what are notes anyway?

This performance lecture presents, explores, and evaluates ‘remoteness’ in the collaboration between Jenn Kirby, Lauren Redhead and Alistair Zaldua through improvisation, interactivity, and experimentation in scores, texts, and instructions. ‘what are notes anyway?’ is both an experimental text for performance, and a prompt for this performative evaluation, where ‘notes’ stand in for sounds, notations, instructions, and collaborative exchanges that can be approached in multiple ways, including by ignoring them. The performance lecture itself draws on principles of performance autoethnography (Denzin, 2003) to negotiate between the presentation and performance of our collaborative work and its real-time discussion and negotiation. ‘Notes’ are considered as extractions, as abstracted, and are fragmented and layered through A/V performance employing past documentations and individually-created materials. Ideas of dis/continuity, layering, and responding in quasi-infinite loops mean that this is an ever-evolving discursive process that invites alternative methods of improvisation and interactivity. As a result, the idea of the collaborative work is itself presented as transient; each instance—or ‘version’—a snapshot of interacting fragments. ‘Notes’, and other materials, evolve in new or unexpected contexts by cycling through an iterative, non-linear process of disassembly and reassembly through improvisations undertaken together and in isolation, with new ‘notes’, ideas, and practices created as artefacts of this fragmentation. Beyond the material, then, this performance lecture will investigate the problem of collaboration and exchange over distance. This has become a familiar topic and mode of exchange for many artists since 2020, but here we further consider questions of present and absent bodies as themselves material to the discursive sonic exchange of a piece. Through continuous exchange and layering of synchronous and asynchronous performance, towards an interactive sonic and audio-visual practice, we seek methods that represents the collaborators as authors even in their fragmented presence.