mode for future acts of radical solidarity. “Raise your hands as feedback to the performer,” commands Telepathic Improvisation. The film wants to know if this is a moment of participation or surrender.

31

PAULINE BOUDRY AND RENATE LORENZ WITH DEAN DADERKO AND LIA GANGITANO A Conversation

DD We have this idea of machines as perfect objects, right? They

continually produce, and they do so with no exhaustion and without feeling. Then there’s telepathy, where there’s so much excess of feeling that it’s actually palpable; you can reach out and touch it.

What’s very interesting for me is that your new video work Telepathic Improvisation (2017) doesn’t posit machines and telepathy as being opposed to one another, but as two complementary options that one might take advantage of to bring on a desired outcome—like, say, a new political reality. For instance, when MPA recites Ulrike Meinhof’s text addressing the expropriation of the president, it feels very relevant to our current situation in the US.

RL The telepathic transmission in our film includes all the machines,

objects, and performers on stage, casting them in a mutual conversation. It suggests not only that we can take advantage of objects and machines, but that they might take advantage of us.

In terms of politics, it interests me to think about the difference between notations and scores, and between choreography and telepathy. In a text André Lepecki shared with us, he connects telepathy to choreography. He sees them as similar because they’re both about bodies acting as conduits for ideas and gestures provided by others. Telepathy and choreography are contingent upon, dependent on, and enriched by all the factors around an individual, including their desires, their commands, everything. I like this idea, but I still have the impression that telepathy could set off a reaction somewhere else: Does the audience really send their ideas? Do they raise their hands only in the moment when they see their movements appearing onstage? Do human and nonhuman objects move only when they receive an idea telepathically? This possible disobedience, these uncertainties, might be freeing, but they are also unsettling.

PB This uncertainty is, somehow, already provided in Pauline

Oliveros’s score. She writes that the audience might be thousands of miles or light years away and that we are attempting intergroup or interstellar communication. We loved this idea that something is happening onstage and you actually have no idea who is sending

33

PAULINE BOUDRY AND RENATE LORENZ WITH DEAN DADERKO AND LIA GANGITANO A Conversation

DD We have this idea of machines as perfect objects, right? They

continually produce, and they do so with no exhaustion and without feeling. Then there’s telepathy, where there’s so much excess of feeling that it’s actually palpable; you can reach out and touch it.

What’s very interesting for me is that your new video work Telepathic Improvisation (2017) doesn’t posit machines and telepathy as being opposed to one another, but as two complementary options that one might take advantage of to bring on a desired outcome—like, say, a new political reality. For instance, when MPA recites Ulrike Meinhof’s text addressing the expropriation of the president, it feels very relevant to our current situation in the US.

RL The telepathic transmission in our film includes all the machines,

objects, and performers on stage, casting them in a mutual conversation. It suggests not only that we can take advantage of objects and machines, but that they might take advantage of us.

In terms of politics, it interests me to think about the difference between notations and scores, and between choreography and telepathy. In a text André Lepecki shared with us, he connects telepathy to choreography. He sees them as similar because they’re both about bodies acting as conduits for ideas and gestures provided by others. Telepathy and choreography are contingent upon, dependent on, and enriched by all the factors around an individual, including their desires, their commands, everything. I like this idea, but I still have the impression that telepathy could set off a reaction somewhere else: Does the audience really send their ideas? Do they raise their hands only in the moment when they see their movements appearing onstage? Do human and nonhuman objects move only when they receive an idea telepathically? This possible disobedience, these uncertainties, might be freeing, but they are also unsettling.

PB This uncertainty is, somehow, already provided in Pauline

Oliveros’s score. She writes that the audience might be thousands of miles or light years away and that we are attempting intergroup or interstellar communication. We loved this idea that something is happening onstage and you actually have no idea who is sending

33

the message, that there might be a communication with a place or time that we have no knowledge of.

Another aspect of the score was important to us: We are very interested in the fact that it addresses relations between the performers and the audience—a kind of exchange of energy or desire that is, I think, present in any performance. In Oliveros’s score, this interdependence is highlighted: What does the audience want to see happening onstage? What are the messages the human or nonhuman performers—or we as artists—are sending? What are the expectations and imaginations on both sides, and how does this communication produce new actions, which are somehow the result of the performers’ and the audience’s wishes?

RL Connected to this, we also thought about whether the fantasy of a

political action could be considered a political practice, or if it needs to be received and acted out.

LG As we’re talking, I realize that I keep mixing up telepathy and

telekinesis. I’m thinking, “I need to look these words up,” because I keep imagining not only sending messages, but also the ability to move objects with your mind. Thinking of certain passages in the film as not necessarily representing a message that is discernible, but just as this power to push something across the stage without really touching it. I’m finding that the term “telepathy” is slipping, which is kind of connected to this form of humor or non-spectacle of the performance. It’s funny (as in peculiar).

RL W hat seems important is not only that a box might move, but that it

might move us.

DD There’s that beautiful moment when MPA is being rolled onto the

stage by one of the boxes. That moment gave me the sense that people could be subject to the will of the boxes. As it happens, though, all of these elements seem to be getting on rather well.

RL Yes, as the ambivalence of the giant handcuffs in the film might

34

suggest, subjection as we often experience it in the current political situation can be violent. But there is a strong connection to desire and sexuality as well. Speaking of desire, the screen between the performers and the audience seems important: It works as a surface for projections of desire, a surface where images and ideas can travel back and forth. This unsettles the notion of the film as a product that is fixed after it is recorded and edited. So even though the film is not interactive in a technical sense, this seemingly fixed production addresses the audience directly by asking them to send ideas and promising that their fantasies will appear onscreen moments later.

DD Yes, the idea of the film as a potentially responsive entity definitely

animates the viewing experience.

