Talking Head 2-(c) michael loizenbauer
As test subjects, performers are placed into atwittertubeandfacebook apparatus, in which absurd characters emerge following the dictate of current online-happenings. The performers are constructing, direct and live on stage, text sculptures as a form
of dance and an ever-new image of themseives via webcam.
Talking Matroschkas or a small Tower of Babylon.
The glossolalia of Christian antiquity, the automatic writing of the Surrealists, black metal’s growling –those are just some of the numerous acts of speech/writing of the finding of oneself within losing, of the giving up of will, because of a hope of gained insight.
Advanced Modern Talking Heads have found their place on the web. From the social networks we hear the droning of the polyphonic babble of simulated communication, which won’t give a hoot for the old distinction between original and copy, but rather builds its nest in an unsafe “space between”. People tweeting about a state of identity, which will be a completely different one tomorrow. In the biblical sense of the “talkers in tongues” we may be made to believe: we are being spoken by the Web 2.0 – it talks through us Talking Heads on the base of the actual Laws of the online world. The term Talking Head does not only recall one of the most successful New Wave bands of the 1970/80’s turn of the decade, it also denotes the frame of a
close-up camera shot on the speaker. But what is talking head that is of a sound mind (no religion, no drugs), whose experimental goal would be to improvise in various jargons of speech? E.g. the sociological lingo of the explorers of the precariate, the tech-talk of IT wizards, the BA-slang of neo-liberal worshippers of the economy, or the feverish post structural discourse of dance theoreticians. Even if all forms of crude parody are to be disregarded, there is, with every form of expert
jargon, if only for its tendency to exclude, always an urge for democratic contradiction; be it in the form of ironic subversion of it’s gestus of dominion, or alternatively, by its transformation into different fields of representation, which make it more difficult to “swagger” or make the “hot air”, which always resonates, more quickly distinguishable. Take for example the discursive experiment of placing two dancing Talking Heads on a stage.
