DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Johan Gottschalk Wallerious: Swedish chemist, mineralogist
Someone said: singer, poet, desire, child, brute, amateur
Else: Else, historical, machinic
Coltrane: philosopher
I Am (in Brooklyn, (in Berlin: a body, a vector in space, a given place
Siri: Siri
Heriberto Yepez: Heriberto Yepez
Charlotte Wolff: scientist, radical sexologist, chirologist, philosopher, wearer of men’s clothes, psychologist of gesture, lesbian identified
Via Alev Ersan: via the writer Alev Ersan, on Facebook
Public Space: Public Space
Sheena Easton: Sheena Easton
It: It
June Jordan: June Jordan
Fassbinder: Fassbinder
Minor Appearances: Orgy, Aristotle
ACT I
Johan Gottschalk Wallerious:
Else requires someone else
Someone said, to become someone else
Requires someone else
Electrically, unmeasured
Other-ness, someone said
An Allotrope of Else
Someone said, A Loosening Ampersand
Throbbing with amperes
& a bromo blue
Citi sign, someone said
Electrically To Become Someone
Else requires some structured bonds
Someone said, more & more
In a less fixed phosphorous
Someone said, Ore.
Else:
Desiring machines
some other means.
Someone said:
Sheena Easton
for example. She
Sheena Easton
is a machine
Sheena Easton
desiring some
other means.
Bromo blue.
Watermelon red.
Wallerious serious.
I love that color.
Else:
If it moves
it’s alive.
If it’s alive
this time
but not
moving it’s
mourning.
If it’s alive
this time
and refusing
to mourn
or move it’s
probably
this time
watching
Netflix &
performing
adorability.
Someone said:
Until branded
as vernacular
speech acts, the band
in me
in every conversation
in them, yeah yeah yeah
a long-fingered tool
for climbing is, until branded
Elsewhere, a hand since
from wing or paw
whose thumbing
is the first machine,
whose thumbing
is this asks the / the
second machine
Else:
repeat the sentence
increasingly brutal
movement to dethrall.
Else’s hard intel stare.
Core. Else’s black substrate.
Core. Else under a chair lost.
Manufactured in
other country it
no longer exists
save for the objects
made in said
other country.
Someone said:
Old English thūma; related to Old Saxon
thūma, Old High German thūmo,
Old Norse thumall, thumb of a glove
from Latin tumēre, to swell.
Orgy:
Into armpit
or palm.
Wallerious:
Yeah yeah yeah
As if homophony
Wasn’t the easiest
Hard drive. More
materially, Africa.
“The granary of Empire.”
1.08 billion palms
Holding high
Capacitance Coltan.
“The ore of Empire.”
Else:
Siri, where does Coltan come from?
Siri:
Let me check that…
This might answer
your question: Collective information
for US births. Rank: 65th. Fraction:
1 in 318 people. Number: 6318 people per year.
Else:
Siri, what is Coltan.
Siri:
Would you like me to search the web for “Cole train”?
Wallerious:
Coltan, short for
Columbite-tantalite
Known industrially
As tantalite.
Someone said:
You touch the glass with yr machine.
You touch the machine with yr machine.
Glass architecture in a glass palm.
The one surfacing there, touching there.
The one swiping there, pinching there.
You touch the glass with your ear.
You make a call, out from that flesh there.
Else:
Desiring machines
by other means. In other
country. Siri,
what is the space
behind the knee?
Siri:
What is Dancoe? Let me think…
Here’s what I found: Dana Holding Company (DAN)
Latest trades: DAN $20.95 NYE.
Wallerious:
The popliteal space?
Coltrane:
Namelessl
y informatio
n swells.
Sheena Easton:
Sheena Easton.
ACT II
SCREEN 1:
I Am (in Brooklyn:
I realize, and it is not without irony, that I tell stories. I tell a certain kind of story in response to which one reaction I have witnessed is repulsion a response perhaps to what is felt as my attack on the lush ground that ‘story’ is thought to occupy.
When I tell a story it is as though I am interrupting. The room. Something is always happening. For example a sudden repulsion that seems to augur logic. I trust the interruption. I want to tell you now, not later. It won’t matter anymore. It may never again matter. I…
I am (in Berlin:
Here is a story that comes after an attack. Or rather footage of an attack. What exactly is the story when there is an attack in a public space. What exactly is the story when women are not allowed in public space. Rather than footage what was in the machine was: a double story.
Let me explain.
