"Acting as an excellent layman's introduction to the origins of one of the most common languages on the planet, 'History of the English Language' demonstrates how language changes over time, and presents England as being multicultural right down to its roots."

What if the object is not a “witness” but an entity constructed for the express purpose of creating, or activating, the forum? Such an object might map the diffused networks of informal or illegal labor, or be called upon to narrate historical events in the absence of evidentiary materials. In fact, the object may be the very thing that produces a forum where none previously existed. An artwork likewise produces its constituency; it gathers, rather than simply assumes an already extant audience. If the object, conceptualized as such, is not that which registers the events that came before it in the manner of the classical witness, then it might be said the object itself becomes the event to which the forum as witness will address itself.

Participants:
Susan Schuppli, Goldsmiths, University of London, moderator
Amber Horning, John Jay College, New York
Sara Jordeno, artist, New York
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design
Arne Svenson, artist, New York

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.


Cesare Pavese

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much. 


Orson Welles in F for Fake

That objects can neither feel nor speak is fortunate - otherwise, I would be mocked by the houses and plants on my return. They would say, You could even lose your way when taking a stroll. I realize what life is. Life is constantly not knowing what to do. Therefore I let things happen to me- a breeze that brings a street filled with the scent of flowers, a tower whose meaning is obscured although it's still watched from a distance, a battlefield soaked in the rain while I talk loudly with a friend under a small umbrella. When something loses its first level of meaning, a second level of meaning emerges. The second level of meaning is often more accessible and more suitable for me: a baby stroller leaning against a tombstone, a three-page will found under a freshly baked loaf of bread. I stroll during a pleasant afternoon and lose my way in the second level of meaning. I have no other real pleasure. Often, just as I'm about to feel a small degree of pleasure, I feel a deep sadness. What is sadness? If I knew what sadness was, I would no longer feel sad. What then does life mean? Life means certain things are not yet done and must be done, and other things are done but not done well. Tomorrow, I'll stroll no more.




From Mu Xin - An empty room

The imperfect is
our paradise.

How does one start to speak? The term glossolalia signifies to babble, to jibber-jabber, or to stutter (Greek: lalein) in the tongue (Greek: glosse). So it is no surprise to find glossolalic traces or moments in the speech of children just as in innumerable literary texts (see Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac and so on) that concern the nature, conditions, and beginnings of the Word [la Parole]. But bound to the question of the beginnings of the spoken word [la parole] is the question of its lapsus or its end. How does speaking come undone? The passion of the fall redoubles the passion of the birth. Each, moreover, can be the very site of the other, and accordingly the two figures frequently mix. Every glossolalia combines something prelinguistic, related to a silent origin or to the "attack" of the spoken word, and something postlinguistic, made from the excesses, the overflows, and the wastes of language.


Michel de Certeau, Vocal Utopias : Glossolalias
In Representations 56, fall 1996

More whistled languages : http://www.lemondesiffle.free.fr/presentation_eng/languessifflees.htm

A conversation with subtitles : http://www.silbogomero.com.es/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=62&Itemid=67

And some further reading : http://www.lemondesiffle.free.fr/whistledLanguages.htm


via www.deconcrete.org

- You must go on.
- I can't go on. I'll go on.

http://ubu.com/film/beckett_krapp.html

Eilis Mcdonald, welcome_to_my_modern_fantasy