Caroline Sultzer + Valerie Franco
Octopus: An evening inside blood type
Performance Space New York

correspondence transcript

I know what you were going to ask and the answer is no, I was not a thumb sucker. Do you remember when in presence I held the conical device and when the button was pressed a past familiarity became immediately understood.

Understood how?

Wondering then how I will now, fill or substitute those desires to condition a habit of pain control. Your younger self remembered the button that facilitated the remedial efforts of this pump. Keeping the time, it marked a flooding.

How can I track the device? A Role reverse where the pca becomes dependent on something to function. Although its function was only dependent on my pain. How do I cause it pain, cause it to need something else in order to “operate”. Force it to be recorded as a body. Measure its failures, inconsistencies. Cause it the need to be conditioned.

The moment of understanding, then stemmed from the conditioned act of pushing, never sucking. Manifested in a fixation, of pushing onto the thumb of another, in hopes to retrieve that same satisfaction-al warm rush of an analgesic. In direct opposition to thumb sucking, where the child seeks autonomy onto the skin of itself, I pushed but never my own, acknowledging that this body could never on its own provide an adaptive response to an emotional regression.

Pleasure chemically confused with the desire to numb, coming from the other.

Ok lets work around chemical confusion - The process of chemicals binding within the body denatures the receptors. Preconditioned at this age it imprints structurally reforming the way in which the body is able to process sensorial input. The idea of autonomy was never at reach, but rather dependency was the way in which I contended with autonomy.

Like a light pulsating touch?

Something that needed the mirror of another to facilitate perpetual first impressions, now a mere series of trial and inevitably always error.
Tracing the response of the other to understand how to act.

Can you trace this existence in marginal space? Yea, do you remember when we first realized
that they were a faggot?

Marginally negotiating how to react, respond, digest, always one step back, or was it one step
over? I do not maintain I do not keep up

So it was initially an uncontrolled reflex - something that was later redirected - moving from
being a container to a conduit.
Is it easier to retain than to let go?
Is it easier to let go than to retain?

yeah that's good

Not bad

Ok what about the light?

Light is sticky and loves to hold place in the body, a loud burn, the muscles can very easily take on the timing. A desire to numb the impacts, I sought answers from the bodies around -
seemingly unaffected I was deemed too sensitive.

I know what you are thinking, it is the familiar pain.

But don’t you prefer it that way? I thought that’s what you said.

Sensitivity creates limitations - things to push behind the back. Through the back. Light travels
from the center of the bulb into the center of my core. 
Some of the most powerful ones have beams to trace, beams to count. If open to the idea the beams can pass through the body, leaving traces only through the autonomy, release is key.
To redirect light through the body, it can now be physically present.

Present how?

I have this image, because it makes so much sense to me in terms of falling. There's a beam of light and then there's this body floating, a body of light going through my center and the arms and the legs are held back, and it's all funneled.

So as it is imagined, a self strung along the beams floating above, chest up - bent backwards.
Although now in hindsight, it wasn't enough to keep my body from falling again.

Can stillness have a tempo?

The touch of another was never quite right - pulsatile triggers - give the girl a beat.

A body that was already being squeezed did not necessarily welcome the confinement of
someone else’s physical touch. Unregulated lengths of the neuro and physiological plasticity.
The very physical reveal of the current state of - pairing up against, creates a further push of isolation and discomfort when an abnormality is felt.

Being held caused pain; my body in its early developmental stages was forced to drop out - isolated to avoid any acknowledgment of the metal bar that held up the chest deformity. The ribcage internally bearing the friction, stainless steel against bone, filed and imprinted.

Physically separated from myself and others, as the body that was familiar to me, morphed for my ease. Distance is a symptom that contends with irregularities. A correctional insertion, where the body prevails permanence and memory is inescapable, holding onto the last figments before time tore them apart.

Were you able to hold onto anything? I held onto the closeness of physical distance, even after the removal of the bar.

And what about the chest? 

The chest in time will not be able to hold the cavity up on its own. It needs assistance in order to function -- for a body that will give out.

Dependence is a normal part of proper pain treatment.

Drag that space out for me – T
he body was dependent before the mind knew this was a desire that it would try to fulfill. Where morphine has touched my body, and left marks - the first time nothing sticks, it acknowledges the whole system.
And on its second run it begins to make marks.
Their efficacy is often limited by a delayed response ; from a systemic first pass
The drug needs to flood the entire body, before its able to affect. Chemical signatures mark the body after its initial rush because internal body systems are optimal storage pockets. The adaptability of this body, unfortunately led to its detriment.