There was the violence of the attack and violence of the machine recording the attack and the machines which transmitted the recording of the attack and the machines which downloaded the act with ease, with a swipe of a thumb, a gesture, automated. This was all after the fact. The story begins before this. What was in the machine was. The image bundles affect, which is duplicated, doubled, becomes story, gothic. I stood up in my apartment, gagged.
My story begins with a machine in a country nowhere near the country where the footage was taken. Let me explain. I am in a country which is a story that turns me inside out, violently, suddenly nowhere and nowhere nearly as the violence which a body holding a machine witnesses, nearly commits, let alone the body suffering the fact of attack. I broke into a sweat. No lush ground. No story. No nearly, nowhere. Refuse to let the image empty you. What was in the machine was. It’s telling.
Public Space:
A bromo
blue glow
brought
to you
by Citi.
Charlotte Wolf:
Gesture of a Holding Recording Device
Gesture of a Hollow Recording Device
Gesture of a Holding Recording Device Just Above One’s Head
Gesture of a Holding Recording Device In Front of Your Head
Gesture of a Hollow Head That is Nonetheless Extremely Heavy
Gesture of a Holding Recording Device At One’s Side, Inconspicuously
Gestures and Gesticulations of Fingers as Eyes
Gesture of a Holding Recording Device Beyond One’s Head While Running Forward
Gesture of a Hollow Recording
Coltrane:
Reconstructin
g tellin
g make
s a dislocatio
n machin
e.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
Telling:
Insides without outsides.
Rudely formed viscera, unsheathed.
Precious, monstrous, starkly lush.
Coltrane:
Deser
t and tundr
a guid
e
gilde
d ancien
t wor
d.
Heriberto Yepez and Else (together):
The text will become the history of the loss of our body.
The loss will become the history of the text of our body.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
Stories are locative adverbs.
I don’t desire a visit.
Else:
Media visits
What upon us.
Someone said:
She. She was a visitor. She
Was a visitor. She was a
visitor. She was a visitor.
Else:
Two tents.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
This is an attempt at never visiting.
Press: “travel”
Lift: “migrate”
Charlotte Wolf:
Gesture of Pressing Against Travel
Gesture of Trying To Stay Put
Gesture of Failing the Gestures
Public Space:
Where you stand.
She is not a visitor.
Where you stand still.
Where you are (not) visited.
Else:
M…mourning
strange vibrations
marking these
unremarkable
leftover signals
Someone singing:
Tell me why is it so.
Don’t wanna let you go.
Coltrane:
Okay. Hold o
n for jus
t a…!
This interrupte
d line wants t
o finish bu
t can’t. Th
e animal, ever
y time it trie
s to complet
e it, or disentangl
e itself eviscerate
s further int
o.
Public Space:
Already? At the start
a space between
one or more sentences
gathered, a violence
named
by space.
Sheena Easton:
Sheena Easton.
SCREEN 2:
Someone said:
IT makes more sense
IT holds as if it were a breath
IT the very moment
IT has nothing to project protect
IT becomes extreme weather
IT:
IT suggests terrible things happening
after near escape, off the page,
in this unfriendly helicopter sky.
Someone (singing):
Up up and away
my beautiful, my beautiful.
Up up and away
my beautiful, my beautiful.
Up up and away
and away, way up HIGH
my beautiful, my beautiful.
Heriberto Yepez:
We suspected
mimesis doubled
rendered violence
visibly redundant
& so we painted
cockpit windshields
on fallen drones.
Charlotte Wolf:
Gesture of Removing Drones from the Sphere of Metaphysics!
Gesture of Removing Drones from the Logic of Speculative Finance!
Siri:
We would like to use your location.
Else:
Your thumbs know where the keys are.
It doesn’t take long to adjust.
Someone said:
Even if we are somewhere else.
Else:
As in a place other than where we desire
the footage to record our movements here.
Public Space:
A statue of a protester.
An archived space. An image
full of gestures. A public space
generating images. A public
full of gestures. An image
full of images. A film
of a still image of a protester. A film
of a still image of a
protester in public space
breaking allotropically
into a run, a fist or feint or
immanently adjacent
to image or film, the edge
in an image or screen or page
or square, an opening there
that is NOT a tear, a duct
at the base of a pear.
Heriberto Yepez:
Neo-remembering. Never mind for now: a 4 cornered body crossed by a three pointed star
tries to exceed its surface into the atmosphere by excreting.
It wants. IT historicizes herself anticipating the tragedy of submission, our sticky times.