LG I don’t know if this is the right moment, but when you’re talking

about agents and agency, of the human and nonhuman elements, it makes me want to ask you about the cast. How much do the performers’ identities represent this fine line between their recognizability—casting people for who they are—and how they function as stand-ins for others, for the audience, or for you? Again, there is a slippage in terms like “actor” or “performer,” because their presence is not anonymous, really.

PB Yes. There is a contradiction between performers who “act” in

a similar way as the lights and boxes onstage and the four very specific performers that we choose to work with. Even if it is not always acted out in the film, they all bring in their backgrounds in art and choreography, and their political interests.

We develop filmed performances with our ideas about the performers very much at the same time. We never think of a film in advance and cast performers after. For instance, we’ve worked with Ginger Brooks Takahashi many times before, and were excited to think about how she would react to Oliveros’s score as a musician and artist. We also thought that Ginger might have a strong interest in the potential of telepathy. We had an idea that Werner Hirsch, whom we’ve worked with regularly, would be very

35

the message, that there might be a communication with a place or time that we have no knowledge of.

Another aspect of the score was important to us: We are very interested in the fact that it addresses relations between the performers and the audience—a kind of exchange of energy or desire that is, I think, present in any performance. In Oliveros’s score, this interdependence is highlighted: What does the audience want to see happening onstage? What are the messages the human or nonhuman performers—or we as artists—are sending? What are the expectations and imaginations on both sides, and how does this communication produce new actions, which are somehow the result of the performers’ and the audience’s wishes?

RL Connected to this, we also thought about whether the fantasy of a

political action could be considered a political practice, or if it needs to be received and acted out.

LG As we’re talking, I realize that I keep mixing up telepathy and

telekinesis. I’m thinking, “I need to look these words up,” because I keep imagining not only sending messages, but also the ability to move objects with your mind. Thinking of certain passages in the film as not necessarily representing a message that is discernible, but just as this power to push something across the stage without really touching it. I’m finding that the term “telepathy” is slipping, which is kind of connected to this form of humor or non-spectacle of the performance. It’s funny (as in peculiar).

RL W hat seems important is not only that a box might move, but that it

might move us.

DD There’s that beautiful moment when MPA is being rolled onto the

stage by one of the boxes. That moment gave me the sense that people could be subject to the will of the boxes. As it happens, though, all of these elements seem to be getting on rather well.

RL Yes, as the ambivalence of the giant handcuffs in the film might

34

suggest, subjection as we often experience it in the current political situation can be violent. But there is a strong connection to desire and sexuality as well. Speaking of desire, the screen between the performers and the audience seems important: It works as a surface for projections of desire, a surface where images and ideas can travel back and forth. This unsettles the notion of the film as a product that is fixed after it is recorded and edited. So even though the film is not interactive in a technical sense, this seemingly fixed production addresses the audience directly by asking them to send ideas and promising that their fantasies will appear onscreen moments later.

DD Yes, the idea of the film as a potentially responsive entity definitely

animates the viewing experience.

LG I don’t know if this is the right moment, but when you’re talking

about agents and agency, of the human and nonhuman elements, it makes me want to ask you about the cast. How much do the performers’ identities represent this fine line between their recognizability—casting people for who they are—and how they function as stand-ins for others, for the audience, or for you? Again, there is a slippage in terms like “actor” or “performer,” because their presence is not anonymous, really.

PB Yes. There is a contradiction between performers who “act” in

a similar way as the lights and boxes onstage and the four very specific performers that we choose to work with. Even if it is not always acted out in the film, they all bring in their backgrounds in art and choreography, and their political interests.

We develop filmed performances with our ideas about the performers very much at the same time. We never think of a film in advance and cast performers after. For instance, we’ve worked with Ginger Brooks Takahashi many times before, and were excited to think about how she would react to Oliveros’s score as a musician and artist. We also thought that Ginger might have a strong interest in the potential of telepathy. We had an idea that Werner Hirsch, whom we’ve worked with regularly, would be very

35

responsive to dance elements connecting objects and machines, as this relates to issues he’s currently pursuing in his own choreographic work. We met Marwa Arsanios last year in Beirut, Lebanon, and began challenging conversations about performance and violence, including the potential of violence as a tool of resistance. And we’d wanted to work with MPA for some time, as we feel very connected to the ways her work deals with notions of aggression, resistance, and the urge to open up alternative ideas to the “here and now as a prison house” as José Munoz frames it. We imagined that these potential connections between them would bring about unforeseeable results, something that could open up or even blast through our initial script. I suppose we were also challenging our agency by foregrounding the individual agency of these performers within the work. When we’re at the start of a project like this, we welcome the presence of a void that allows for the unexpected to occur.

LG About this void: I was trying to think of another word for it. But

when you say you’re making a film rather than a performance, in a way, for me, one of the most affecting moments is when the light boom comes down and you’re reminded of your body in relationship to the film. I guess what I’m thinking about is the structure and the apparatus of the theater, the black box, or the making of a movie. You’re exposing those hidden elements so that they also become visible agents in the film. I’m not sure exactly what the question is, but it has something to do with how, in order to create the space of this particular energy exchange, you expose these things in the process to give them some kind of life, or agency.

DD For me, there are also important moments that stretch what’s

physically possible, like when the cloud of smoke covering the stage gradually blows away. It’s magical that all of a sudden the cloud onstage gets smaller and smaller and turns into a little wisp that roils through the air before it decides to leave and head somewhere else. I appreciate the ways that these unexpected subjects function materially and physically in the video.

36

LG Right, it’s almost like exposing the magic is the magic. That’s what

lays everything bare, or creates the conditions in which telepathic messages can be more clearly transmitted.

DD Yeah, there has to be a space for these feelings to fall into and

be recognized. This is maybe what I’m talking about when I talk about the void. It’s not a place of absence, but a place of waiting for presence.

So, how did you both come to Oliveros and her work?

PB For this piece?

DD Well, I remember your video work To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn

Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013) is also based on one of Oliveros’s scores. I wonder how she came into your lives?