Can you remind me of the half life and about the storage of a half-life?

Before a response is shown the chemical breakdown has already begun. The molecular structure of morphine is a permanent composite that will never reach net zero. Its breakdown is unlike that of a body - starting from the moment it binds the breakdown begins. It can be dated through its half life - a continual disposal of half of its volume. Zero is an unachievable construct further proof that the chemical will outlive the body.

Left open, fluids* rush through it so that it can both flush and retain.

Full of half lives that have , that will outlive. 
You have it there, to control it, you have it there so that you can control it, - is it performing onto
you?
Do you recover?

I Manage.

It forces the brain to shift how the body feels in response to pain, overpowering the bloodstream

Have you ever had to lie on someone to hold them there?

A favor if you may.

I'd imagine you’d do the same.

Body weight is realignment. It’s all just a period of production waiting for a future lack. Medicine is in fact an addition and subtraction, an addition of what is lacking and a subtraction of what is in excess. The pressure and weight of another body onto mine was presumed to be the remedy for a body
out of control.

Bearing weight was an addition of pains - Morphed into the seeking of an intensity - seeking to
push up against the pain to harness and redirect. Body weight is now realignment, control
A call back into the self.

I had a dream about your younger self- floating in the clouds over the water - I was sitting, legs
paralyzed - squeezed between the clouds - you were running away and through them as if they
were hill tops - a responsibility to a younger self a connection like a hug that was to watch over -
Full of energy and housing youth - tiny body - tiny glasses - running and laughing. Over the
clouds , over the water , my body was stuck but you visited often enough… my memory of you
was enough to know that you were okay

Pump to morphine to button
Sub to body to body

_______________

Special Thanks to Dozie Kanu, Performance Space NY 
For the endless support - Zhi Wei, Max Popov, Juan Garcia, Sam Warkov, Griffin Stoddard, Yve Laris Cohen
Supporting Materials - Zhi Wei, Nicholas Phillips, Matas

        

Valerie Franco + Luis Polyanszky Worth
Installation, sound, text
canopy.supplies

What follows 
In attendance


    If
    characters are not present
    then


I’d like you to study the previously enclosed space in an attempt to compensate 
for an encountered lack. Point to both a cemented linearity in presence. And a cyclical one 
in its replacement.    


As an encounter: I’d like you to


Insert results from an algorithmically distilled vocalization. Extract tonalities from an 
insignificant representation. Expose an interior previously unseen


    (A granulated synthesis fragmented from a digital pace of a body. 
    A mark translated. 
    Its calculated(-ing) makeup leaks through a gated threshold that has already 
    reached a point of capacity. It trickles down into a metallic clearance with unsubstantiated 
    motivation. No new information is created, but the physicality of the body pushes through 
    in that emptiness.)


And subsequently confront a new set of synaptically (dis)placed contingencies.


Now let it go 
and remember


    else
    contained shortcomings of two characters
    then

    To reveal a presence previously concealed, trace the overarching progression that 
    used to be. 
    Various mournings, spatially resonant. I’d like you to recall these cued voices.
        

A rearrangement of "Sensual Inconsistency"

Cooper Union
New York, NY
Thesis Show with Sam Warkov.

Performance Room - CU EOYS
New York, NY

OrangeTheory Text

“Her body is monitored to fit perfectly above the baseline—

to remotely track her but to also keep her on track, interrupting the flow of her experience to prompt her – when an algorithmic analysis of her own real-time data deems it necessary – to eat, drink, or rest.
– to __, ____, or ____. 

*A post-

she is a somatic individual that aspires to be autonomous. Embraces responsibility for her body and the choices she makes for it. Short-circuited responsibility: the more time she spends with her data doppelgänger, the more familiar she becomes.

She builds herself a picture of what it is she’s really doing. Letting herself see and understand the choices she thinks she’s making on a daily basis. This of course is a picture of who she really is. She imposes onto herself an intimate modulated surveillance, in the name of self-care.”


(A practice of surrogacy: and so if I reduce myself to just a number. A number based on statistic, a baseline, I can live forever. Continuously tracked. Packed within a digital repository.)

