Content vs Conversation

Jodi Rose

(Title taken from a slide in Mushon's 'Getting Intimate with Your Invisible Audience)

“Are you around tomorrow?”

The main question people ask on seeing each other but already being on their way somewhere or to meet someone. Shorthand for either I really want to talk but am overloaded with input and stimulus or you're not compelling enough for me to stop and talk now or I don't remember who you are but I'll smile and say hello anyway just in case you turn out to be important...

Also a deep philosophical question that touches on the very nature of our existence – precarious, unknown and completely unpredictable. If you open yourself to life then unexpected winds may catch your sails, a force beyond your control may direct your steps in another direction, accident or disaster might befall you – so, I hope that I will be here tomorrow, but there is no guarantee - anything can happen.

Everyone is busy; rushing, making their connections, networking, schmoozing – and boozing;

I am like a ghost, a wraith floating through the corridors, now and then I see someone I know and we speak, sometimes there is a deeper connection, a warmth but equally often there is hardly any sense of touch, we brush each others surfaces but don't really connect.

Trying to get people to the tea lounge feels like another tug on an already over-frayed sleeve.

It wasn't mean to be like this. In the Utopian ideal of my imagination; the tea lounge was really a place for relaxed interaction and deeper exchange. Over a cup of tea. I sensed that having the technology overshadow the conversation could be a problem, and so it has turned out. Having to talk directly into the microphone, to pass it around and focus the communication between two or three people becomes an exclusion and a performance. Instead of being a group of people with the chance for many different configurations of interaction and connection, the social dynamic becomes two or three people talking in the aural spotlight, while the non-mediated guests become an audience. This wasn't supposed to happen. I wanted real intimacy, real connection. As you may read, through the wonderful essay by Mushon which formed the basis of his presentation – getting intimate with your invisible audience – we have abandoned intimacy. A performative intimacy or performance of friendship is not real intimacy or friendship.

So now, I am lying in bed trying to collect all the threads of connection and ideas into a sampling of text for this Open Zone Edition. If you stumble across an 'I' in the text, that is me filtering and framing the material contained in this book, which is gathered from guests in the lounge, friends with whom I crossed paths briefly at the festival, two of the only presentations I managed to hear in the main program, some of the artists with me in the Open Zone, people on the Traces Tea Lounge and radioCona team, the Museum of Transitory Art who made the video documentation, and other chance meetings. Another call for attention, another arena in which to perform – both for the tea lounge guests, myself and now you in deciding whether to read – or not – anymore.

Every conversation becomes loaded with the expectation of performance, intelligence, meaning, depth – like it has to be important. This was also directly opposite to my intention, after making cultural features for ABC Radio and being frustrated that only the key sound bites would ever make it into the program, I wanted to hear the words in between... and everyone has something to say.

I remember it now from previous conversation lounges, like the one I hosted at Pixelache 2007 in the lobby of Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. I became slightly manic, pointing the microphone whenever anyone opened their mouth to speak (at least that's what it felt like), the impetus to capture, to record outweighing the actual words or intent of the conversation.

And for what purpose, who is listening? We had a maximum of five listeners during the live stream of the tea lounge – after spamming hundreds of mailing lists, friends and colleagues. Over five thousand people have downloaded the recordings from Pixelache Helsinki, which are hosted on archive.org – I don't know who they are or how they heard about the conversations, or what exactly is interesting for them to listen to in these random exchanges with people who crossed my path and microphone at the festival. I haven't done any promotion of the material since uploading it there, and have no idea where these conversations may have been heard.

My intuition is that perhaps people also liked to hear something that wasn't polished, edited and produced – a raw form of communication – or maybe there is someone famous with whom I spoke, although I wasn't aware of it at the time. It was never about talking to the 'stars'.

Luce Irigary has a wonderful rave about writing 'well' in her classic feminist philosophical text 'when our lips speak together'. She says, who are we to want to write – or speak – well, to rise above the others, to become vertical, define ourselves as authorities? No, we need to stay on the flat ground, to speak together – maybe this is the origin of 'horizontal conversation' that the kom.post collective next door to me in the Open Zone were talking about in their mini-conference, on 'opening the open'. I don't know, I never really got the chance to talk to them. It's the same with radio, as Sophea Lerner taught me during the hybrid radio workshop Particle | Wave we produced at Pixelache Helsinki in 2005, you don't have to make 'good' radio. Take it out onto the streets, to the grilli, to the snack cart, give the your ears a life of their own and listen to what comes back to you.