RL We have both been fans of her work for a long time, because she’s

central to the development of contemporary composition, and experimental electronic music and its presentation. Moreover, her deep-listening practice signaled the invention of a radical approach to queer-feminist politics in music. When our friend, the curator Irene Revell, invited her to London in 2012 to perform her 1971 score “To Valerie Solanas...,” we immediately thought, “We’d like to work with this score!” Watching informal video documentation of this performance, we realized that we very much liked hearing the music, though it didn’t work for us on a visual level. The image felt like a distraction from the music. So we challenged ourselves to figure out how we possibly could transform the score into a visual piece.

PB For Telepathic Improvisation, we made slight modifications to Oliveros’s

score. Instead of having the audience send tones to musicians with instruments, we wanted the audience to send all manner of actions, and to direct their thoughts to the performers or any other elements onstage. The theater lights, for example, each produced very different electronic sounds and tones. We loved the idea that they’d become instruments. We quickly realized that it would be interesting to treat all the elements on stage as instruments: the smoke machine, the

37

responsive to dance elements connecting objects and machines, as this relates to issues he’s currently pursuing in his own choreographic work. We met Marwa Arsanios last year in Beirut, Lebanon, and began challenging conversations about performance and violence, including the potential of violence as a tool of resistance. And we’d wanted to work with MPA for some time, as we feel very connected to the ways her work deals with notions of aggression, resistance, and the urge to open up alternative ideas to the “here and now as a prison house” as José Munoz frames it. We imagined that these potential connections between them would bring about unforeseeable results, something that could open up or even blast through our initial script. I suppose we were also challenging our agency by foregrounding the individual agency of these performers within the work. When we’re at the start of a project like this, we welcome the presence of a void that allows for the unexpected to occur.

LG About this void: I was trying to think of another word for it. But

when you say you’re making a film rather than a performance, in a way, for me, one of the most affecting moments is when the light boom comes down and you’re reminded of your body in relationship to the film. I guess what I’m thinking about is the structure and the apparatus of the theater, the black box, or the making of a movie. You’re exposing those hidden elements so that they also become visible agents in the film. I’m not sure exactly what the question is, but it has something to do with how, in order to create the space of this particular energy exchange, you expose these things in the process to give them some kind of life, or agency.

DD For me, there are also important moments that stretch what’s

physically possible, like when the cloud of smoke covering the stage gradually blows away. It’s magical that all of a sudden the cloud onstage gets smaller and smaller and turns into a little wisp that roils through the air before it decides to leave and head somewhere else. I appreciate the ways that these unexpected subjects function materially and physically in the video.

36

LG Right, it’s almost like exposing the magic is the magic. That’s what

lays everything bare, or creates the conditions in which telepathic messages can be more clearly transmitted.

DD Yeah, there has to be a space for these feelings to fall into and

be recognized. This is maybe what I’m talking about when I talk about the void. It’s not a place of absence, but a place of waiting for presence.

So, how did you both come to Oliveros and her work?

PB For this piece?

DD Well, I remember your video work To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn

Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013) is also based on one of Oliveros’s scores. I wonder how she came into your lives?

RL We have both been fans of her work for a long time, because she’s

central to the development of contemporary composition, and experimental electronic music and its presentation. Moreover, her deep-listening practice signaled the invention of a radical approach to queer-feminist politics in music. When our friend, the curator Irene Revell, invited her to London in 2012 to perform her 1971 score “To Valerie Solanas...,” we immediately thought, “We’d like to work with this score!” Watching informal video documentation of this performance, we realized that we very much liked hearing the music, though it didn’t work for us on a visual level. The image felt like a distraction from the music. So we challenged ourselves to figure out how we possibly could transform the score into a visual piece.

PB For Telepathic Improvisation, we made slight modifications to Oliveros’s

score. Instead of having the audience send tones to musicians with instruments, we wanted the audience to send all manner of actions, and to direct their thoughts to the performers or any other elements onstage. The theater lights, for example, each produced very different electronic sounds and tones. We loved the idea that they’d become instruments. We quickly realized that it would be interesting to treat all the elements on stage as instruments: the smoke machine, the

37

performers, Ginger’s guitar, the motorized props. They all have audio and visual components.

DD You’ve really set yourselves up with a great challenge in choosing

Telepathic Improvisation as something to give visual form. It’s as though you’re exploring the extra-visual!

PB We definitely approached it with a sense of humor.

LG: Well, with the installation, as it relates to all of these different

elements you see in the film—the idea of a stage as almost a futile or inaccessible object also repositions or repurposes the stage, because in this particular configuration it really serves to alter the physical space and to function as a surface. What I think is also achieved is that it emanates light. In the course of watching the film, the object itself, which is so simple, completely changes in the course of 20 minutes. It’s like repurposing that object is connected to how the actors and agents and objects function in the film itself. The stage performs similarly.

RL I like to think of it as an extension of the film.

LG Yes. RL The large constructed box in the gallery that we project the film onto

relates to the remote-controlled boxes that move around the stage.

Perhaps you expect this box to begin moving as well, or that the performers might appear in the gallery. Because of its physical layout, when new visitors walk around the box and appear in your line of sight, it could seem like they’re new performers entering the space.

LG Right, and there is a sense that the scripted element of the entire

space begins the moment you walk in the door, almost like you’re entering backstage and going through somewhat of an event while passing your works Wig Piece and h ear er, which unfolds further as you see the first works after sneaking in the back door. I haven’t experienced it that many times yet, but already I feel the difference

38

in how the silence versus the sound that you associate with the microphone work will change depending on how and when you enter and depart. What sound you initially hear from the film changes, and the absence of the voice is very crucial to this work. But then it’s going to have other lives, too.

