Lisa Busby and Jill Halstead.
Strings, threads and knots have emerged as key metaphors for thinking on the nature of inter and intra action, and the relationship between self, other and the material world. String metaphors draw on the affordances of threads by focusing on the actions of weaving, looping, braiding and entangling, less explored is the way string sounds and the actions of tuning, damping, fretting and strumming.
We take up Donna Haraway´s invitation to play the ancient game of string figures as a form of knowledge making. Using sonic string figures, we spin a number of threads into yarn, threading hand to ear and ear to hand. Working with braiding as an acoustic practice we splice, make loops, knots and ligatures, some yarns we hold tightly, some we loosen and drop.
This a messy project of description, narration, intervention, inhabiting, conversing, exchanging and building. Through conversations, shared listening and reading, archive work and storytelling we trace the imprints of an interaction. We take up Haraway´s words and gestures to reconfigure what counts as knowledge as we search out ways to reconstitute the generative forces of embodiment. We tangle ourselves with the shared task of using antiracist feminist theory and cultural studies to produce patterns of worldly interference.
Proviso for a Score
A game consisting of two (guitar) players making a sequence of sonic figures.
Taking turns, each player makes a sonic figure which is offered to the other player, the next player manipulates that figure taking it from the hands of the previous player to create another figure.
Extracts from Guitar Yarns
Murderous Green Noise
Cygnet
Better Songs