Transformer fable/
Testimonial
2021 - Audiovisual project, 26:27 - Kate Paul
Kate Paul is an artist writer based in Croydon. Working at the intersection of alt literature and audiovisual art, Kate works to formulate models for co-regulation with readers and viewers. Kate's most recent work is Transformer Fable/Testimonial: A Witness Statement (witness statement), an illustrated transcript that can be found on sweetpea69.com.
‘Transformer fable/testimonial: a witness statement’
Text by Sean Roy Parker
26:27”
The recording opens with layered vocals and descends into stumbled and faltered thoughts, appearing to lack conviction as if echoing the cadence of unsure children. I guess Kate is too nervous and might begin the recording again. She doesn’t. Right afterwards, I hear a mis-speaking; surely now she’s too far in to restart?
Why am I anxious? Because I’ve already reverted to projecting insecurities onto the narrator rather than receiving the delivery. I’ve automatically brought my own baggage, several predetermined expectations of what a live reading should sound like. In my shallow subconscious, I make an egoist judgement, comparing the performance to those I’ve listened to before: over-produced, “pro” audiobooks, podcast, radio shows.
Form is unsettling, and I’m here for the ride. Kate distances both subject and object, fracturing structures to such an extent that sentences become the sweeping of words into a rough, sparkling pile. The order is, at times, chaotic~ haphazard~ gleeful~, like following improvised subtitles on live television. Shards of syntax are strung together confidently with silence. False starts, non-verbal utterances, repeating of entire phrases: noises that sound like words drop unexpectedly in a familiar pattern, the air surrounding is thick with nothing (this is a very clean recording).
Listening is active rather than passive, but the listening I grew up with meant heeding requests and complying with rules. Once we clock on that authority figures are big babies in uniform (parental, professional, political), it’s fertile to feel out our own boundaries and stick flags in the ground. Personal sovereignty is possible through creative pushback.
When she laughs, I wonder whether this is scripted or accidental, planned or improvised. It compels me to laugh back, out of confusion and second-hand embarrassment. Am I being scripted too? Have I just inadvertently collaborated with a headless voice? Knowing that someone else is there –unsteadily worlding– keeps me hanging. When emotionality is piped in, the voyeur’s window is smashed and I consider the threat of being found out and why that normally matters so much. A silent recipient can hold judgement behind a cool mask, but a co-creator is entirely, inescapably engaged. There is another being on the other end, after all.
~~~
Up until a few years ago, but for as long as I can remember I struggled to follow traditional narratives. Film storylines didn’t stick, books remained forever unfinished, telling my own tales was near impossible. This conjured a painful lack within, as if I was not equipped to bask in the collective experience. Instead I stared at cinematic composition, obsessed over linguistic style, and perfected my own story. Listening to Transformer takes me back to the cinema seat with popcorn and sprite and an invigorated understanding of the power of interpretation. Kate’s acute, pernickity, tumbling performance style hooks me on its aesthetics: surprise repeat vowels, switching of foreground and background, exorbitant lists.
Sense is congealed through a bodily fiction rather than historical retelling. The staccato delivery forces me to listen to the sounds that Kate is creating with their mouth, the translation from text to image to sound. Although reminiscent of a linear narrative, I experience a gap in my own spatio-temporal reality. A circular –no! spirular!– tale is unfolding in multiple directions with manifold tongues flapping. I’m not a fixed point moving along a straight line. I’m a wildly rotating point undulating through a series of moments. I’m not on the monorail, I’m stuck in the teacups.
Writing about Kate’s work has unexpectedly led me to researching the anatomical configuration of larynx. The opening and bring-together muscles are antagonistic (when one activates, the other has to release). However, except in extreme cases, the opening and bring-together muscles are always activated simultaneously. I am thinking about the expelling of controlled sounds via muscles taking instructions from our brain. The reading, playful and crumbling, makes the unattached voice visible as an instrument made from wood or pig skin or taught horsehair.
