Video with sound 6:00 and performance.
A video and performance forming the third part of the Ellipsis series, which seeks to understand the linguistic, material, and spatial workings of desire through the poetics of the punctuation mark.
Ellipsis III is a video shot through sheets of paper. Each page is punctuated with holes that correlate spatially to the full stops and ellipses present in the diary entries describing details of dreams and encounters with “she” used in Ellipsis II. Variations between transparency and light produce elliptical access to the bodies and texts behind the paper.
The soundtrack features contact microphone recordings of my body, which have been moderated to frequencies more audible to human ears. Elliptic fragments of poetry appear as brief handwritten intertitles, interrupting the obscured audio and image with moments of linguistic clarity.
In the performance I recite a poem on ellipsis addressed to “she” in synchrony with the intertitles, positioning my body in front of the projection, where its silhouette mirrors the silhouette in the video.
Screened/performed at PolyPly, Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre, Centre for Creative Collaboration, London, 2014.
Performance photos by Hannah Daisy, 2014.
Hazel McMichael 