System

A collaboration with Alex Braidwood

Merging technologies from two different eras, Impalpable Descriptivism is a participatory writing system and reactive audio sculpture that performs the printed word as score. It is a text to phone to email to phone to fax to camera to data to noise system. Through the use of a restrained, ubiquitous mobile input method (text messaging), participants are asked to deliver a detailed real space account (the printed facsimile) of something seemingly insignificant, mundane or otherwise difficult to put into words. By asking participants to push beyond the surface and communicate the subject in a more verbose way than is necessary, a narrative-based inquiry develops. As messages traverse the system, their resulting facsimiles are employed in real time as score. This exploration of asynchronous collective performance creates a sound work composed entirely from the sounds and literature of mundane objects and actions.