IT:
Reaching down while getting up
subject to being fucked
by that broken head (god)
Rough and crumble over figure
Off the page IT leaves
Violent diaphanous
Fatherless imprint
Else:
IT can’t, and turns back up and
back into itself.
Heriberto Yépez:
Under power
Under powered
Under powdered
Else:
“Good upload man”
SCREEN 3:
I Am (in Brooklyn:
Walking around
peacefully enough but
taken with a persistant
incurable want.
I am attempting to leave
the never born child
behind.
Coltrane:
No, don’t cry ou
t with it! Don’
t make the imp-
recise deman
d: IT to
o wants t
o exis
t.
[exits]
I Am (in Brooklyn:
I cut off the head your encephalitic
squirming for you!
[humming tune of “Like a Virgin,”
spasmodic gestures approximating
dancing, sings]
Like an earthworm
Touched for the…
Coltrane:
[re-enters]
Stop tryin
g. To exis
t. Ther
e is onl
y squir
m o
n
th
e wa
y
t
o l
o
v
e.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
Losing the want
Though it’s good to have somewhere clean to stay
Eat and Touch more than a square foot is better,
Especially nice for one to be
Map-able Find-able Bury-able
Public Space:
The houses poorly ventilated, overcrowded,
have no chimney. In Jalazone, a Palestinian refugee camp,
dampness is present in 72.5% of the houses,
50.5% have mold, 37% have leaks, and only 41.5% were
exposed to the sun. In Jalazone, 61% of the households
have 3-5 people to a room, while 16.5% of the households
have over 5 people to a room.
ACT III
SCREEN 1:
Via Alev Ersan:
“Dear friends, currently the mainstream global media is keeping an eye on Taksim, Istanbul. Thus, the police forces have backed off and they have remarkably scaled down the number of attacks against the protesters. However, in the meantime the police terror in Ankara as it is now is on a much larger scale compared to the very beginning of Istanbul attacks. Tear gas is relentlessly being thrown inside apartments, people are suppressed by plastic bullets, illegal custody, and physical assault. Things have escalated quickly and the scale of these attacks is rapidly increasing. We need to make benefit of social media once again to show the world what’s going on in Ankara right now. Here is a message from the people of Ankara: ‘We have supported the protesters of Istanbul from the beginning, and now it is your turn to support us and the rest of Turkey. This resistance is clearly not limited to Istanbul, it has taken over all of the country. The festive atmosphere in Istanbul is just a trick to fool global media and soothe off the masses. Nothing has been accomplished yet and things have just started actually.'”
Else:
Place. As smoke and mirror.
June Jordan:
[Watching television, or in a television frame]
We USAmericans, United Statesians, USonians: love our Arabs and Muslims in the form of democratic youth, so much we are willing to watch them be slaughtered, to watch our premieres meet in gilded frames.
Else:
Who controls the smoke controls the mirrors.
Who controls the mirrors is SMOKING.
Coltrane:
What. Yo
u want m
e to say som
e thing abou
t globalizatio
n. Maybe on
e would wan
t it, if on
e hadn’t gotte
n it. To be know
n. Worl
d Recognitio
n.
I Am (in Berlin:
It’s hot. I sign off all my emails with the phrase It’s hot here. The emails I receive from friends in Brooklyn end with same phrase. It’s hot here. The emails I receive from friends in Rio end with the same phrase. It’s hot here. The emails I receive from friends in Paris end with the same phrase. It’s hot here. The emails I receive from friends in Morocco end with the same phrase. It’s hot here. The emails I receive from friends in Sweden end with the same phrase. It’s hot here. It’s hot here and the windows are open. The windows of all the neighbors in the courtyard are open and we move around with few clothes, we move around slowly wearing few clothes. Nearly everyone sees everyone else in a Berlin hinterhof. Nearly everyone sees everyone else in apartment buildings that face other apartment buildings. There is rarely any sun in Berlin and rarely are curtains needed. The neighbor across from me moves slowly through the room. We have seen each other over the years numerous times through the curtainless windows. All the neighbors have seen each other numerous times. We move together slowly and we see each other.
Charlotte Wolf:
Gesture of Sight
Gesture of Sight Among Other Gestures
Gesture of a Body Next Door Felt in the Wood of the Floorboards
Gestures Conditioned by Distinctions Between Public and Private Space
I Am (in Berlin:
The other is there, right across the air, the hinterhof. The crows on rooftops throw their voices into it and revel in the echo—hopping sideways, gleefully! Nearly deranged! As all crows are, all over the world, perhaps because for them there is no—
Charlotte Wolff:
Gesture of Delirious Harley-Rider-ish Sound in Order to Break Free From.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
Hearing from the front and back. I look to the harbor and hear the ocean. I look to ocean and hear the helicopters. Rhomb lines for airplane. Just Above My Head. I smell jet fuel. Craving.
