#Transcript4GriefTense

This text engages a performative method of writing in the form of speculative transcripting. Operating mutually between practice/research, writing is proposed as ingestion and metabolic processing: one that negotiates a perceived paradoxical condition of transmission.

Interlocutors (fictionalized, human and non-human) transmit to ‘you’, a user, across contemporary dimensions and materialities of transmission (physical, virtual, online). This aims to offer productive openings that take us beyond the binaries of writing/making, practice/theory, image/text and their constituent material–immaterial conditions. Conducted through a speculative grief tense, it is both witness and enactment of the realtime materiality of online searches, image captures, data transmissions and word processing comments facility. The following embodied writing techniques are reformulated here to encompass a somatic estrangement: J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances, ficto-criticism utilized by authors Kraus, Nelson and Barthes, along with Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading. This emergent process identifies online forms of transmission (broadcasting, publishing, data) as a new paradigm in the reception, production and distribution of art/ expanded (self)publishing.