Autistic Resource Base

20.3.2010  9.am


Thinking now about the emotioning that built up in countless repetitious acts- positionings, alignments, erasures, re-angled points. Given in the manipulation and promotion of familiar objects animated in the sensory room in the Autistic resource base at the side of the school.

Twelve different children one after the other. They all arrived with different pre-occupations and different agendas. These they would take up as if tying on from the end of a loose thread left over in the time before. Sometimes they would take up the flak left by the child visiting just before them, utilizing the scattering of things or their bunched up groupings in order to take the motion in a new direction; to feel it out into a different tempo of concentration and dissipation; of stopping and starting.

Sometimes they would use these placements to draw patterns with. At other times they would set into motion the elements as with the marbles rotating around the rim of the giant plastic basin- more things added to the mix until there is a gradual entrapment and slow-down until inertia sets in. The pinging of disparate chords- their twang and vibration - the attack and fade, drive and absenting, that bodies would pick up on, pacing from here to there, stopping, sinking to the ground, articulating the rush and plunge by voicing it out as an added texture in the thought-shape. This played back into contact- in pulls and collapses, - light brushes as accidental spins in motion. Then a giving into body weight, clambering over me and hanging there for a while. Patterns of sticking together and sliding through- of stuckness and leverage; of descending particles and them flying through momentum; the rinse and spin, jolt and seizure; then the entropy of a blanketed figure. All the particles that were flying as the body in motion now filtering back down to ground level- neurological wind-stir- like snow particles in one of those shaken water toys, gradually descending as the rotary loses its frenetic rhythm by turns. Come to rest.

They played on and off of engagement and then would be following, watching, feeling the patterns as they took affect through out this nervous attention. Then into disengagement or letting off of the break to run that affect into the texture of a breathable atmosphere. A kind of reach in this percolating universe. Not touchable in the grasp of a fist but a kind of atmosphere that pervaded all things and joined up all humans in a quality of experiencing that affect. An affect that we moved through.

This a kind of moving towards entropy- than an insertion into that spreading out to re-set the momentum, reinsert a point of disturbance; twist it into a new working state- crashing on-off.

Objects bundled together squeezed shut in tight packages- stored high up on a near unreachable shelf, then tumbled out of their holding. Scattered or popped up in to use; a shelter constructed out of all that contracted stuff. Exploded into a canopy to get under. The person becomes the new package- stored within. Then that too jumped up past the storage space. A body re-invigorated in countless hops and jumps and leanings- an explosiveness of laughter, of mutterings, and sing-song taken and stitched from a thousand sources; adverts and conversations, reprimands and celebrations, party songs, clapping and teacherly hand-shaking. Her breath is working backwards and forward like a double winding and re-wind to create textures within textures; a kind of pump of affect that emotes and directs by each annunciation, jumping on and off of its attraction/repulsion towards and away from it’s double. Proximity and distance played into this bundle of tightness and expansion. A conundrum of physical connection and rebuff, of access to communication and agendas played out as a circuit not to be interrupted. Than the deliberate scuppering and assault of such programs becoming the game itself- the point of leverage- aggravation and hilarity playing back and forth. Affection and affectivity reaching its threshold level of tolerance. Then rest. Nothingness. Absorption and the pieces filter back through. Start up again and replay the whole thing as some kind of inversion of itself.

This kind of conical shaping of a Multiverse- like the contact dance that Steve Paxton describes- that shape intuited in the broken fragmentary nature of an exchange, a fight, a rocking embrace. A moment distracted, extended and walked out. Objects become the exchangeable pieces not in and of themselves but in how they are employed as markers- trace indicators- coinage circulating. Never crunched into particulars but kept in circuit- converters from one instant of motioning to the next. The markers of a pause in all of this- yet with no extension into space- no permanence of matter except when they are being utilized- taken up, spun around, re-packaged, re-invented in their capacity as actors. The children are their animators. They in turn animate the children. Invite movements- situate halts in the movement. They are the pace-makers- the time-keepers. The memory of that route. The need to habituate somewhere along the way.

A place visited, distanced from, then re-visited, upset, re-invigorated, or crushed to become a sound texture- the object incidental- its usage in a gravitational pull. People used in that way too. But that is not the end of it. This is not a thoughtless manipulation. It is a build-up of affects over and over again. The playing out of different landings, different spins, different holds- with objects, with the body; through the conjunctions of one another. An accumulation of frequencies jostling together in the room. They begin to interact as if by magnetic resonance. Many tendencies set in a capacity to create countless run-ins. The event is bound to simply occur as the intensity gathers pace. Moments of coming together or coming apart are unmissable; gather heat. Become unmistakable. They are recognized and configure as an experience- a memory- drawn from the interaction of all these particulars and elements over time. Waves and descriptions that run through objects and through people like transparent threads that nevertheless exert a real pull, a real force. Like the harmony/dissonance of a musical ensemble- mobile in its ability to come into fractionally different alignments in the creation of unique chords and schemes that carry attention from point to point. More a shaping than the distillation of a category that could be generalized to mean one thing or another. In that movement free to configure and re-set the equation between affinities and scatterings, we are moving into different equations that we are drawn towards but yet we do not know or have to know what they may come to mean.

These are the conditions- the workshop practice- of how this space becomes an emotioning space, worked up into something from out of fragmentary pieces. Those fragments that are falling and rising in order to meet in passing, are part of the mobility and tactile subtlety of this assembly. They are not fragments of any specific whole, disassembled and less than they were. They are fragments of a changing constellation. An assembly always in the process of its making, always re-making itself as different elements are introduced, engaged with or lax into a state of near entropy, before being jumped up into a different affiliation.