26
SEP

IndexFoundation

Anna Barham: Live Production Reading Group

Listen live to Anna Barham’s Live Production Reading Group at Index. A group of about 10 participants will take turns to read prepared texts aloud that are then interpreted by speech2text software and re-introduced to the circle. Each reading is a re-authoring of the text – the computer output is unpunctuated so the reader must choose how to break it up, to find places to breathe, to deal with a breakdown in syntax, as well as choosing how to intonate, what feeling to inflect etc. Meaning ebbs, flows and sediments in the collective listening of the group and the wider online audience. The work is an act of resistance to the flattening and standardising tendency of contemporary linguistic technologies and uses them against themselves to return language to bodies and the particular qualities of each singular reading as a generative process. There will be several interludes during the reading group for discussion and to allow readers to swap in and out of the circle. Research Processes: British artist Anna Barham has worked with Index throughout 2019 as the first artist in the Research Processes, a series of residencies started at Index in 2019. Barham works with and beyond language, with text, readings, videos and situations. Linguistics and performativity have been the starting point for investigations and exchange between the artist and Index. The live production reading group and the launch of her new book, Poisonous Oysters, on Thursday 26th September are a chance to continue this conversation with audiences. Index Research Processes is a program thought of as a tool to define other temporalities and, in collaboration with artists, to establish ways of investigation operating beyond a starting plan or objective.