Unaltered Audio

Script:
1. I have an endless desire to supplement an absence, a lack.
2. I mourn my own various absences.
3. A longing for an autonomous self completion coming from an image of the other.
4. The awareness of this gap, a two finger difference.
5. It’s a structural difference, not a lack of artifice. The congenital chest wall deformity, absent.
          

Staedelschule Rundgang
Luis Einhauser, Valerie Franco
Installation, Sound; Performance (12:00 daily)

im ersten Akt; zu Beginn
beschreiben wir - nach einer Grund-legung - im Bewusstsein dessen, was war, die Zustände der akut aktuellen Situation. 
      
(within the first act; at the BEGINNING,
we are...describing - that is after the fact -; aware of what ’has been’; various conditions of present, acute, allocations) 

We prepare an outset -more or less dramatically - (an ARC) on which the progression can then, slowly, streadily embark and/or proceed on. To be determinded: does its momentum accelerate slowly in progress (0 to 100) or is its beginning a full-fleshed 'Performance' within that set universe.

Focusing on existing terms | materials | citations | previous explorations (fictional, fictional within themselves) Characters V and L ("beside themselves") mourn on their own ('various') absenceS. Detachments as much as from themselves; as from oneanother. Measuring their own, individual stati (singular: status), they're interested in as much as visualizing these, their ...short-comings... by means of living up to a set parameter (of inconsisten- cies), i.e. Questionaires: 

Dear Diary

Dear Superior, dear subordinate dear...

'How did you ...’

’Place your...’

’I’ll bring you back..., there, you'll just wait...

    - ’for your results’
    
    
     

Joanne, Staedelschule
Frankfurt, Germany

          
          
_eirelav__ · To Understand / On Understanding
          


4 sets of body measurements:
Temperature, Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, Oxygen Level.

Averaging each result to a number between 0 and 3, which determines the strength 
of the heaters and the fan. 
        

Cooper Union, 2nd fl
Valerie Franco & Max Popov

2017
Dean's Office
New York, NY

         
        A heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic. Under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical proposi­tions, and so on. The apparatus itself is the net­work that is established between these elements. The apparatus always has a concrete strate­gic function and is always located in a power relation. 
         Giorgio Agamben, What is An Apparatus?, 3. 
         
        The performance is an ongoing piece, its beginning is marked by the act of self-medication. I take my daily anti-inflammatory pill for my foot, followed by one for my stomach. This small act mirrors the cycle of what follows. 
         
        A sound piece plays in the background, on repeat. It is a documentation of a one-way conversation led by my mother. The conversation, in short, briefly mentions my general doctor losing/never having my medical documents as my mother tonally expresses (the sound is only fully accessible to those who speak spanish) the frustrations of the medical institution as she attempts to obtain referrals so that I can see the specialists I have been seeing bi-anually since I was 5.
      
        Xylene, DMSO, acetone and chloroform. These chemicals are used to extract the ink from the medical documents, after I’ve finally obtained them.

        Performed in the Dean’s office, I attempt to create parallels between medical and school institutions. Leveling them both as systems that capture one’s body as the creation of inaccessible documents. The Dean’s office exists as a mythological sacred space, as the core of a system that withholds and stores the capture of your subject. However, you come to realize that a space like this is non-existent, these systems are strong because of their scattered, and de-centralized nature. The data of a body is what keeps an institution running, the apparatus is contingent on this data. The document itself has no value, and is brought back to its original material form. I will not be able to get access to the original, physical form of these documents again as they will now only exist in a digital, virtually inaccessible form. As a way of making the medical system tangible again for myself, I go through this complicated and toxic procedure, knowing that I couldn’t change anything or re-gain agency of an apparatus that I had never had any inital power over. After the ink is removed, the paper is put back into a system of access and bureaucracy. They are placed in an institutional printer, put back into the same cycle so that another body can be captured, subjectified, categorized.
         
          
         
          This ends part two. ---
         

        

2017
Peter Cooper Suite
New York, NY

      Slendertone uses Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) technology to penetrate and stimulate the deepest core muscles, tightening your inner corset. It replicates natural muscle contractions 
        

2017
New York, NY

          Prescribed ECG machine for arrhythmia.
         
         1. Attaching machine on my body for the first week. 
         
         2. Taking it off and placing it on somebody else. Inserting another body into the process of my own medicalized capture/ subject production.
         
         3. Caroline wears it for the second week. Producing a second set of data under my body's examination. 
         
          
         
             Duration: 2 weeks. (no documentation available and no access to the data created.)
         
          
         
             A body-to-body transmission.