I Am Sitting in a Room

curioArt, Language, Sound

After Alvin Lucifer’s famous work:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the written letters of my handwriting and I am going to write over the letters again and again until the inherent strokes of the letters reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my handwriting, with perhaps the exception of abstract word shape, is destroyed. What you will see, then, are the naturally imbued shapes of the letters articulated by handwriting. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my handwriting might have.

The idea would be to replicate his theme and transfer it to the realm of writing and handwriting, capturing the performance on video and in the final outcome of the repeated iterations of writing out the passage. His work explores minimalism and repetition with displacement; displacing the audio into the space over and over until we are left with only the resonant sounds of the room. In the last line of his piece, he hints at another reason behind his monologue and the process he puts it through. He refers to his own stuttering speech, and how by the end of the iterations, any semblance of speech is merged beyond recognition with the reflections of sound within the room aside from echoes of rhythm and canter.