DD Yeah, when there are voices in the space, it almost seems like the

objects are talking. I got that feeling watching the shadows the microphones on the rotating stage cast in silhouette on the nearby wall. I like how the sculptural objects (the rotating stage and the wig curtain) feel like they could have come out of the video, even if we don’t see them in it. There’s a sense that they’re in conversation with one another, and with the video and the presences in it. The sculptures seem like they’re just waiting for their cues, their moment to take the stage.

PB I like your notion that the different elements in the exhibition space

are waiting for their moment somehow, because it’s a little like that for any stage. It’s waiting for the performers and…

RL The microphones in the first part of the space also work as a kind of

announcement of the piece: You see the microphones, and only hear the film while its images are still hidden behind the white cube/ stage element.

PB That’s really nice because, actually, this is also how we understand

the work. It is also a sound piece.

LG There is an element to the soundtrack—it’s spooky, so you get a

feeling of disembodied voices. They are floating around, and at times can attach themselves to the work, and at times they are hovering above.

DD As an extension of that, Lia, you make me think that the voices could

be hovering as a kind of zeitgeist, that finding a physical form can help them to coalesce. It’s really exciting. And to step back to what I was talking about before, in the Meinhof text, the suggestion of

39

performers, Ginger’s guitar, the motorized props. They all have audio and visual components.

DD You’ve really set yourselves up with a great challenge in choosing

Telepathic Improvisation as something to give visual form. It’s as though you’re exploring the extra-visual!

PB We definitely approached it with a sense of humor.

LG: Well, with the installation, as it relates to all of these different

elements you see in the film—the idea of a stage as almost a futile or inaccessible object also repositions or repurposes the stage, because in this particular configuration it really serves to alter the physical space and to function as a surface. What I think is also achieved is that it emanates light. In the course of watching the film, the object itself, which is so simple, completely changes in the course of 20 minutes. It’s like repurposing that object is connected to how the actors and agents and objects function in the film itself. The stage performs similarly.

RL I like to think of it as an extension of the film.

LG Yes. RL The large constructed box in the gallery that we project the film onto

relates to the remote-controlled boxes that move around the stage.

Perhaps you expect this box to begin moving as well, or that the performers might appear in the gallery. Because of its physical layout, when new visitors walk around the box and appear in your line of sight, it could seem like they’re new performers entering the space.

LG Right, and there is a sense that the scripted element of the entire

space begins the moment you walk in the door, almost like you’re entering backstage and going through somewhat of an event while passing your works Wig Piece and h ear er, which unfolds further as you see the first works after sneaking in the back door. I haven’t experienced it that many times yet, but already I feel the difference

38

in how the silence versus the sound that you associate with the microphone work will change depending on how and when you enter and depart. What sound you initially hear from the film changes, and the absence of the voice is very crucial to this work. But then it’s going to have other lives, too.

DD Yeah, when there are voices in the space, it almost seems like the

objects are talking. I got that feeling watching the shadows the microphones on the rotating stage cast in silhouette on the nearby wall. I like how the sculptural objects (the rotating stage and the wig curtain) feel like they could have come out of the video, even if we don’t see them in it. There’s a sense that they’re in conversation with one another, and with the video and the presences in it. The sculptures seem like they’re just waiting for their cues, their moment to take the stage.

PB I like your notion that the different elements in the exhibition space

are waiting for their moment somehow, because it’s a little like that for any stage. It’s waiting for the performers and…

RL The microphones in the first part of the space also work as a kind of

announcement of the piece: You see the microphones, and only hear the film while its images are still hidden behind the white cube/ stage element.

PB That’s really nice because, actually, this is also how we understand

the work. It is also a sound piece.

LG There is an element to the soundtrack—it’s spooky, so you get a

feeling of disembodied voices. They are floating around, and at times can attach themselves to the work, and at times they are hovering above.

DD As an extension of that, Lia, you make me think that the voices could

be hovering as a kind of zeitgeist, that finding a physical form can help them to coalesce. It’s really exciting. And to step back to what I was talking about before, in the Meinhof text, the suggestion of

39

expropriating the president is a thrilling conversation to having now. It’s as though the idea is floating out there, and through this video it finds purchase. It can take root. I like that the video, a seemingly inanimate object, can put that idea out there. It can transmit ideas, and take them on from viewers.

PB I like this idea of disembodied voices finding a body, like when

MPA connects with the discourse of Ulrike Meinhof, or in some

other moments where these voices are unarticulated. They can exist in the installation with the empty stage and microphones, haunting the space.

RL This also makes me think of an idea about waves that the theorist

Mathias Danbolt shared during an introduction of To Valerie Solanas: that waves that are out there and can be embodied.

PB Radio waves?

RL Yes, radio waves, but also waves like in feminism, where we speak of

first and second waves, for instance. I find this quite beautiful.

LG You have to gather them?

RL Maybe they gather or haunt you. They find you, and you embody

them.

DD Yes! Your notion of “temporal drag” gains new resonance when you

think that Meinhof’s text could have traveled so far through so many years to get here so that someone watching your video today can take the idea, be inspired by it, and walk off and do something else with that energy. It’s exciting.

40

41

expropriating the president is a thrilling conversation to having now. It’s as though the idea is floating out there, and through this video it finds purchase. It can take root. I like that the video, a seemingly inanimate object, can put that idea out there. It can transmit ideas, and take them on from viewers.

PB I like this idea of disembodied voices finding a body, like when

MPA connects with the discourse of Ulrike Meinhof, or in some

other moments where these voices are unarticulated. They can exist in the installation with the empty stage and microphones, haunting the space.

RL This also makes me think of an idea about waves that the theorist

Mathias Danbolt shared during an introduction of To Valerie Solanas: that waves that are out there and can be embodied.

PB Radio waves?

RL Yes, radio waves, but also waves like in feminism, where we speak of

first and second waves, for instance. I find this quite beautiful.

LG You have to gather them?

RL Maybe they gather or haunt you. They find you, and you embody

them.

