Aphasia (2017)

A collaboration between Hope Mohr and Rich DDT at Matchbox #4

Commissioned by Matchbox, a monthly salon seeding new cross-disciplinary collaborations, for which CODAME and CouterPulse select and pair artists to drive participation, engagement and understanding. 

Performance History
Premiere: May 16, 2017

Collaborators
Performers: Hope Mohr and Rich DDT

From the Artists:

We began with ideas about delay or latency as a metaphor for the dissonance endemic to contemporary consciousness. We landed on the image of a black hole as a container for these ideas. Our work together has been an ongoing conversation between the analog body and the technologically sophisticated environment. 

 "Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one's own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it, through a disjunction and an anachronism."  -- Giorgio Agamben

"The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contermporcriness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present. But what does it mean 'to see an obscurity,' 'to perceive the darkness'"?  -- from "What is the Contemporary?" from What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Standford University Press, 2009)

"Scientists think of [a Black Hole] as being sealed of behind its own event horizon. In fact it is human perception that is sealed off behind their current consciousness horizon." -- Elia Wise

Photo by Robbie Sweeny.