A collaborative research project with Words as Matter, a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Language-Based Artistic Research Group. The research was shared as part of the 16th Society of Artistic Research gathering in Porto, Portugal in May 2025:
Words as Matter // Mariana Renthel | Erika Tsimbrovsky | Cecilie Fang Jensen | Benjamin Jenner | Danica Maier | Antrianna Moutoula | Anouk Hoogendoorn
During May 2024, Anouk wrote letters to the members of Words as Matter in a park, guided by the wind in an open collaboration with the air’s uncanny currents. These traces, shaped by movement and chance, became messages to the members of the group: Mariana, Erika, Cecilie, Benjamin, Danica, Antrianna.
For research purposes, with a playful and creative approach, the group responded with videos, echoing the interplay between intention and elemental forces. This asemic exchange reimagined writing as a dialogue beyond human language. The wind, as co-author, left its mark alongside Anouk’s gestures, while the videos extended the conversation into new mediums and other entities.
As an open experiment, one might invite a force—light, water, sound—to shape letters, filming the process as it unfolds. The group’s video contribution to the above conference can be viewed here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/3594677
i was going to do it…
My contribution to the group video work, entitled i was going to do it…, was motivated by the practice of conceptual art group Collective Actions (CA), and in particular their idea of the ’empty action’: an intervention into a constructed situation that alters participant’s understanding of their role in the unfolding experience. The empty action involves a shift in participant’s understanding of the value of what is being observed and/or happening around them, whereby what was understood to be preamble or preparation (what CA call “extra-demonstrable information”) is suddenly understood (retrospectively now) to have been the main event (what CA call “demonstrable information”). Crucial to the success or failure of the empty action is the ability of group members to place extra-demonstrable elements inside the demonstrable elements without participants suspecting what is taking place ahead of time. The shift in understanding (the transformation of the innocuous into an aesthetic experience) is initiated from inside the (as yet unperceivable) event via the insertion of a normally unremarkable and anti-sensational gesture (such as the signing of a certificate to confirm participation in the event that has just taken place).
The value of the empty action to the creation of an asemic text is in the way it legitimises the possibility of writing with a force in the absence of any understanding that this is what is taking place. That is, it offers the opportunity to write with a force from within the force, to communicate something that is suspended between two types of meaning (my meaning and the meaning brought by the force), without falling into the trap laid by thinking: namely that treating writing as a series of signs for what has been thought after the fact, erases (through the very act of thinking the force) the force and its ‘asemic’ agency.
i was going to do it… Benjamin Jenner, 2025
In i was going to do it… (above) two figures enter a wooded area armed with two pieces of paper, some pens and a camera. They are going for a walk and to have a conversation. Both pieces of paper have the words “cloud, reverse, shutter, light, step, bank, camera, mud” written down the right-hand side; followed by a number from 1 – 9 (see below). In the work, these words operate as signals prompting a period of reflection that includes recalling and writing down the dialogue that led up to the utterance of the word. The aim of the activity is to insert these words into conversation in such a way as to surprise the interlocutor, causing them to reevaluate the purposiveness of the dialogue that lead up to the utterance of the word.
The placement of a signal word by one of the figures inside the dialogue is conceived here as equivalent to the placement of an extra-demonstrable element inside the demonstrable structure of the work. Although both figures are privy to the list of words, placing the words into a sentence that is consistent with the ensuing dialogue takes considerable mental effort, making it less likely that either figure would notice the effort being made by the other to structure the conversation around one of the words. In this way, words that ought to be in thought are able to bypass consciousness with ease on the pretence that they are insignificant (extra-demonstrational) elements of the exchange, a bit like a Trojan Horse rolling unnoticed inside the walls (consciousness) of Troy. Several times during the making of i was going to do it… a signal word was spoken only for the receiver of that word to continue walking, needing to be called back so as to engage in the process of recording and reflection.
The recording of the word’s utterance is undertaken by both figures simultaneously, with each figure writing twice, with both hands (the right hands of both figures write on one piece of paper, the left hands of both on the other) the dialogue that lead up to the word’s utterance. Recalling this dialogue is not a simple task: coupled with the above reference to the fall of Troy as a metaphor for the breaching of thought’s teleology, the dialogue was by definition unremarkable, unmemorable and in no way building up to a significant moment – prior, that is, to the signal words utterance. As such, retrieving the words that make up the dialogue requires a reversal of thought in reference to the loci of the signal word that now (understood as such) reshapes the build up to its utterance. The reshaping of the passage of thought in light of a constructive misapprehension of what has just taken place relinquishes thought’s agency over action, and the agential actions of other forces, generating asemic writing. CA call this kind of document “factographical discourse”. The recording is concluded by each figure attempting to read what the other has written, a process that extends (and is an extension of) the illegibility of much of what has been recorded, itself evidence of the writing-with that occurred prior to the utterance of the word, prior to the realisation that something extra-demonstrable had pierced the surface of the work’s demonstrable elements.
What the force is that the figures are writing with in this instance is not straight forward: is it the presence of an interlocutor (prior to any engagement with the words) whose attention is in a dance with the other figure’s attention [the appearance of which is half constructed sentences and conversational dead ends] (yes); the landscape that enabled the sentence to be languaged (yes) itself a kind of attention; the idea of the word on the page that is contextualised and made immanent and specific through its utterance (yes); and/or the structure of the work/game itself (yes)?
As the number of words available to cite decreases, the absurdity of the task increases and the placement of the extra-demonstrable inside the demonstrable becomes harder to achieve.
With thanks to Colin Goodwin.