Charlotte Wolff:
Gestures of Crows for Whom All Space is Public Space.
Heriberto Yepez:
Crow Gestus: Gesture of making big USAmerican noise without sound.
Else:
Beep. Double
Beep. Beep double
Beep. Double
I Am (in Berlin):
It’s hot here. The windows are open. Waist high. Last night a voice in the courtyard cried out, a pleasure so complete the pitch of it was genderless and everyone, in all the windows, was turned on, although the lights stayed off. Squares of open air. An image open, emptied. Architecturally intimacy occurs. We have seen each other but not recognized each other. We have not recognized that we have seen each other but we know this recognition exists, unrecognized, when we meet each other in the treppenhaus, the stairways. Here there is also air between our bodies, but less.
Fassbinder:
Ja Ja Ja
in Agnst Essen
Seele Auf
I wanted most all of it shot in courtyards
and stairways
and doorways
leading to hallways—
Charlotte Wolf:
Architectures of Recognition Gestures
Gestures of Public Touching
Overcrowding Gestures
Orgy Gesture
June Jordan:
Western expansion camps. Refugee cramps.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
between a
door and a
front door
Fassbinder:
where Ali
and Emmi
meet in a doorway
vestibule
a transitional…
June Jordan:
But not provisional
structure the outside
Impositional architectures
Racing bodies
Merging bodies
Orgy bodies
The rooftops
Coltrane:
Architectura
l ai
r.
Else:
The internet?
Someone said:
Orgies, intafadas and riots!
They must take place
In physical space.
Orgy:
If a staircase, then
carefully.
Someone said:
Right. Carefully.
There is no
tyranny of
recognition, no
way to erase
the final
distance
between bodies.
Orgy:
Step by step.
Full of objects
Of outwardness.
Via Alev Ersan:
A space however
Small for politics.
A failed anagram.
An ark.
June Jordan:
Askar
Camp #1
Jenin
SCREEN 2:
Else:
When you look up ‘gestures of location’ on Google you are directed into an Apple development site on Gesture Recognizers. Gesture Recognizers interpret touches to determine whether they correspond to a specific gesture, such as a swipe, pinch, or rotation. If they recognize their assigned gesture, they send an action message to a target object.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
They look more forgotten each time I see them. There is a man I feel like I am friends with. He must be Jewish or Arab or Armenian does it matter which? Wait…we were at “A Gesture of Location” or Gestures of Location or. I don’t know his name but I have known him for all the years that I have lived in my neighborhood. Those years a teenager between us: 17 or 18…year old teenager trans person yesterday hacked to death. My unnamed friend in Brooklyn is a cortortionist. He can bend the back of his neck so that his head is at 90 degrees.
Wallerious:
Maybe that is not so hard.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
I watched him like this for 10 years. Because he sat on my stoop. I could tell he liked me, felt kinship with me. Maybe this means he is Jewish or just relieved to not be put out to the dogs. One day after ten years he looked at me and he was standing up straight. I smiled at him until he recognized me. Today I saw him on the train. We nodded to each other. When he got off the train he went back to being hunched over, in 90 degrees.
Else:
Gestures feel real
she read, but only
when her
hand opened,
when finger and
thumb separating
widened image
to text.
Coltrane:
A relatio
n that i
s neithe
r one no
r two.
Someone said:
Flow, from one to each’s other.
Shift, from thinking to knowing.
Sheena Easton:
Sheena Easton.
Aristotle:
Recognition is as augury for catastrophic
Wreckage.
A beautiful contraction, a perfect
Cleave.
Someone said:
Recognition denied or disabled.
Unclear weather. I recognize this.
Thunder precedes. Like this.
Flow. Shift. From cathexis to
Heriberto Yepez:
Uninstalling the blind
Stupid trilogy. Anti-
Oedipal yes, but
Let’s goes further,
Condemns the binary
And the 4 winds.
Else:
The last episode brought closure and still managed to stay open-ended.
June Jordan:
“Beach Camp”
SCREEN 3:
I Am (in Berlin:
Something someone said about a partial way of looking.
Lines, electrodes, an anti-reflective coating it alone.
Tap to zoom in on king.