DD Yes! Your notion of “temporal drag” gains new resonance when you

think that Meinhof’s text could have traveled so far through so many years to get here so that someone watching your video today can take the idea, be inspired by it, and walk off and do something else with that energy. It’s exciting.

40

41

1st Edition © 2017 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

Editor Rose D’Amora

Exhibition Itinerary Walker Art Center June 15–September 10, 2017

Catalogue Coordinator Patricia Restrepo

PARTICIPANT INC

June 3–July 16, 2017 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston September 16, 2017–January 7, 2018

Designer Amanda Thomas Photography Mark Waldhauser, pp. 10, 14; Pablo Gimenez-Zapiola, pp. 9, 11–12, 16–18 ISBN

978-1-933619-68-2 Fonts Anselm Ten, Folio Printer CPY, Houston, Texas Bindery Universal Bindery, San Antonio, Texas Cover Telepathic Improvisation (video still), 2017.

Single-channel HD video: color, sound, 19:27 minutes. All works courtesy the artists, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, and Marcelle Alix. p. 4 Pauline Oliveros and the ♀ Ensemble performing Teach Yourself to Fly from Sonic Meditations, 1970, Rancho Santa Fe, CA, (foreground to the left around: Lin Barron, cello, Lynn Lonidier, cello, Pauline Oliveros, accordion, Joan George, bass clarinet. Center seated foreground to the left around voices: Chris Voigt, Shirley Wong, Bonnie Barnett and Betty Wong). Pauline Oliveros Papers. MSS 102. Mandeville Special Collections Library, Univerisity of California, San Diego. pp. 56–57 Gisela Gamper, Pauline Oliveros in the Dan Harpole Cistern, 1990.

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All works courtesy the artists, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, and Marcelle Alix.

Telepathic Improvisation, 2017 Wood, steel, paint, hardware; singlechannel HD video: color, sound, 19:27 minutes Dimensions variable Film Credits Performance Marwa Arsanios, MPA , Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch Director of photography Bernadette Paassen Color correction Matthias Behrens (Waveline) Team at EMPAC Producer Victoria Brooks Project manager Ian Hamelin Lighting director Alena Samoray Sound Stephen McLaughlin, Jeff Svatek Robotic-platform development and fabrication Eric Ameres DIT and video Eric Brucker, Mick Bello, Ryan Jenkins Director of stage technologies Geoff Abbas Production technicians Carl Lewandowski, Mike Wells Wig piece (whose body? – whose thoughts?), 2017 Synthetic hair, felt, adhesive, C-stands, and pole 80 ¼ × 72 inches he ear r, 2017 Microphones, microphone stands, spotlights, C-stands, wood, paint, mechanical turntable, and hardware Dimensions variable

53

All works courtesy the artists, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, and Marcelle Alix.

Telepathic Improvisation, 2017 Wood, steel, paint, hardware; singlechannel HD video: color, sound, 19:27 minutes Dimensions variable Film Credits Performance Marwa Arsanios, MPA , Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch Director of photography Bernadette Paassen Color correction Matthias Behrens (Waveline) Team at EMPAC Producer Victoria Brooks Project manager Ian Hamelin Lighting director Alena Samoray Sound Stephen McLaughlin, Jeff Svatek Robotic-platform development and fabrication Eric Ameres DIT and video Eric Brucker, Mick Bello, Ryan Jenkins Director of stage technologies Geoff Abbas Production technicians Carl Lewandowski, Mike Wells Wig piece (whose body? – whose thoughts?), 2017 Synthetic hair, felt, adhesive, C-stands, and pole 80 ¼ × 72 inches he ear r, 2017 Microphones, microphone stands, spotlights, C-stands, wood, paint, mechanical turntable, and hardware Dimensions variable

53

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz are based in Berlin, Germany and have been working together since 2007. Their staged films and film installations have been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Zürich in Switzerland; the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria (both 2015); the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany; and the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (both 2013). Recent titles in their filmography include Silent (2016); I Want (2015); To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, In Recognition of their Desperation (2103); and Toxic (2012).

Boudry / Lorenz’s films have screened at the Berlinale in Berlin, Germany (2015); the Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva, Switzerland (2015); the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York (2014); and Nottingham Contemporary in the UK (2015).

Based in upstate New York, Victoria Brooks is a producer and curator of time-based visual art at EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-chair of the Contemporary Curatorial Workshop at the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art. She has commissioned and produced new works in the expanded field of moving image and performance with artists including Ephraim Asili, Charles Atlas, Tarek Atoui, Rosa Barba, Patricia L Boyd, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, Laure Prouvost, Lucy Raven, Martine Syms, and Wu Tsang, among others.

Dean Daderko is the curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), where he has previously presented projects with Jérôme Bel, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Joan Jonas, Matt Keegan, Klara Lidén, MPA, Gina Pane, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Kay Rosen, Wu Tsang and Fred Moten, and Haegue

54

Yang. Daderko’s writing has appeared in numerous CAMH exhibition catalogues, in Mousse and Art in America, and in publications produced by the Studio Museum in Harlem and The Americas’ Society.

In 2001, Lia Gangitano founded

PARTICIPANT INC , a not-for-profit art

space that has presented exhibitions

by Charles Atlas, Michel Auder, Kathe Burkhart, Renée Green, Greer Lankton, and Virgil Marti, among others. As curator at Thread Waxing Space, New York, the exhibitions, screenings, and performances she presented include Spectacular Optical (1998); Luther Price: Imitation of Life (1999); Børre Sæthre: Module for Mood (2000); and Sigalit Landau (2001).

Gangitano is the editor of Dead Flowers (2010) and the forthcoming anthology Alternative to What? Thread Waxing Space and the 90s. She is a contributor to the publications Renée Green, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, Lovett/ Codagnone, and to Whitney Biennial catalogues in 2006 and 2012. She currently teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Mason Leaver-Yap works with artists to produce texts, exhibitions, and events. They recently worked with Marwa Arsanios, Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, Lizzie Borden, CAConrad, Jamie Crewe, Beatrice Gibson, Renée Green, Evan Ifekoya, Lucy McKenzie and Atelier EB, Eileen Myles, Charlotte Prodger, James Richards, and Leslie Thornton.

