Dossier: Cross-Media Slowness

For this dossier, we selected six pieces that elaborate upon artistic practice and the relationality of slowness. We begin with two considerations of measurement and time that call into question our anthropocentric views, and offer new avenues for exhibitions, in terms of the "here" and "now" of mediation. In "Phase to Phase: On Oceanic Oscillations, Measurements, Predictions, and Chronographs," DAVID GAUTHIER offers a reading of two of his recent sound art and video installations. In exploring the operations of instrumentation used to measure and predict tide and wave oscillations, his work questions both the move from measurements to predictions as well as what could be termed the perspectives of the metrological machines themselves. HANS FIDOM's "Coping with Cage: On ORGAN²/ASLSP, Listening, and Music-Making" also engages in a consideration of slowness in terms of machinic possibilities. In exploring just how fast or slow the piece could—and should—be played, what comes to the fore is that rather than having an answer to "how to cope with Cage," we should always engage with the question itself.

The dossier continues with the documentation of two performances from the ASAP/Amsterdam symposium. Adding to clocked time the presence of the past and a multiplicity of timescales, the performances work to further elucidate the layeredness of slowness. In "SCORE for Wavelength. An Homage to Michael Snow," Alexandra Karl offers a condensation of a recording of Snow's forty-five-minute Wavelength to twenty minutes, during which time she presented critiques of his film and technique, alongside quotations from interviews and audience reactions. In effect, Karl's performance served both to speed up a very slow zoom and to slow down its mediation—both by her in the present and by interviews, reviews, and her students in the past. Greatly expanding the timescales presented, Jeremiah Day's "The chair remains empty / But the place is set," with accompaniment by Bart de Kroon, invited the audience to ponder the political connections between disparate times and places, including Istanbul during the Gezi protests, Kant's Berlin versus Arendt's Berlin, and the first town hall meetings in New England in the seventeenth century. While his rhythmic repetitions of movements, sounds, and slideshow images cannot be directly experienced in the transcript as presented herein, his way of choreographing through language is evident, and his words and stills forcefully call to mind the clocking of them all.

The final two dossier pieces further speak to how artistic intervention can effectively mediate the experience of space and time. In "Hasten Slowly: On the Perception of Time and Space in Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta," Ekaterina Kochetkova offers Finlay's landscape architecture as a productive engagement with slowness. She explores the cross-historical dimension that Finlay sought to engender in his garden near Edinburgh by having his visitors move back and forth between antiquity, the World Wars, and the present day through a demarcation of tiny details, framing vistas and other points for pause, and careful placement of plaques with Latin phrases, cited poetry, and wordplay. The experience of the walk Kochetkova relays thus becomes more than a meditative experience of calm and renewal—it makes clear Finlay's, and perhaps our own, preoccupation with speed and mediation. Maria Fusco's "Then speech is not an impediment, a sort of brake on the wheel of intellect but like a second wheel running parallel with it on the same axle," also offers an engagement with the mediation of time through artistic intervention. In her excerpt from her unpublished novella, Sailor, she not only develops a practice of slowing down her writing process by scoring the Belfast dialect but also, in so doing, forces the reader to slow down the reading process in order to decipher, pronounce, and thereby hear the dialect. Her delocalizing of dialect—from the aural to the textual, as well as from the writer to the nonlocal reader—raises further questions of labor, patience, and intent.

—Katja Kwastek and Erin La Cour