14/11/18 VL Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Q&A

This lecture was dreadful. It was crazy how inhibited we are that without chairs we slink to the sides and the back of the room. The chairs hadn't been put up. We had to sit on the floor. I retrieved cushions from the studio but they didn't relieve the dead legs. I wanted to lay down on my front but I was self-conscious. I think we all were. If I ever do a presentation in the future to a lot of people I will make them sit closer to me. We were squished, yet filling 1/5 of the place. I didn't mind sitting on the floor, I had initially thought that it was the artists choice but we truly are a herd and we all smushed up in the same places.

I found the work of the artist fascinating but I could not concentrate, I don't know if it was the smushage or the visual stimulation of a ton of people oddly sardined in a room too big for them. I think it may have been Morten's voice, it was very calming and monotonous and when he played the sound from the hypnotist -I think given a modicum of comfort, I'd have been asleep. When I am not stimulated, I feel tired and can easily fall asleep. This happens when forced to rid myself of distractions and have to concentrate. His work was great, I loved the use of writing and his poem.. being inside the sweet pocket of a suit... I love how otherworldy that is. He created that idea and transformed an idea into words, knowing how powerful and immersive that can be. He then turned that into a physical space. This is exactly how I have worked in the past and what appeals to me. I don't know what I am doing these days but the magic he creates... the things that cannot be easily articulated... are what I feel I am chasing- like a dog with a car. I will never get it but I can try.

I didn't care for the way that Morten stayed behind the desk. I appreciated his professionalism, the talk was structured and well illustrated. He was a lecturing overachiever. Even during sound clips he showed films or he would move the screen over slowly with the mouse so we constantly had another anchor to keep us in the fantasy he had created. Something that resonated with me was when the hypnotist explained the shapes his voice makes. That is exactly the sort of thing I want to explore. I think I am an overly visual person and I sometimes cannot explain things fully, it's like there is an extra sense that I haven't yet mastered yet that should help. I wrote some notes about it at the time. 

Things that cannot be articulated easily, things that need a poetry. Visual, written, immersion, sensory.

Surrealism?

Bedwyrs exercise, creating new realities, dimensions.

Pushing language in different ways, using different modes, as a framing device.

I took an idea and changed it into a project lesson plan, I then planned to turn it into a set of rules for a board game. I want to explore using different bodies of text and changing their framing. I have looked at using antonyms, I changed the first paragraph of my lesson plan into every words opposite. The resulting article didn't make a lot of sense. I realised that to turn a paragraph into it's opposite I would need to convert sentences rather than individual words. Words like AN and OR were the most problematic as the opposites were an idea only conveyed in sentences rather than in a new word.

I found that when I turned text into it's opposite it still relayed the same message. I thought that was because of double negatives creating a positive. It is interesting to me that even in a non-visual way that is still a truth. I think the minds ability to map out a set of cues (written or sensory) into something that cannot be articulated is interesting. I feel that when you cannot articulate something that is when this is occurring. For instance, when Artist XXX came on the Wednesday lecture he spoke about holes and recesses in the forest. How he had used sound to record them, how they had their own identity in absence. I am always interested in negatives filling the place of a positive until it becomes one. Even if that is only in the perception of one. When he played the hypnotist talking, the hypnotist spoke about the shape of his voice. This was interesting to me because this is the kind of things I would think about and I'd be lost in dreaming about the halfway point where a sound becomes an almost physical structure that I can see'.

I know that within the brain, things nudge and overlap one another. I know that it isn't perfectly separate and neat. So our sense of smell is closely linked with memory for example. Sight and where messages are sent to pain receptors. We must have many experiences that are not of just one sense and cannot be communicated.

I looked at some well-known poems and I explained them, trying to first get into a state where I was thinking as abstractly as possible and not looking into what I have previously thought about the work. It ends up reading like a poem of sorts but I am trying to invoke my other senses into the conversation.

Come from my own struggles with explaining and articulating my thoughts  

I think this was an interesting lecture overall because he didn't show too much so was able to go into depth about the work- leaving enough interest that we could go and research his other work out of university. I also thought that I wouldn't stand behind a desk and read a well-rehearsed speech when I present in the future. Not that I ever have done that, I had just been aiming to be at that point in the future but I don't think it would actually benefit me to do that. Reading -unless you are an actor just takes away most of your natural inflections and it destroys a speech to me. Something to explore with Maria?? Inflections and how they mould communication. He was very technical and this lost my attention, perhaps I can find a way of talking about work that doesn't require too much in- talk. ' You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother'kind of thing.