"SIGNS FOR THE DEAF WERE GETTING MORE OBSCURE"

PROGRAM NOTES

CONTAINMENT

In its Classical Greek meaning, theoria referred to a group of individuals (theoros) who had the function to “see and tell” attest to the occurrence of some event, to witness its happenstance. The spectators came to the theater worried about everyday problems and through the medium of the chorus; the spectators could feel the required emotions. If we follow a trajectory from (Greek) tragedy, (Roman) epistle, (Renaissance) sonnet, we find that the contemporary era has '(re)-invented' testimony as its new literature. Testimony is employed as a privileged mode of communication-transmission and as bearing witness to a crisis or trauma.

SIMULATION

In this volume, SIGNS FOR THE DEAF WERE GETTING MORE OBSCURE my use of the 'testimonial artwork' functions in the capacity of witness to something cognitively dissonant without offering a completed statement or account of events performing a form of theoria. The structure or situations that are created function as a 'container' for the authored system of content exploration. The artwork does not attempt to transmit something pure in itself as a news report; but something from the very life of the narrator and from that life borrows it back imprinting both the narrator's and the viewer(s) sign in the story. Discoveries are made within this 'framework' and it is in these moments that the works develops. The realities that form themselves are tangible as a heuristic manner of organization, which regards the irregularities of the environment as a set of opportunities around which the work takes shape and adjusts its own identity.

RECOGNITION

An examination of ‘testimony’ as subject and medium of transmission informs the conceptual possibilities and experiential specificity of the work. ‘Testimony' as subject is here considered as a vow to tell or promise, as an act composed of bits and pieces of memory, as occurrences not settled into any complete understanding or remembrance of past events. ‘Testimony’ as medium of transmission is performed as a reminiscent series of snapshots taken at specific intersections of material, place, and time. The events are retroactively rediscovered and understood by visible marks or indications assembled as a “testimony of sorts” addressed to others from the stance of the witness.

IDENTIFICATION

The conscience of the project lay not in the production of specific artifacts but rather in the potential for the making of meaning constructed from a translation of the media elements and processes into a 'recombinant' language. The interaction of the artifacts of the media format and the ‘techniques of the observer’ in a specific venue characterize the performance of the work. The effective design of the work acts as a 'trajectory of discovery', a path of exploration through the work by using visual and interactive cues in an attempt to build a 'live residue' in the mind of the viewer. This strategy is the performance of critique and mythology at the same time, bringing into relationship experiences with three levels of discourse: personal (autobiographical), popular (community stories, oral history, and popular culture), and expert (technological disciplines of knowledge).