~~~
“The boy would draw cross-sections of organs entering organs and then the written dialogue would be both thoughts and speech.” Meta, physical, metaphysical. There are reams of paper, trimmed and stapled together in exercise books, printed with evenly-spaced lines and a perpendicular margin, now complemented with anatomical drafts. The artworks are sold off in plastic wallets from an archive that can be endlessly replenished. I receive this narration (birthed from writing) as endlessly replenishable configurations of lines, sounds and events. They are artfully arranged to recur, slip, fade, sometimes disappear completely. I empathise with a sentence that gets swallowed, a lost thread of a thought. This is the closest I will ever get to claiming the text as my own.
Drawing attention to the unintentional poetry spun by bots and emailed to the boy (“You wanna dance? Sweetpea, sweetpea, don’t worry”), Kate dwells thoughtfully on the spam, deciphering potential tone and purpose, “sometimes kind of ominous...sometimes insulting...but often neither”. This elongated musing on scrambled AI is the acceptance that there is sense and feeling especially in the non-human. Using the internet far too much has sprouted an appreciation of ghosts in the machine, to such an extent that we often struggle to discern their voices from our own.
It reminds me of when everyone thought @horse_ebooks was a spam bot, but actually it was a person pretending to be a spam bot. Trickery is perfect, it raises the hairs on my arms and makes me squeal at my screen.
Illustrated transcript
sweetpea69.com
The internet is a pretty dull place. The wider it grows, the narrower I browse, checking only a few sites regularly. It feels incredibly difficult to read anything online for a lack of attention and a sort-of permanent skimming mode I’ve cultured. Industry-published texts are intermittently obscured by ads, while blogs and newsletters deny any fun in the margins. Classic self-publishing, for all intents and purposes, lives offline in punk xerox, flimsy pamphlets, badly-stapled zines, screen printed posters, which is notoriously difficult to transmit through a stiff, modular medium.
Fortunately for me, Transmission has crossed the threshold, combining the hard, stylised layouts of DIY with gamified click-through webpage. It’s magnificently simple; cursive handwriting atop slanted rules, translucent arrows on a vivid single-spread on a fixed backdrop. I feel like this is how we’re meant to consume alt-lit – with jaunty script and off-kilter graphics – not violent, monochrome Helvetica or tiny, austere Times.
I found two ways to read sweetpea69.com: one as a traditional detective (collecting clues and piecing together the puzzle), one as an artlover (noticing each creative decision and appreciating the flow between tiles). Roleplaying is a key aspect of non-judgemental observation. We must learn to decouple our ego from the way we interact with the world.
Kate’s visual layout is consistently inconsistent, thoroughly daft at times. If you read this description as a negative one, consider the baggage you have brought. The disorientating and challenging nature of this transcript is asking more questions of us. How do we carry our attitudes and values when approaching a narrative or when we consume an image? Are we passively accepting social convention? Why have we been cultured to receive artwork in a particular way, and who does it benefit? The purist expectation that all literature must contribute to the canon –the museum of historical texts plotted on a straight line– upholds a false narrative for gatekeeping culture. As Jean Dubuffet wrote in Asphyxiating Culture,
“I believe it is healthy for a community when its individuals pride themselves in having individual maxim prevail over the social maxim… Caprice, independence and rebellion, which are opposed to the social order, are essential to the good health of an ethnic group. We shall measure the good health of this group by the number of its delinquents”.
I am utterly convinced that I should glean joy from sweetpea69.com. For me, frivolity and inquisitiveness underpin the story, humour is the methodology. The voice is wry yet gullible, and at points verging on melodrama. I don’t know Kate’s real intentions with this work, and I might be horrifically wide, so the only truth I can follow is the one that I have from meeting it. ‘Body fiction’ is useful for turning inward to receive the artistic expression of others as an extension of their physical experience in the world, rather than as a cynical product designed to placate and bind readers together in “society”.
Read Sean’s essay on Katherine Paul’s work HERE.
