 Now I'm in an awkward position because I'm going to introduce the next speaker from here. We have a panel, a really fantastic panel with Lucy Ives, an established writer and poet who is doing a book on Madeleine's writing, and then she'll be joined by Leopold Lambert, editor of the Phenambulist, but also was a close colleague of Madeleine in her later years. So Lucy, why don't you come up to the podium. So let's just see how this, how does this sound to everybody? Does this sound okay? Okay, thank you. So speaking of precedence, because precedence came up just now, I wanted to start out today by going back a little bit to the late 1960s in New York City. And I don't mean for this to, here we go. I don't mean for this to seem too narrowly historicist, but I think that this is an important point of departure because it helps us to see how Madeleine Ginza's work is connected to conceptualism and conceptualist leanings in contemporary poetry and experimental writing, as well as other strains of text-based art. And I don't mean to imply that Ginza's merely conceptual in her orientation, that would be way too limiting. But I do want to provide a brief introduction to Ginza's early writing in the 1960s and 70s, which I hope will allow you to see her efforts in their contemporary relevance and importance. And most importantly, in their intelligibility, because indeed her work is too often described, when it is described in broader trajectories, histories, as being difficult or unintelligible. And not just that, but being a product merely of her own fancy rather than an engaged response to her times. So in this very short talk today, I'll say some things about Ginza's early prose and poetry, and I'll also present one of the unpublished poems that I've come across in my work in Ginza's archive. And I'm also going to outline as I introduce you to this writing the ways in which I think Ginza's literary output should be understood in the years before she began her collaborative work on the Reversible Destiny project. So I'll discuss her poetry and prose in relation to this project, but also in their distinctness from it. And these remarks are adapted from an essay that will appear in the May 2018 issue of Freeze Magazine and are also related to a longer, more involved academic article. Also briefly just to say about the title of this Visionary Cybernetics, Cybernetics as we know is a transdisciplinary approach to the study of or implementation of regulatory systems. And I like to use this as kind of a quick gloss for some of the ways that I'd like to speak about Ginza's ambitions as a poet and a philosopher. So in the spring of 1969, the poet, prose writer, and artist Madeline Gins joined a collaborative effort to make artworks and writing on the streets of Manhattan. Along with John Giorno, Lucy Lepard, Adrian Piper, and Hannah Wiener, among others, she contributed to the final issue of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's legendary magazine Zero to Nine, which took the form of a special supplement titled Street Works. And you see the title page here. Ginza's submission was a group novel for which she asked the reader to quote, please finish these sentences and return this paper with the ultimate goal of creating a group novel and historical novel and exploration of the nature of consciousness. Also included in Street Works were photographs by Gins and Arkawa of a stylized house floor plan laid out on a plastic sheet that could be unfolded on the sidewalk. This floor plan also appears in the end papers of Ginza's first book, 1969's Word Rain. So the end papers here. And I will read the whole title of the book is Word Rain, Open Parentheses, or a Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G-R-E-T-A-G-A-R-B-O. It says, suggesting the coincidence of the floor plan and this image in the end papers, a connection between the exploration undertaken in Street Works, the group novel, and Word Rain's ecstatic experimental prose. In the questionnaire included in Street Works, Gins announced her interest in the possibility of a novel collaboratively composed by individuals who might also be its readers. In Word Rain, she began to describe the complex relationships entailed by a textual situation in which the reader and the writer are not strictly speaking, divergent, or separate. A situation in which authorship is extended to the reader to, even as the writer looks on, observing and recording the results of this invitation along with the meeting that ensues. So before I turn to some readings from Word Rain, I want to say a little more about Street Works and why I think that this publication is so significant for our understanding of Madeleine's work. This might sound like a sort of minor mention in the history of conceptualism in the U.S. However, I think it's important to emphasize that many descriptions of poetry's interaction with this particular mode and moment of art making have tended to focus on the static materiality of language to the detriment of descriptions of interactivity. Though there are many exceptions, conceptualism's role as a critical capstone to trajectories in American art, including modernism and minimalism, has entailed the reduction of language at times to a, quote, kind of object as the critic Liz Kotz has written. Accounts of language-based conceptualism emphasizing what the artist Roy Ascot in his 1966 essay on behaviorist art and the cybernetic vision termed the, quote, field of behavior are more rare. But we can see that with Street Works, which is a project that takes place on the streets of New York and requires the behavior and input and awareness of friends, colleagues, and strangers, language does not function simply as an object. It's a site, it's an enticement to act, and it is a form of action. Ginza's group novel called for action. Unlike the