A Constructed World - Speaking to eels

Média Médiums

A Constructed World began Explaining contemporary art to live eels in 2003, inviting art experts from across the world to explain their research to eels temporarily inhabiting museums and art centres. The live eels (Anguilla anguilla) have now, due to their dastardly decline, been exchanged for a speaking, robotic eel. Did we at some point, decide the image has duly replaced the-thing-itself? Has the image replaced logic in the same way logic exceeded and displaced rhetoric before it, if so what use are intellectuals? What is to be examined when everyone knows how to read the image in a lively often disingenuous way? In this performance of absence, where is speech coming from. What difference does it make who is speaking? Who really spoke? Bruno Latour says something like there may be a space that we could deal with as empirical but we would first need to understand what part is human. 'We put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know'. When talking to others, objects and other species are always near. Ready-to-hand. Richard Rorty opines that that getting authority over oneself means hearing 'your own statements as part of shared practice.' This part of the seminar will take place over two days the first will be a lecture about how speech aggregates and ACW’s work and experience talking to eels, the second will be a group workshop to consider, what that group proposes, the voice of the eel might be and how an actual voice might be produced. A Constructed World work with actions and methodologies that bring attention to diverse modes of artistic practice. They are well known fortheir lengthy performances which include up to twenty performers presenting speech, conversation, philosophic al texts, music and singing, incorporating high levels of specialisation and not-knowing as a shared space. In their ongoing project, Explaining contemporary art to live eels, they invite art specialists to speak to live eels that are later released back into the water. These projects accumulate a research concerned with transmission and reception, satisfaction-without-delay.