Keke, I’m bummed because I wrote to you first, earlier, and like your work, like the body you project, it was there, and then disappeared into the world of digital memory. Here is what I remember, a re-membering of my previous thoughts: The keyboard, as a landscape. Hands hovering over a keyboard. Enter, delete, return, shift: the mundane maneuvers of computing, but suddenly existential philosophical ideas about time and motion. Imagining your body without picturing it, hovering, clacking, pressing, on the keyboard. Your breath and rhythms, implied by the images. The present and also past- legacy. Time collapsed, carrying the past into the present. The choreography of the page. Honoring culture and living with complex identities. The keyboard and the page, telling us about the body that is invisible but palpably present.
Keke,
I wish you could hear my screenreader performing this choreography! As I’m sure you know, a screenreader reads everything that’s put before it. And while the voice is mechanical, it is faithful to every keystroke. In the sections where you had repetitions of symbols: [][][][] etc. it spoke with such a rhythm, I felt movement happening. I gather that you create a visual pattern on the page, a kind of concrete poem,but for someone who reads with her ears, you also made a compelling and mysterious aural incantation.
When I look at this work and ask what it shows me about the body, I think it teaches me that the body is ancestral communal and community. It points up the distinctions between our personal bodies at our collective bodies. I feel called upon to make such an examination in my own life and my own practice. What do I know about my body in relationship to my culture and my history and indeed, to others? I feel also a strong pull towards the body as a technological phenomenon. not in the usual way — disability technologies or assistive devices more in a way in which the technology itself is our body embodying and in itself embodied.I feel positioned between two worlds when I look at this one of which asked me to straddle a post that is unknown to me and one of which that asked me to reach into a future that is equally unknown to me. In response to that I feel in my own body a deep call to go to the studio and try and realize the text in movement. I feel a deep slowing in myself, a sensing registering the nature of complex inquiry.
It would be interesting to explore the assumptions of bodily symmetry built into the design of a keyboard. I can imagine movements and haptic encounters with parts of the body not intended to interact with the keyboard, perhaps toes or lips or tongues or even less fine-grained haptic encounters with something like shoulders or knees.
The locus of “body” becomes the page and also can be shaped like a body. Ancestral knowledge and the phenomenon of us “stumbling upon it” (even that phrase – disabled led wandering/wonderment/calling?) that speaks to me as what’s already on the body is already on the body. What struck me most was the transference of written imagery to my brain and how my body remembered, divined, or interpreted the movement. A kind of telepathy – what the body knows? Traveling: never ceasing and the fluids inside us, the tatu on the skin, are keeping us intact, perhaps.
I keep lingering over the line “I, too, have home keys…” This piece is visually stunning and full of movement. I didn’t realize what was possible with our keyboards!
I appreciate the journey of discovering movement in inanimate objects, especially ones that require a response/ reaction from a body that can or cannot be in motion. One thing that really stood out for me was the connection with culture that was weaved into technology. Honestly, Im not sure I understand it so I would like to learn more from Pelenakeke’s perspective. Im curious and my imagination peaks about the spaces in between the strikes. What happens there? I’d also like to learn more about crip time.
Keke, I’m bummed because I wrote to you first, earlier, and like your work, like the body you project, it was there, and then disappeared into the world of digital memory. Here is what I remember, a re-membering of my previous thoughts: The keyboard, as a landscape. Hands hovering over a keyboard. Enter, delete, return, shift: the mundane maneuvers of computing, but suddenly existential philosophical ideas about time and motion. Imagining your body without picturing it, hovering, clacking, pressing, on the keyboard. Your breath and rhythms, implied by the images. The present and also past- legacy. Time collapsed, carrying the past into the present. The choreography of the page. Honoring culture and living with complex identities. The keyboard and the page, telling us about the body that is invisible but palpably present.
Keke,
I wish you could hear my screenreader performing this choreography! As I’m sure you know, a screenreader reads everything that’s put before it. And while the voice is mechanical, it is faithful to every keystroke. In the sections where you had repetitions of symbols: [][][][] etc. it spoke with such a rhythm, I felt movement happening. I gather that you create a visual pattern on the page, a kind of concrete poem,but for someone who reads with her ears, you also made a compelling and mysterious aural incantation.
When I look at this work and ask what it shows me about the body, I think it teaches me that the body is ancestral communal and community. It points up the distinctions between our personal bodies at our collective bodies. I feel called upon to make such an examination in my own life and my own practice. What do I know about my body in relationship to my culture and my history and indeed, to others? I feel also a strong pull towards the body as a technological phenomenon. not in the usual way — disability technologies or assistive devices more in a way in which the technology itself is our body embodying and in itself embodied.I feel positioned between two worlds when I look at this one of which asked me to straddle a post that is unknown to me and one of which that asked me to reach into a future that is equally unknown to me. In response to that I feel in my own body a deep call to go to the studio and try and realize the text in movement. I feel a deep slowing in myself, a sensing registering the nature of complex inquiry.
It would be interesting to explore the assumptions of bodily symmetry built into the design of a keyboard. I can imagine movements and haptic encounters with parts of the body not intended to interact with the keyboard, perhaps toes or lips or tongues or even less fine-grained haptic encounters with something like shoulders or knees.
The locus of “body” becomes the page and also can be shaped like a body. Ancestral knowledge and the phenomenon of us “stumbling upon it” (even that phrase – disabled led wandering/wonderment/calling?) that speaks to me as what’s already on the body is already on the body. What struck me most was the transference of written imagery to my brain and how my body remembered, divined, or interpreted the movement. A kind of telepathy – what the body knows? Traveling: never ceasing and the fluids inside us, the tatu on the skin, are keeping us intact, perhaps.
I keep lingering over the line “I, too, have home keys…” This piece is visually stunning and full of movement. I didn’t realize what was possible with our keyboards!
I appreciate the journey of discovering movement in inanimate objects, especially ones that require a response/ reaction from a body that can or cannot be in motion. One thing that really stood out for me was the connection with culture that was weaved into technology. Honestly, Im not sure I understand it so I would like to learn more from Pelenakeke’s perspective. Im curious and my imagination peaks about the spaces in between the strikes. What happens there? I’d also like to learn more about crip time.