What are my hunches?

Since you wrote this, we’ve talked about inviting writers to think about approaches to online space, which use the tools that already exist: navigating it as a found landscape, like a city — something designed, intentioned, constructed, but also brought to life by its use(r)s. We’ve talked about a psychogeography of the internet, as well as fictional identities, travels in time and perspectives, performance and games. We’ve talked about the role of Ross or another technologist being to frame these journeys, rather than to make them.

This feels good to me. It feels like a way forward that gives us more freedom, strangely, than trying to construct everything from scracth. It is the difference between saying “What do you want to do with everything?” and “What do you want to do with this?” It feels more manageable, too, in its relationships with people.

We’ve also agreed to wait until the study room sessions at Lada are over, before deciding on anything. And this also feels right. It feels right to percolate with other people’s thoughts.

So, I think we have a sketchy plan. And, in the midst of this brief pause, while the blossom appears on the trees and the sun shines as if it’s always been there, I thought it would be useful to think about our ambitions and aspirations for SO: both what they were at the beginning, and what they mght be now. And, I suppose … what they might not be, or what might be lost, left behind, or forgotten.

I wanted to address some long held concerns about the relationship between the live, writing, and the digital sphere. I wanted to approach art criticism as an art form in its own right; to explore the potential of language to be as well as to be about, and to do that in relation to the real, full-body sensation of being present with and in something. I associate that presentness with live events and live performance, but on reflection I actually think it is less to do with the live than it is to do with the sensory. The sensory is the live’s forte, but it can happen in reading, too; and at the cinema; and while listening to music.

And all of this is bringing me back to a feminist perspective (by which I mean my perspective — which I call feminist because it is informed by my experience as a woman and as a feminist — as well as my reading of feminist literature, including Cixuos who you mention above, and Virginia Woolf, and Jeanette Winterson, heck I’m going to throw Hilary Mantel in there, Luce Irigirary …), that does not see a distinction between mind and body, does not follow a linear path, and that at the same time, simultaneously, does not usurp meaning with its own version of non-linearity, does not assume a unity of mind and body, does not assert any binaries or opposites in fact, but enacts instead a constant interrelation … and I am thinking of you as I write this, because I am not sure if I have ever told you this, but one of the things I love about your writing is the glorious, velvety length of your sentences. They make me want to wrap myself up in them and lie down in their curves.

Well — this is interesting. It turns out I am not as interested in theories of the live and the digital as I am in representations of sensory, embodied experience. ‘Live’ and ‘digital’ space are obviously good testing grounds, because of their implicit and/ or imagined relationships with the the body and disembodiment. But really, it is experience that fascinates me. Experience in language and online. How to experience in language and online. And what. And with whom.

And this dialogue has also taught me what I should have known — that I think best in writing. Not in conversation. Not in notes on a page. Certainly not in polished prose. But typing at a screen.

Aha! (Lightbulb slowly flickers …) (woman starts to type so loudly she is worried it will wake up the child …) THAT IS WHY I’M DRAWN TO ‘DIGITAL SPACE’! (this phrase that I have made up or made use of, but never properly defined). Because my sensory, embodied experience of writing is at a computer.

Fucking hell. It all seems so obvious now! I need to have a lie down (I might take one of your sentences with me). It is about the experience of writing. The sensory experience of writing. And how writing translates and diminishes and forgets and remembers and transforms and transmits and makes public and makes real and summons up and lets go of so-called ‘live experience.’ Of how writing is a performance. Sometimes (like now), online.

And this is not to do away with ‘art’, or the ‘art event’ or, even, ultimately, ‘art criticism’ (as an approach of criticality, rather than a discipline of knowledge). Art is there, too. I often find myself talking about art as if art is real. The only real thing. I can tell by their faces that some people don’t believe that. … But I can’t make myself believe any differently. So the art is there, the art event, the real, the tangible. And the experiences of writing and reading and browsing online are with it, feeling it, experiencing it, and transforming it …. I dunno, I dunno. Maybe this is going nowhere? I’m going to leave it hanging, and return.

This morning I heard some music at dawn. The music floated up into a purple sky, into the sharp tinkle of bird song, until the words were lost to the wind and the trees shook with applause. Which is to say both that I have been up for too long today to think straight, perhaps; and that I want to leave my own thoughts up there with the birdsong and the music and the shrouded buildings of a not-yet-known day.