Providing Positioning

“Long / Distance calls. They break sound / Into electrical impulse and put it back again…..

The connection faint. / Your voice / consisted of sounds that I had / To route to phonemes,

then to bound and free morphemes, then / to syntactic structures.”

-Jack Spicer, “Phonemics”

All of the language for this installation was taken from a forty-five minute telephone conversation conducted on July 21, 2010. It was a Wednesday morning, Florida-time, a Wednesday afternoon in Durham, England. I spoke that day with several people who had agreed to participate as they stood — mobile phones in hand — in the Main Hall of St. John’s College.

Having never been to this site (and yet planning a site-specific installation for this conference), I asked each of them to describe to me — “as if to a blind person” — the various views from the Main Hall’s windows.

The recorded language from that morning’s conversations was later adapted for the Durham installation.

Many thanks to the University of North Florida’s Michael Boyles and CIRT for the vital assistance with this installation