Today at the ICA

I dropped by the ICA today around 12:30pm. The plan was to go and spend an hour listening and transcribing. I sat down on the floor in the corner of Ensemble, curated by Christian Marclay, and began my transcription attempt. Nothing happened. There was no possible way I could capture all of these sounds into a form of notation that would resemble them in any real or reproducible way. I sat and just listened for about fifteen minutes, then began again: "rat a tat - chink - tk - tk- tk- ching-ding dong - type writer keys - rrerrrrh - dong - errrrr --" at this point, obviously failing and simply listing any familiar onomatopoeic word I could think of that slightly corresponded to what I was hearing of the objects that were producing those sounds, I began drawing figures instead, hoping that this language would perhaps express the system of sounds and their relationships more lucidly. This only remained interesting for about three minutes. More just listening. Then at 1:00 I decided that for the next ten minutes I would just do a bit of compromised automatic writing in that I would try the best I could to transcribe, but anything I was thinking would come onto the page. Anyway, this is all I find not too interesting, but what it is hard to express just how difficult I found the task of trying to describe what I was hearing. It was, I venture to say, impossible.

That said, the space was so unique. The guard was dancing, laughing, and gregarious with many of the visitors. She talked to me on several occasions and even brought a chair in for me to sit on. During my time there, Yoko Ono's piece, Telephone, whose instructions read, "When phone rings, pick up," rang. The guard excitedly ran over; this is the first time it had rung! Guess who was the lucky person to get to talk to Yoko? That's right, the guard. She was exhilarated and I was excited to be there when it happened.