#3—
Jessica FOLEY
a sentence
on making room
For PHONICA #6, I presented three open-ended pieces, of text and film. I called them ‘abstractions,’ excerpts from my doctoral research diaries with CTVR (The Centre for Telecommunications Value-chain Research, headquartered in Trinity College, Dublin), which began in 2012. I used the concept of ‘room’ as a way of holding the three pieces in relation or conversation with each other.
The first abstraction was a reverse chronology of my research diaries from 2014 backwards to 2012, filtered and edited according to sentences containing the word ‘room’. The second abstraction was an excerpt from an unedited Super 8mm film shot in Room 3.17 during a week in December, 2012. I informed the audience that the film was made collectively with 25 people from CTVR, and that none had used a film camera before. It was an experiment in learning through the lens with film. The third abstraction involved combining my filtered field-notes with excerpts from Virginia WOOLF’s essay ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ again filtered by sentences containing the word ‘room’. These two texts were combined and then read by a twitter bot machine, which generated new sentences from these texts using markov-chain code. This final abstraction was made with the help of Stephen CUSHEN, a Leaving Certificate student who was on an internship with CTVR / CONNECT in 2017.
These abstractions were each an imperfect way of asking how I might bring form to an experience of interdisciplinary research and the challenge of communicating in such a context. The written piece I present here, as part of the Phonica archive, is one of many iterations in response to this question. Here, it takes the form of an open-ended sentence on making room. The text is accompanied by stills from the Super 8mm film shot from room 3.17 at DUNLOP ORIEL HOUSE in 2012.
I am working towards an iteration on film.
the engineer does not need to be in the writing room and this is the myth and then he said what was i going to say to you did you ever get that film printed room-is-a-foil and he said that they all had such good fun doing that project and bringing all the funny things to the room and the idea of room-as-a-foil and here we all are in a room in a building on a corner thinking what if and what for and if that is not radical i don’t know what is and he came straight into the seminar room where i was setting up for the session and he just had a lovely smile on his face and he stooped over and gave me this big embrace and i get the feeling there won’t be room for melting pots and there will only be room for ladders to the moon and we are a melting pot at the moment but the glamour of the moon is alluring and it is certainly beguiling and at the moment i get the feeling that when the platform is built above the melting pot there will have to be justifications for the melting pot and they all walked into the room and in fact you need to cultivate your own naiveté and it gets you into rooms where people discuss quite complex things and this will take place on friday from 3.30pm to 5.30pm in the seminar room and we will get it done and the whole room a cocoon of orange and the reading room and one russian doll, two russian dolls and i am not visual but i think visually and i think in the shape of scenarios rooms buildings foggy images and i enter the room in the morning and i catch the same colleagues’ eye and i smile and mime ‘hello’ but he never reciprocates and we chatted in the seminar room from 12 to 12.30 and he was incredibly honest and i wasn’t prepared for what he would say and i leave him then and we leave the room together and i recall him saying how stressed he is and how difficult the work is and he says that he shouldn’t have any hair left with the way things have been going and i feel for him and there’s nothing i can say to help and talking about the future seems ridiculous when the present is so full of tension and crisis and the only culture in a crisis is crisis and i rather like things i can’t come to terms with and there’s plenty of room for blunder and the little buzz that learning or seeing something in a new way gives you and white board paint on designated areas of the wall space and the entire perimeter of the room and the tables are gridded and writable with solvent marker and the room is bright and spacious and probably the least oppressive room in the building and when i had just moved up in to the little room there had been a lot of turmoil around the government’s austerity budgets and people were really struggling a lot and there was anxiety and no one felt the government had any sense of empathy for the people and there was a sense that the politicians became subsumed by the system of governance as it stands currently and there was a sense that political will was severed once a politician crossed the threshold into the government buildings and now there is only room for truth and honesty and trust with yourself and so what is your true strength then and how do you go about letting that strength be powerful in the world and we all sat together writing together and the quiet of the room and the sound of a page moving along its own weight and gravity moving it against the gesture of the hand and there is an intensity in the room and the