WHITE
WRITE
(2020-2021 -> on going variants)
White Write is a durational performance and installation series exploring automatic writing and embodied inscription.
Originating from an inquiry into the temporality and materiality of writing in a post-digital context, the series investigates how embodied processes of mark-making, sonic feedback, and gesture can generate epistemic spaces beyond conventional language and meaning. Through continuous iterations of embodied writing — where gesture becomes mark, and mark informs gesture — the work stages writing as an open process, resonant with emptiness and emergence.
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White Write 2.0
In White Write 2.0, interactive feedback loops between body, laser sensing, soundscape, and traditional materials further interrogate the thresholds between visible and invisible inscription. The work proposes an embodied, open-ended process of writing — where the act itself becomes a site of epistemic emergence beyond fixed history or linear progress.
The laser senses the distance between the body and the surface of the outer boundaries, which controls and cuts off the deep continuous soundscape. The body as an empty agency that follows the trace of the laser dot and the trace of the interactive soundscape, negotiates the movement in between, instantly composing the orientation, silence and rhythms. As a return, the visible traces are left behind through the traditional medium (ink on rice paper), while the electronics that is constantly interacting leaves invisible traces.
White Write 2.0. Monopol Berlin, September 2021
electronic sensor. Neumond electronics
video footages. Kami Nami
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White Write 1.0
In White Write 1.0, the body becomes a medium of writing — following inner and outer motions in a stream of consciousness that produces calligraphic traces and sonic flows, emphasizing process over meaning.
Does writing still have a future? Compared to the process of automatically engraving data in an invisible cloud, writing by hand on a physical format seems to be outdated. In an eye-blink, the data are written, but manual writing requires one to slow down, one word after another. As Vilém Flusser stated, “The result is a new experience of time, that is, a stream of unstoppable progress, of dramatic unrepeatability, of framing, in short, history.”
WHITE refers to the emptiness that is writing. In this process, I observe what comes from within, and spontaneously transport with my body in writing. By focusing on the process instead of the meaning, the Chinese character transforms into the meaningless line that follows its own direction and rhythm. Furthermore, observing what's written gives feedback to what's coming next. The loops continue in the motion of an open system which is the host of the emptiness. What is foreseeable is not the future but the current moment.
White Write 1.0. Studio Weichselstraße 48, Berlin, February 2020
video footages. Melika Akbari Asl and Karsten Dirk Gloger
video edit. Dan Su
curator. Claire Federica Crescini
technical support. Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch
studio support. Thomas Georgi
photo. Melika Akbari Asl and Andreea Hriscu
