“Archive”: the near combustibility of the term is like a haunted instrument. “Cher Sylvère” is a score-based video-poem and performance piece based on the archive of theorist and Semiotext(e) founder, Sylvère Lotringer. I used locations from the Lotringer Fales Library papers to provoke the balance between researcher and research subject. The score is available upon request for use in shaping future creative endeavors that seek to put archival research to work/waste.

The myriad source materials for this undertaking share a common position; that of orientation to the street, but the psycho-geographical position that I aimed to employ may have been a dubious one. I took to the street at a time it was deemed “unessential” to do so. That alone seemed worthy of exploring. I refuse “art as necessary labor”—what I aimed to make was a collection that defended the unessential; the creative “no” of isolation that moves across zones and mediums. This project aims to see the street beyond its place of power and signs.

The score demonstrates a site of signs transferrable without attributing primacy to a single agent, place, or type. It aims for all to have access to a variety of results and challenges to literacy. I propose that the archive can turn speech from itself and welcome a budding voyeurism. Sitting among its materials in contemplative observation, prior to intervention, is a legitimate pedagogical act. Why do anything with the archive? Enacting the archive, as I did here, resists teleological meaning contained in any single “other.” Non-communication is also transferable in the form of omissions and wandering.

Audio script excerpt:

[…]

Axioms:

(1) Time works in the negative. It takes away.

(2) Sound measure is the reclamation of time.

(3) The connection between the archive and synthesis is a dormancy followed by a red thread.

(4) Audio is self-selected overexposure. It implies itself and the other with an ill-fated potential for completeness that times-out.

(5) The point where two archives meet is closeness in the ideal, a momentary touching of correspondence.

(6) Perversion of the archive is voyeurism, an unavowable paparazzi.

(7) Archive is arrhythmia; its life exists in stop motion, piecemeal, grâce à la chance.

(8) Syncopation: time and beauty run parallel; beauty is always ahead, and being so incapable of action.

[…]

This piece was commissioned by Issue Project Room for their Isolated Field Recording Series.