André Lepecki is Professor and Chair in Performance Studies at New York University. He is the editor of several anthologies on dance and performance theory including Of the Presence of the Body (2004) and Dance (2012). As an independent performance curator, he has created projects for the Haus

der Kunst Munich, Hayward Gallery, HKW-Berlin, MoMA Warsaw, and the Sydney Biennial, among others.

He is the author of Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (2006) (translated into German as Operation Tanz), and Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (2016). In 2008 he received an AICA award for Best Performance for co-curating and directing the authorized 2006 redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, a commission by Haus der Kunst Munich, which was later presented at PERFORMA 07.

As an independent curator, Alhena Katsof has organized numerous exhibitions and performances, including Towards the Unknown, the first traveling exhibition of drawings by the artist and master musician Yusuf Lateef, which premiered at White Columns in New York in 2014. In her role as the Director of Strategy and Protocol with the performance research group Public Movement, Katsof co-authored the book Solution 263: Double Agent (Sternberg Press, 2015) and she is a contributing author to The Artist As Curator: An Anthology, edited by Elena Filipovic (Mousse Publishing, 2017).

Katsof is a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Acknowledgments The artists and contributors to this catalogue extend their thanks to the following individuals for their support and contributions: Geoff Abbas, Eric Ameres, Bill Arning and Mark McCray, Marwa Arsanios, Rashad Becker, Matthias Behrens and Waveline, Mike Bello, Wenzel Bilger, Franklin Boue, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Laura Drey Brown, Eric Brucker, T De Long, Elena Filipovic, Glen Fogel, Gisela Gamper, Tomie Hahn, Ian Hamelin, Kerry Inman and Denby Auble, Ione, Ryan Jenkins, Gabrielle Jensen, Ronald Jones, David Kirshoff, Harry Kleeman, Carl Lewandowski, Marley Lott, Stephen McLaughlin, Jeffrey Means, Sheryl Mousley, MPA, Bernadette Paassen, Patricia Restrepo, Alena Samoray, Jeff Shore, Sara Stevenson, Jeff Svatek, Amanda Thomas, and Mike Wells.

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Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz are based in Berlin, Germany and have been working together since 2007. Their staged films and film installations have been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Zürich in Switzerland; the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria (both 2015); the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany; and the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (both 2013). Recent titles in their filmography include Silent (2016); I Want (2015); To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, In Recognition of their Desperation (2103); and Toxic (2012).

Boudry / Lorenz’s films have screened at the Berlinale in Berlin, Germany (2015); the Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva, Switzerland (2015); the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York (2014); and Nottingham Contemporary in the UK (2015).

Based in upstate New York, Victoria Brooks is a producer and curator of time-based visual art at EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-chair of the Contemporary Curatorial Workshop at the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art. She has commissioned and produced new works in the expanded field of moving image and performance with artists including Ephraim Asili, Charles Atlas, Tarek Atoui, Rosa Barba, Patricia L Boyd, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, Laure Prouvost, Lucy Raven, Martine Syms, and Wu Tsang, among others.

Dean Daderko is the curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), where he has previously presented projects with Jérôme Bel, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Joan Jonas, Matt Keegan, Klara Lidén, MPA, Gina Pane, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Kay Rosen, Wu Tsang and Fred Moten, and Haegue

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Yang. Daderko’s writing has appeared in numerous CAMH exhibition catalogues, in Mousse and Art in America, and in publications produced by the Studio Museum in Harlem and The Americas’ Society.

In 2001, Lia Gangitano founded

PARTICIPANT INC , a not-for-profit art

space that has presented exhibitions

by Charles Atlas, Michel Auder, Kathe Burkhart, Renée Green, Greer Lankton, and Virgil Marti, among others. As curator at Thread Waxing Space, New York, the exhibitions, screenings, and performances she presented include Spectacular Optical (1998); Luther Price: Imitation of Life (1999); Børre Sæthre: Module for Mood (2000); and Sigalit Landau (2001).

Gangitano is the editor of Dead Flowers (2010) and the forthcoming anthology Alternative to What? Thread Waxing Space and the 90s. She is a contributor to the publications Renée Green, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, Lovett/ Codagnone, and to Whitney Biennial catalogues in 2006 and 2012. She currently teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Mason Leaver-Yap works with artists to produce texts, exhibitions, and events. They recently worked with Marwa Arsanios, Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, Lizzie Borden, CAConrad, Jamie Crewe, Beatrice Gibson, Renée Green, Evan Ifekoya, Lucy McKenzie and Atelier EB, Eileen Myles, Charlotte Prodger, James Richards, and Leslie Thornton.

André Lepecki is Professor and Chair in Performance Studies at New York University. He is the editor of several anthologies on dance and performance theory including Of the Presence of the Body (2004) and Dance (2012). As an independent performance curator, he has created projects for the Haus

der Kunst Munich, Hayward Gallery, HKW-Berlin, MoMA Warsaw, and the Sydney Biennial, among others.

He is the author of Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (2006) (translated into German as Operation Tanz), and Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (2016). In 2008 he received an AICA award for Best Performance for co-curating and directing the authorized 2006 redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, a commission by Haus der Kunst Munich, which was later presented at PERFORMA 07.

As an independent curator, Alhena Katsof has organized numerous exhibitions and performances, including Towards the Unknown, the first traveling exhibition of drawings by the artist and master musician Yusuf Lateef, which premiered at White Columns in New York in 2014. In her role as the Director of Strategy and Protocol with the performance research group Public Movement, Katsof co-authored the book Solution 263: Double Agent (Sternberg Press, 2015) and she is a contributing author to The Artist As Curator: An Anthology, edited by Elena Filipovic (Mousse Publishing, 2017).

