Kati Payne

Practice #8: Revisiting “Redirecting yourself into an image”

A diptych. Redirecting into images in history, in the container of Yvonne Rainer. Resting the eyes of the present on the dust of the past. To make relevant again.

Dismantle technically means to break(apart)(down) into its pieces. I think of dismantling as removing something from where it has been affixed. Maybe later affixing it elsewhere, in a different place of the hierarchy.

Laying on the ground is dismantling verticality. 

Laying on the ground is resting.

Resting is dismantling capitalism.

Therefore, is verticality capitalism?

Like a mathematical proof.

 Practice #6: (Re)directing yourself into an image

How do you react after listening deeply to an image?

What life can an image have, after the moment of its inception?

How do we enter unchanging images? Does our entering change them? Can they change without our entering?

How to add new material to pre-existing material?

A practice of accumulation, being the accumulation, how to make what was accumulated so well integrated and accepted that it just becomes a whole of a new thing, not an add on to an old thing?

How do we interact with images as a way to honor them by keeping them alive and fulfilling their potentialities (to stay relevant, to be subsumed by new contexts)?

All I ever end up with is a handful of questions.

At the museum, directing myself into...

Improvising in slanted sunlight, trying to mimic my own shadow, my goal in movement is to mirror my own shadow, but it is distorted by the angle. As I move to try to achieve the distortion, the image of the distortion changes. A shadow of a moving thing is un-pinnable. In a haystack with no needles, just all hay and not particularly searching for anything. It is the epitome of the present constantly falling forward. The input and output are inextricably linked, what you respond to is constantly changing and so the response is too. The present is reinjected into the present until the present has passed into a new one. The present is squared. 

Practice #4 pt 1: Communication between things that are different simply because they are different (inner- and intra-body conversations)

Communicating vs. relating:

This prompt tripped me up. Jorgie Ingram makes a guest appearance to help me talk it through. I present to you: miscommunication as communication, relationality as communication, things that aren’t communication as communication. 

Methods:

A conversation without hearing, futile

A hand hand, foot foot conversation, underscored by more conversation and laughter

Practice: jazz listening and documenting stream of consciousness reactions

The mission and deceit of jazz

How eyes direct you/the audience - (jazz group) power to keep themselves close-circuited

If they wanted eye contact only into / between each other they could leave us out, they

could go somewhere else entirely, they could make this be in vain

Body in Pain - weapons as extensions of the body = instruments as extensions of the body = instruments are weapons

I wonder what they are annihilating

I wonder what brainwashing has proceeded this

Carrying out of task by human will

I wonder their awareness of their mission

A greater cause

I wonder what their homecoming will look like

I wonder if they expect glory

Each moment carefully crafted even though none seem to fit a whole

Exactitude is patience - waiting until elements / polyrhythms fall in together again

Confidence in a shifting core

Confidence in introducing / integrating a new aspect (seamless)

Emergence from the dark (actual bodies, when their part comes in, storm the stage) at the precise moment to reconvene / recollect into a whole

What is the leading factor indeterminable, well hidden lead, maybe there really isn’t one

Illusion trick / strategy /deceit for the operation

In + out of lucidity

Straight connect to the soul

If you sleep it’ll sneak out more willingly

Portholes that keep moving / sliding past

What axis is being rotated around - it keeps changing

Jazz as rotation

Rotation as knowledge-making

Surrealism is a great example of how everything can be turned into something else. I want to use books as plates for my dinners and drink my tea out of colanders. Futility is not synonymous with failure. 

Everything can be turned into something else, and by that logic, everything can be REturned into the thing it once was.

So I finally mended all the clothes that have been in the “mend” pile for years. Maybe doing things on my to-do list to fulfill these assignments falls into the idea of density that I believe goes with quickness. 

Sewing by hand with a sprained thumb is a slow-going boat. With quickness, time multiplies; with sloth, the units of time expand, big chunks of it fly by like nothing. The speed you are moving changes the speed of things going past you. This is what slow inefficiency can show me about quickness, from the outside. Futility is not synonymous with failure, and repetition is important. 

Practice #1: scenic routes / beating around the bush

When you take the scenic route, sometimes you are late,

But you have also seen more of the world.

When you do a contour line drawing

The result is fragmented in a way that makes the object more itself.

I say the crux of this is how image differs from presence.

Fragmentation is a strategy for seeing more clearly,

Or for stripping away.

Abstraction is there too.

When you draw something from memory

The buffer of time passed and passing prevents you from looking directly at.

Mind as mirror.

Mind as steamroller; flattened images.

Mind as fragmenter,

A memory changes each time you re-re-member it

Some people say it’s a flaw but I say

It’s our built-in evolutionary tool to help us see more clearly.

Hindsight is 20/20.

All indirect gaze is 20/20.

And avoidance and refusal are different.

I’ve been obsessed with the word gravitas since my high school teacher Lewis said that one of my short stories had it, wrote it in the top margin in pencil, but

Calvino is more interested in “weightless gravity.”