“My own material existence I am reasonably assured of. I can imagine my friend at the other end of the line. But between us two there is an airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else[…]The vocal inhabitants of this strange region have an amazing vanishing quality[…] And sometimes…you hear the confused murmur of a hundred voices. You catch more expressions from private conversations than your nerves can transmit to the central office of your brain; and if you are imaginative, you may undergo, as I have, a feeling as if you had a hundred astral bodies that were guiltily listening at as many keyholes.”
“A Reporters Visit to the Boston Telephone Exchange”
Scientific American 1887, 106
joe[a]strangeregion.co.uk
COLLIDING WITH GREAT SPEED FROM GREAT DISTANCE, OFTEN MISSING
written by Joe Summers + Joe Vaughan
in collaboration with SVS Collisions, Munich
edition of 200
116 x 177mm, 28pp
2022
four pounds
Colliding with Great Speed from Great Distance, Often Missing is a pamphlet created during the development of The Angel’s Share (a mixed media performance piece by Joe Summers & Joe Vaughan) as part of the SVS collective’s Collisions festival and exhibition. Part of the text was written in response to a period of personal and creative dissonance between the two artists and includes WhatsApp messages sent and received between them in the weeks preceding the SVS residency in Canfranc, at which only one of them was able attend. Some of the experimental texts explore the idea of meaning being derived from the presentation of two unrelated expressions and the similarities we automatically infer through our innate desire for meaning. Sentences overlap, collide and forge new phrases by virtue of their collisions. From this plurality one may gain something close to a singular, personal understanding.