Katsof is a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Acknowledgments The artists and contributors to this catalogue extend their thanks to the following individuals for their support and contributions: Geoff Abbas, Eric Ameres, Bill Arning and Mark McCray, Marwa Arsanios, Rashad Becker, Matthias Behrens and Waveline, Mike Bello, Wenzel Bilger, Franklin Boue, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Laura Drey Brown, Eric Brucker, T De Long, Elena Filipovic, Glen Fogel, Gisela Gamper, Tomie Hahn, Ian Hamelin, Kerry Inman and Denby Auble, Ione, Ryan Jenkins, Gabrielle Jensen, Ronald Jones, David Kirshoff, Harry Kleeman, Carl Lewandowski, Marley Lott, Stephen McLaughlin, Jeffrey Means, Sheryl Mousley, MPA, Bernadette Paassen, Patricia Restrepo, Alena Samoray, Jeff Shore, Sara Stevenson, Jeff Svatek, Amanda Thomas, and Mike Wells.

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This project is produced in partnership with the Goethe- Institut New York, and generously supported by the Bentson Foundation, Service des affaires culturelles - Canton de Vaud, and Pro Helvetia.

Support for CAMH is generously provided by the Museum’s Board of Trustees and their families: Allison and David Ayers, Candace Baggett and Ron Restrepo, Vera and Andy Baker, James M. Bell, Jr., Jereann Chaney, Estela and David A. Cockrell, Ruth Dreessen and Tom Van Laan, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Dan and Eleanor Gilbane, Blakely and Trey Griggs, Melissa and Albert J. Grobmyer IV, Catherine Baen Hennessy and Matt Hennessy, Leslie and Mark Hull, Louise Jamail, Dillon Kyle and Sam Lasseter, Erica and Benjy Levit, Lucinda and Javier Loya, Catherine and George Masterson, Libbie Masterson, Greg McCord, Mac and Karen McManus, Jack and Anne Moriniere, Cabrina and Steven Owsley, Howard and Beverly Robinson, Andrew and Robin Schirrmeister, Nicholas and Kelly Silvers, Margaret Vaughan Cox and Jonathan Cox, David P. and Marion Young, and Elizabeth and Barry Young.

Additional funding for CAMH’S exhibitions, programming, and operations is provided by its dedicated patrons and donors: A Fare Extraordinaire, Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, Art Market Productions, Mary and Marcel Barone, Bergner and Johnson Design, City of Houston through the Houston Museum District Association, George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation, Houston Endowment, Jackson and Company, James M. Collins Foundation, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Mr. and Mrs. I.H. Kempner III, KPMG, LLP, Lehmann Maupin, Leticia Loya, M.D. Anderson Foundation, Mary Kathryn

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Lynch Kurtz Charitable Lead Trust, Elisabeth McCabe, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Fayez Sarofim, Ms. Louisa Stude Sarofim, Leigh and Reggie Smith, Susan Vaughan Foundation, Targa Resources, Inc., Union Pacific Foundation, The Wortham Foundation, Inc., and Michael Zilkha.

Chair Jereann Chaney

Treasurer Vera Baker

President Dillon Kyle

Secretary Elizabeth Young

Allison Ayers Candace Baggett James Bell Estella Cockrell Ruth Dreessen Barbara Gamson Dan Gilbane Blakely Griggs Melissa Kepke Grobmyer Cat Baen Hennessy Leslie Ballard Hull Louise Jamail

Director Bill Arning

Curator Dean Daderko

Accounting Assistant Alan Aguilar

Curatorial Administrative Assistant Laura Dickey

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 2017–2018 Board of Trustees

Vice President Andrew Schirrmeister III

Exhibition catalogues and additional programming are made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston.

CAMH’S operations are made possible in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

CAMH also thanks its artist benefactors for their support, including Chris Beckman, Michael Bise, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Mel Chin, Julia Dault, James Drake, Mark Flood, Jeffrey Gibson, Wayne Gilbert, Roberta Harris, Camille Henrot, Oliver Herring, Joan Jonas, David Kelley, Julian Lorber, Marilyn Minter, Nic Nicosia, McKay Otto, Joyce Pensato, Gavin Perry, Susie Rosmarin, Jacolby Satterwhite, Shinique Smith, John Sparagana, Mary Weatherford, Carrie Mae Weems, Haegue Yang, and Brenna Youngblood.

United is the Official Airline of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

CAMH Staff

Tour Programs Coordinator Jessie Anderson Registrar Tim Barkley Assistant Gallery Supervisor Quincy Berry Communications Assistant Casey Betts Deputy Director Christina Brungardt Education and Public Programs Director Felice Cleveland Director of Development Libby Conine

Gallery Supervisor Kenya Evans Museum Shop Assistant Manager Danaka Gordon Grants and Gifts Coordinator Ara Griffith Controller Monica Hoffman

Erica Levit Lucinda Loya Catherine Masterson Libbie Masterson Greg McCord Mac McManus Jack Moriniere Cabrina Owsley Howard Robinson Nick Silvers Margaret Vaughan David P. Young

Director of Retail Operations Sue Pruden Assistant Director of Facilities and Risk Management Mike Reed Exhibitions Manager and Assistant Curator Patricia Restrepo Head Preparator Jeff Shore Teen Council Coordinator Michael Simmonds

Videographer Ronald Jones

Director of Communications and Marketing Kent Michael Smith

Special Events and Sponsorship Coordinator Beth Peré

Gift Processing and Development Coordinator Erin Thigpen

Assistant to the Director Shane Platt

Graphic Designer Amanda Thomas

59

This project is produced in partnership with the Goethe- Institut New York, and generously supported by the Bentson Foundation, Service des affaires culturelles - Canton de Vaud, and Pro Helvetia.