over-active heating system isn’t helping things much and they are running a few more numbers and they are writing code and they are trying things out and they are patient with each other they are learning from each other and it is a good energy they have between them and the one of them checks his phone not urgently just casually to fill in the waiting time and he taps and swipes the screen and his hand poised at the ready for another gesture to move on the content and so it turns out that someone has been in room since i moved out and the antennas were thrown with all the printed matter into a hard green plastic tesco box and shoved under the table in the lobby space and a lot of the paper was crumpled scrunched up into balls or just about scrunched up into balls as if they thought about it and i wasn’t sifting through them because i was waiting for the films to come back and they are back now they are with me and ready to be cut ready to be edited and now the room is squeaky clean and this kite the one from the room was made out of plastic and cocktail sticks but it took the shape of what it was and it mimicked well the form and it had string and all the associations between all of the artifacts between all of the images and words has been broken and all of the associations have been rendered simultaneous in the green tesco box simultaneous and non-hierarchical and maybe that’s a very excellent point and things perhaps were getting too fixed but in my heart i feel there was a problem with me taking that room in the first place and i remember when i would explore a little in the early days that the room was open and empty the rooms around it were locked or in use and i remember seeing one of the cleaning staff sitting and looking out the window and they might have been eating their lunch or having a cup of tea and i got the feeling that this was their space and i occupied a space that was someone else’s disused territory and why should i need the room when i have the lab with the computers and now i notice that my bin is in an even less convenient place for the cleaner to clean and so for example room was a place where people came to share something concrete about their knowledge or understanding or ignorance of antennas while at the same time there was a general sense of ambiguity as to whether what they had brought with them was the concrete element or the abstract element and in a sense their contribution was forced to be both and the everything-all-at-once nature of room is confusing and there is no sense of priority and there is no sense of selection and everything is received and i am left with a room full of images and ideas and not much color it has been observed and i have to dismantle this room and it’s kind of strange opening out the room and it’s as if i’m detaching from everything or trying to and using other people to get some perspective and room is underway and come to room during the week of the 10th to the 14th december between the hours of 10am and 6pm and you are requested to bring with you an image/object/text or any other item that conveys something of your knowledge ignorance experience understanding memory and/or impression of antennas and debriefing session in the seminar room mince pies & mulled wine provided ;) and room is a playful way for me to release a lot of tension around my research and something of importance in both art making and in engineering is a sense of where the limits are and where the breaking point or the locus of change is perceptible and the scientific adage “if you can’t measure it, you can’t change it could equally become “if you can’t break it, you can’t change it” and chances of encounter are greatly increased when one leaves ones room however cosy it may be and cosy can become claustrophobic and solitude can become isolation and i made my way towards the main gate and then turned on my heel and headed toward the reading room and she’s nervous around me and i guess i’m nervous around her too and i say that i wasn’t sure whether she thought room was good or was just some crazy thing that i did on company time but she thought it was ‘brilliant’ and room was dealing with a problem of touch within engineering and contiguity and permeability and the co-existence of knowledge and ignorance and sharing knowledge and sharing ignorance and it’s okay to not know and it’s okay to learn the thread and the ways of making connections and she said “so i came in from a meeting and i was too tired to go upstairs so i sat in the common room downstairs earlier today and we had a half an hour’s conversation about your film and he was wondering about the room film and where is it and i do think that room experiment is very powerful and i’ve always thought so”
Jessica FOLEY is a writer, teacher and researcher of art and communication. She writes poetry, art-writing, essays, academic prose and fiction. She is the creator and facilitator of ENGINEERING FICTIONS (2013-present) and STRANGER FICTIONS (2016-2018). Since 2007, Jessica has exhibited, performed and curated nationally (IMMA, NCAD Gallery, Highlanes Gallery) and internationally (HDLU Zagreb, PS1 New York, Tate Modern). Her poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly and Bath Magg. She is currently Asst. Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT).