Preoccupations

"Preoccupations" "presents prose-poetic and discursive 'translations' between a pair of structurally related texts, set in contemplative rural and conflict-riven urban environments. Words and phrases in each are connected via an associative chain of intermediaries, along which the piece perambulates, with dynamic word-level replacements occurring in real time. These replacements may rhyme, have similar meanings, 'sound like' or 'spell like' their predecessors. Beginning in one or other of the texts, the piece sets out in the direction of its counterpart. Via a retained history of its path – unique to each iteration – it then attempts to return, shuffling back towards its starting point. Upon reaching, or failing to reach, its destination, it sets out immediately once again, with each journey a transversal – of proximal texts in a high-dimensional vector space – toward the possibility of parallel expeditions, both feared and desired. Where is it that we are taking our daily walks, and why? These are the piece’s preoccupations, when 'all space is occupied by the enemy.' (Raoul Vaneigem)

This work was developed from an earlier work a Ramble, as we called it, that explored similar word replacements with a single text. It was a computationally modulated walk in lyrical, quasi-randomly disrupted memory. History and events – in Palestine (at the time of initial development), Syria, now Ukraine, and, let’s not forget, many, many other places elsewhere – made dynamic, semantically implicated journeying within such sheltered confines impossible, and so the closely related ‘urban’ text was composed and reconfigured into Preoccupations." -- From Artist's Statement, The New River Journal