Author: S.T. Lore
Client: Art Ink Books & Andre Piguet
Pages: 220
ISBN: 978-0-6450166-6-6
Format: Fictional Essay
Year: 2022
EDGE DETECTION
Two filters coffees arrive.
The waitress spills mine as she places it down. I wave off her apology, ‘No need to get me a new one … This is just fine.’ The black liquid spreads between us as her red nails lift the tablecloth where I have placed my hand flat: ‘I like mess. It makes me feel at home’ Yet truthfully it feels awkward being served coffee this late although I am elated to avoid detection in the hotel lobby and escape a post-talk crowd. The spilled coffee is exactly what I need, but in fact, I wish she’d sit down and make my deceit complete. ‘You know, coffee always makes me nervous I should also have something to eat’. The spread she proffers me is obscene—poached figs, fresh mangos and potted yoghurts; small triangles of Brie staged on salt-cured salmon, a basket of twisted pastries, sat next to ham hock and beans. I select the Nasi Goreng with fresh chillies and a juice fresh from a machine. Stammering in a state of enchantment with her least false movement a whole section of me might suddenly collapse. I focus on the drops of a coffee machine. My nasal passages flare to the sounds. I map out a space through these sounds and orient myself into a web of her actual body by the help of noises. In other words, physically and psychically extended by the sounds, I draw her out of space. ‘Yeah I don’t know. I’m allergic to overhead lights. I need low lighting, also I can’t stomach noise as much I used to be able. I read something about the harmonic nodes of sound. Like, if you stand in the right spot in a room you'll hear harmonics that are soothing, or otherwise, can obliterate you.
Schwitters was an expert in processing collections of paper files. As a technical draftsman in the paper factory near Hannover, Schwitters responded to the magnifcent noise of the machines, ‘During the war, at the machine factory in Wulfen, I discovered my love for the wheel, and recognized the machines as great abstractions of the human spirit.’ In a search for artistic expression, focusing on collage, that language of fragmentation, a theme of technology is resonant (not unequivocally positive, destructive powers are acknowledged). But due to the file weight restrictions that came into effect during the rise of the Second Reich, with an explosion of documents, came other duties. Monetary incentives were offered to clerical workers for the destruction of files and authentications issued to ensure their complete annihilation, and yet, Schwitters felt ‘that this transmutation of records into waste-paper’ must be subverted. He wasn’t that fond of these early office reforms on carbon-copies and duplicates (perhaps a ruinous form of political censorship) and he claimed that the sound combinations for his ‘Ursonata’ were composed at this time ‘in part unconsciously stimulated by the printing of labels’ and the shredding of documents to a machine embossment on certificates.
Long ago, important aspects of this skilled labour force fell into ruin and techniques disappeared. It is, apparently, arduous technical work assembling scraps of paper into useable information – hours spent to compile worthy findings. In this dearth of material, and in an absence of paper documents, we encrypt data in protection acts. These increase a role of privacy concerns and manipulations by commercial enterprises.
‘How did you get here this morning? Maybe by foot, maybe you ordered a car, or god forbid, rented a
scooter. With an increasing dependence on automation, to hurried advances in global digital networks,
very few people retain a technical ability for protective insurances. Media archaeologists once trawled
the industrial recycling centres—vernacular ‘waste dumps’ if you prefer—searching for the remnants
of our collective and private unconscious thought to be stored inside the piles of shredded documents.
I recall automated shredding kiosk’s that sprung up everywhere, in university mailrooms, hotel foyers
and international food courts, originally designed to halt personal identity theft. Vast areas with the
highest foot traffic were targeted plucked from over 200,000 mapped locations and swiftly deployed.’
And in the expressway far beyond this hotel lobby, beyond the communal towers, beyond the political babble, beyond the video downloads and public imagery, I listen to white noise. It is personal. It is dark. I imagine a trash-heap of bitcoin racks fused together beyond blips or currencies. I consume noise medication. I draw in graphite like an animal transcribing the world for post-human instruction manuals. Explaining things is reduced to somnambulant groans and to owl hoots … yet underneath, lurk historical layers, droning at a pitch below the night, settling into my memory foam mattress, the noise ‘washes past, a remote and steady murmur around my sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream’