ART&RESEARCH

SilencesontheFuture: Interview with 7 adolescent on their future.

Interview with 7 adolescents on how they view the future. this edit only allows the silences in the answers. Edit by Victorine van Alphen for Art&Research project Absence/Presence: a research on the ambiguous presence of silence and the impossibility of silence as absence of conversation (or the possibility of  eloquent silences).

Trial by Silence: Chronological progression of Silences from 114 recorded trials of Eichmann

Trial by Silence: Chronological progression of Silences, Montage (Victorine van Alphen, 2011) allowing only the silences from 114 recorded trials of Eichmann in Jeruzalem, 1961 to research what these silences reveal as well as conceal and rewrite. This montage confronted us with the impossibility of defining and isolating silence.

Theoretical background for the montage-experiments:

ELOQUENT SILENCE: A LINGUISTIC APPROACH.

At first sight it is understandable that silence has generally been put in non-verbal, non-linguistic and mostly paralinguistic categories. However, the statistical ‘fact’ that not more than 35% of our adult face to face conversations is reckoned to be verbal[1] (thus  the nature of the remaining  65% of our conversation) could inspire us to include more aspects into the linguistic, revision its verbal focus and consider the status of silence.

Ephratt interprets Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) as putting silence forward not as meaningless, but as the appropriate mode for expressing meaningful content which falls outside logical expressions. In line with this proposed understanding of silence, Bilmes[2] states that where the rule is to speak, to not speak is communicative (p.78). By following the same line (that focuses on silence as expressive mode) Ephratt suggests that silences should be seen as pure linguistic symbols: he characterizes silences as both linguistic and vocal. Doing this, Ephratt criticizes the way silence is only defined as non-vocal by an ‘identification by negativity’: it is characterized as non vocal because of the ‘trivial fact that silence had no  vocal expressive signifier’ whereas non-vocal signs other than silences are in fact characterized positively. When, after an analysis of many silence definitions and -categorizations plus the assumptions they entail, Ephratt defines the phenomena of paralinguistic pauses in the following way: “when silence serves the speaker in discourse as an indexical sign- having simultaneously both iconic and symbolic features, it belongs to the paralinguistic dimensions” Not all pauses belong to the paralinguistic dimension: an example is the non communicating pause of somebody that is asleep[3]. As not all pauses belong to the paralinguistic dimension not all pauses are signs. However,  in There exists no such thing as a photonegative (see publication) it is the silences in discourse that serve as indexical signs that I refer to.

To my opinion, art has always shown itself a strong form to attack the meaning of signs in a deconstructive, illuminating and of course highly idiosyncratic sense; Art deals with and creates meanings of signs and nonsigns (which in the hands of art lose their difference). So it is through manipulation -or in this case recording, collecting, selecting and editing material- that I tried to approach these silences-as-signs.

With both montages -trial by silence and silence on the future - it was my aim to nuance and comment on Ephratts explanation of silence as linguistic and vocal. I tried to do this in favor of gaining insight in the pluriformal, shifting and thus ambiguous meanings of silences. These silences taken from the original discursive context where they exist as a relative absence, come to the fore as a new presence. As I explain in There exists no such thing as a photonegative this new entirety can be seen as the negative form of the presence that has been ‘cut out’ by careful artistic violence. Ironically however, there might be no such thing as a negative form…