Support for CAMH is generously provided by the Museum’s Board of Trustees and their families: Allison and David Ayers, Candace Baggett and Ron Restrepo, Vera and Andy Baker, James M. Bell, Jr., Jereann Chaney, Estela and David A. Cockrell, Ruth Dreessen and Tom Van Laan, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Dan and Eleanor Gilbane, Blakely and Trey Griggs, Melissa and Albert J. Grobmyer IV, Catherine Baen Hennessy and Matt Hennessy, Leslie and Mark Hull, Louise Jamail, Dillon Kyle and Sam Lasseter, Erica and Benjy Levit, Lucinda and Javier Loya, Catherine and George Masterson, Libbie Masterson, Greg McCord, Mac and Karen McManus, Jack and Anne Moriniere, Cabrina and Steven Owsley, Howard and Beverly Robinson, Andrew and Robin Schirrmeister, Nicholas and Kelly Silvers, Margaret Vaughan Cox and Jonathan Cox, David P. and Marion Young, and Elizabeth and Barry Young.

Additional funding for CAMH’S exhibitions, programming, and operations is provided by its dedicated patrons and donors: A Fare Extraordinaire, Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, Art Market Productions, Mary and Marcel Barone, Bergner and Johnson Design, City of Houston through the Houston Museum District Association, George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation, Houston Endowment, Jackson and Company, James M. Collins Foundation, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Mr. and Mrs. I.H. Kempner III, KPMG, LLP, Lehmann Maupin, Leticia Loya, M.D. Anderson Foundation, Mary Kathryn

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Lynch Kurtz Charitable Lead Trust, Elisabeth McCabe, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Fayez Sarofim, Ms. Louisa Stude Sarofim, Leigh and Reggie Smith, Susan Vaughan Foundation, Targa Resources, Inc., Union Pacific Foundation, The Wortham Foundation, Inc., and Michael Zilkha.

Chair Jereann Chaney

Treasurer Vera Baker

President Dillon Kyle

Secretary Elizabeth Young

Allison Ayers Candace Baggett James Bell Estella Cockrell Ruth Dreessen Barbara Gamson Dan Gilbane Blakely Griggs Melissa Kepke Grobmyer Cat Baen Hennessy Leslie Ballard Hull Louise Jamail

Director Bill Arning

Curator Dean Daderko

Accounting Assistant Alan Aguilar

Curatorial Administrative Assistant Laura Dickey

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 2017–2018 Board of Trustees

Vice President Andrew Schirrmeister III

Exhibition catalogues and additional programming are made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston.

CAMH’S operations are made possible in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

CAMH also thanks its artist benefactors for their support, including Chris Beckman, Michael Bise, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Mel Chin, Julia Dault, James Drake, Mark Flood, Jeffrey Gibson, Wayne Gilbert, Roberta Harris, Camille Henrot, Oliver Herring, Joan Jonas, David Kelley, Julian Lorber, Marilyn Minter, Nic Nicosia, McKay Otto, Joyce Pensato, Gavin Perry, Susie Rosmarin, Jacolby Satterwhite, Shinique Smith, John Sparagana, Mary Weatherford, Carrie Mae Weems, Haegue Yang, and Brenna Youngblood.

United is the Official Airline of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

CAMH Staff

Tour Programs Coordinator Jessie Anderson Registrar Tim Barkley Assistant Gallery Supervisor Quincy Berry Communications Assistant Casey Betts Deputy Director Christina Brungardt Education and Public Programs Director Felice Cleveland Director of Development Libby Conine

Gallery Supervisor Kenya Evans Museum Shop Assistant Manager Danaka Gordon Grants and Gifts Coordinator Ara Griffith Controller Monica Hoffman

Erica Levit Lucinda Loya Catherine Masterson Libbie Masterson Greg McCord Mac McManus Jack Moriniere Cabrina Owsley Howard Robinson Nick Silvers Margaret Vaughan David P. Young

Director of Retail Operations Sue Pruden Assistant Director of Facilities and Risk Management Mike Reed Exhibitions Manager and Assistant Curator Patricia Restrepo Head Preparator Jeff Shore Teen Council Coordinator Michael Simmonds

Videographer Ronald Jones

Director of Communications and Marketing Kent Michael Smith

Special Events and Sponsorship Coordinator Beth Peré

Gift Processing and Development Coordinator Erin Thigpen

Assistant to the Director Shane Platt

Graphic Designer Amanda Thomas

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1st Edition © 2017 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

Editor Rose D’Amora

Exhibition Itinerary Walker Art Center June 15–September 10, 2017

Catalogue Coordinator Patricia Restrepo

PARTICIPANT INC

June 3–July 16, 2017 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston September 16, 2017–January 7, 2018

Designer Amanda Thomas Photography Mark Waldhauser, pp. 10, 14; Pablo Gimenez-Zapiola, pp. 9, 11–12, 16–18 ISBN

978-1-933619-68-2 Fonts Anselm Ten, Folio Printer CPY, Houston, Texas Bindery Universal Bindery, San Antonio, Texas Cover Telepathic Improvisation (video still), 2017.

Single-channel HD video: color, sound, 19:27 minutes. All works courtesy the artists, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, and Marcelle Alix. p. 4 Pauline Oliveros and the ♀ Ensemble performing Teach Yourself to Fly from Sonic Meditations, 1970, Rancho Santa Fe, CA, (foreground to the left around: Lin Barron, cello, Lynn Lonidier, cello, Pauline Oliveros, accordion, Joan George, bass clarinet. Center seated foreground to the left around voices: Chris Voigt, Shirley Wong, Bonnie Barnett and Betty Wong). Pauline Oliveros Papers. MSS 102. Mandeville Special Collections Library, Univerisity of California, San Diego. pp. 56–57 Gisela Gamper, Pauline Oliveros in the Dan Harpole Cistern, 1990.

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Contemporary Arts Museum Houston