eMotiVe sOuNDs of the eLEctRic wRiTEr

(project commissioned by the Jeu du Paume 2013-15)

“A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safekeeping.”-Catherine Field

Electronic letters are immensely convenient and link people across the world, destroying in an instant the hurdle of geography that confronts snail mail. Now that e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other ways to stay in touch have taken center stage, writing letters, postcards, thank you notes, or even invitations is rare in the twenty-first century. But will they ever be as richly humane as the handwritten letter, as redolent of a particular personality? Writing expressive or poetic letters have greatly reduced and since we communicate by e-mail, we say things that are neither deep nor profound. My suspicion is that in a world where we are constantly chatting and tweeting, very little is actually being said. Will good written communication skills die off, leaving the rest of us thumbing abbreviations and smileys on handhelds? Will effortless random access erode our collective respect for writing as a logical, linear process? Reading successive pages and chapters teaches us how to follow a sustained line of reasoning. With a constant fast-paced introduction of abbreviated terms being introduced will the simple pleasure of language be lost? Will people have any use for a signature because everything is being conducted electronically?

My focus particularly would be in the loss of writing a personal letter. In the project “Emotive sounds of the electric writer” different participants from different parts of the world would be encouraged to write handwritten letters. These letters will be part of a performance where a machine would be mimicking these hand-written letters on a long scroll of paper. The machine while printing often stops to think when given complex information. This thinking is recorded by the pen blotting into the paper and leaving a score like impression throughout the scroll. Inspired by John Cages “chance score”, this score which will emerge from the process will be translated into sounds by musicians and then composed into a sound piece. The blots also make the score visually less mechanistic and bridge the gap to a future where technology and humanistic characters blend without losing one for the other.

Simultaneously the US Postal System progressing towards a partial shutdown with 15 billion dollars in borrowing from the government, one can’t help contemplate the impact of technology and the slow disappearance of the tactile human imprint in personal communication. There are a lot of questions, but that’s not to say that the skill involved and the pleasure to be found in handwriting a card or note—not to mention the pleasure of receiving such a missive—have disappeared. Perhaps “Letter of Love” would rekindle the passion of writing. The sacred and comforting practice of writing by hand doesn’t have to be a lost custom.