I am (in Berlin) holding an object, an iPhone, the screen of which functions by sensing anything having a dielectric different from air. A kind of death, or experience of death, the sudden fact that difference is gone. I was in the air when my father died. I was high up, 30,000 feet, 35,000. I was in the air and my route in the air was figured by, ironically, “ground speed.” The screen on the back of the seat in front of me was roughly the size of the head resting against the seat. Flight status map. Africa a tan desert. Iceland, white. The Labrador Sea: a kind of rippled digital basin. Dimension on a low-res flat screen seems always like sand to be collapsing. “Local time at origin.” The places we travel to in order to leave them. A head winds. Distances: the minute you have a destination you arrive. I am (in Berlin) trying to locate where my body was when my father died, since where we were when a thing happened was the memory of the thing that happened. I arrived when I found out in New York, and got home, and turned on my iPhone with a swipe of my thumb, reading the email which was written by my mother from a coast across from the coast where I had arrived, which is not where my father died. That was my thought at that time in the narrative, where was I at that time in the narrative, now that I am (in Berlin) recalling this. Without location narrative posits it, sentence by sentence. Above somewhere named Gaspe. Somewhere above No. Only later on a phone with a circuit containing a mineral named by a Swedish chemist and mined in the Congo did a message arrive from another sentence, which was opened solely with the movement of a sentence, its intimate muscles, which are the only muscles in a sentence that move the sentence. Conflict minerals us. Somewhere above Dingwall. The sentence across a page vibrates. You could say a gesture also involves when it is finished dying. Else this high capacitance in a small volume, a river over time finds its way into a circuit small enough to allow live streaming. It won’t take long to adjust. Somewhere above Riviere-de-la-Chaloupe, Baie-du-Renard, Cap-aux-Meules. Airlines always use butt-ugly fonts. I remember that sentence, thinking that. This is a view from seat 42A, from a sentence folded in a seat among other sentences on an Irish airline with a Gaelic name somewhere above Dingwall, which is nowhere near Ireland.
Charlotte Wolff:
Gestarchitecture of Invisible Strings.
Gestarchitecture of Immigration.
I Am (in Berlin:
The flight attendants on either aisle end at take off, at the origin, synchronized. One hand positioned over a face and another behind the head. Jerk to release oxygen. During the prerecorded preflight safety instructions my lips moved with the recording. I am always from the start attendant. Invisibly the machine we become we are synced to. Always, from the start, he said again, narratively. Your thumb suddenly white, like Iceland. Else this high capacitance for an electrical charge, a circuit small enough to resist breathing. The body which is not a sentence in a ritual reduced to ashes, mailed to other bodies who stand there, holding them in a posture that, like any fixed position, grief included, interrupts gesture, freezes it, violently, he said again.
Charlotte Wolff:
Living Gesture of Poses Opposed to Any Fixed Posture.
I Am (in Berlin:
The email recorded the passing of a circuit small enough to prevent grieving.
June Jordan:
Rafah
Beit Jibrim
I Am (in Berlin:
The use of the word is proof that literal affirmation neutralizes dissent: economy class. The space between bodies, increasingly infinitesimal. Within inches of every sense an ad. If we are intensely mindful in such a space not to touch anyone, even at the elbows, it is because discomfort stemming from enforced proximity extinguishes any notion the larger sentence might be, with such touch, suddenly countered, changed.
Coltrane:
Distanc
e the minut
e you hav
e a destinatio
n you arriv
e
I Am (in Berlin:
Willingly move beyond this sentence in solidarity.
IT:
where
an ethics
appears. Avant
Vanguard. All
investments subject
also to read as if
risk, both to hold
what we know as fragile
and to have that,
brokered, ingestured
with windshield,
bad porn, visibility
broken global shatterproof
materials this
common form
to struggles, despite
borders, and the
archives border
beyond a sweetness
the sunlit fur
on the backs of
bees, hidden there
it will win us
over it will
soften us with us
Siri:
I am slurring in a soft warehouse.
Heriberto Yepez:
What is a repeat—a repetition that is not conservative, conservatizing, that bleeds new life—how to name it—close to that falling storm. Sheena Easton, save us.
Sheena Easton:
Sheena Easton.
June Jordan:
Balata
Shu’fat
Nusier
I Am (in Berlin:
Sentences willingly in solidarity move beyond this.
I Am (in Brooklyn:
(spasmodically dancing again)
But the Spring…is physical, it is
difficulty, not death. Broken
trees lost branches. Cold air at my bottom
while breasts hot, humid. Slow magnolias
Bright necessity alive—shortened, stumped.
Pushing force of
collective energy out
must make
side branches.