group novels created by the artists Douglas Hubler and Andy Warhol, for example, Ginza's project was not a locus for confession, nor was it really an anthology of gossip. Like Vido Akanshi's poetry, which played with the instructive nature of writing in marks of punctuation, or, for example, Dan Graham's poem, this is one half of the schema in the poem. This is the poem from 1966, a list of materials for the creation of a poem. Ginza's early writing in Street Works, and in her first collection, Word Rain, was self-reflexive, but they also do something more. Her early writing directly engaged the cybernetic qualities of the conceptualist impulse by deploying sentences and prose fragments as a means for holistic control of discourse, the human body, and social relations, confusing the agency of the writer with that of the reader. And this occurs in a manner that reflects Ginza's literary and transdisciplinary concerns. And this is what I mean by kind of visionary cybernetics. Ginza's interest in systems and communication often went beyond description of what is merely possible into an intensely imaginative and speculative realm. She treated the slow dawning of the computer age as an incitement to produce art. So that's an image of Word Rain, which has a sort of truncated Misan Abhim effect going on there. And this is quite fitting because Word Rain is a book about reference to both the act of reading and the act of writing. But the speakers of the sentences of Word Rain is not quite the writer, nor is she quite the reader. She is someone who exists in relation to words and who is aware of the possibility of reading as well as the possibility of writing. She is aware of the possibility of sensing writing, whether looking at it, touching it, dwelling in it, even sometimes smelling or tasting it. She writes about these possibilities as well as their possible results. And this is a passage from Word Rain. Read this with me. Read that with me. Read with me. Read objects, tables, toes, toads, tails, tin, trains, type, tears, throat. Read, write. Read, write. This is only life. Only I write and read. If you've misplaced me on your own, bring me up again from off the page. I give you this book for a present. It comes with a room, light, a country, sky, and weather. I will arrange for you to be made aware of these in detail. You may look at everything. You will see only what I see. Look at this sentence. So Ginza's narration in Word Rain places unusual emphasis on the experience of being simultaneously a producer and receiver of writing. Experience, tactile, olfactory, temporal, visual, et cetera is folded into Ginza's sentences, and the sentences in turn produce such experience which must be re-described in a sort of feedback loop. Word Rain might thus be a memoir of the present, of the very instant of writing, a sort of homeostatic temporality occasionally difficult to differentiate from the biochemical mix that includes the body of the writer slash reader as well as the interface of the page. There is a thickening here, a layering of sensitivities and sensors of data and processes over physical and textual space. In a radical re-imagining of the traditional hierarchy of figure and ground, Ginza makes the theme of her writing her writing as well as your slash the reader's reading. And so, the literature's process itself for the literary texts, traditional mimetic ends. And so, Word Rain's writing sometimes schematically envisions its own sentences and paragraphs. I'm just going to jump forward to show you that. Sometimes it becomes quotations derived from other books, other texts. It makes everything even that which it records and repeats. Nothing can be taken for granted, not the presence of the reader, not the time of reading. Even the time of reading has to be made. And I want to read one other passage here. In this case, a good idea which I have given you is to do the opposite of what I say in spite of yourself. Please don't touch the book and no kissing. Think of others before you think of yourself. Don't think of your family and the danger they are in at every moment. This is not the place for that. Perhaps the best way you could help me now would be to disappear, vanish. Don't read the next paragraph on this page. Forget that you have ever seen this book. Scream for every word you will not see. Perceive nothing. Lose track of me. Kill me. And I hope that I am assured that you will not read between the lines. It's an extraordinary book. This is the last page of it. I should also say that WordRain has no direct American literary antecedents. Though it superficially recalls various stream of consciousness writings or Gertrude Stein's, Bristlin's syntax, its strategies are specific to its own obsession with the reception of writing that occurs even and especially in the very midst of writing. This interest in the flickering, oozing, chaplain-esque persistence of consciousness as recorded in and affected by the work of art is not easily reconciled with modernism's obsession with literary form and the dramatic upending of academic categories. Nor does Ginza's work dovetail neatly with late modernist and postmodern literary experimentation. You can't quite group her with John Cage or Jackson Maklow who are so deeply concerned with chance operations and collage and Yoko Ono's fluxus tasks are meanwhile more meticulous in their articulation. There are some resemblances between WordRain's complex sentences and those of poets such as Lynn Hyginian, Bernadette Mayer, whom I already mentioned, and Leslie Scalapino. But Ginza's friend, the poet Hannah Wiener, a cybernetically inclined writer and performer, is probably the most convincing analog. In a piece titled Trans-Space Communication, Wiener has an observation that I think is relevant. She says, The amount of information available has more than doubled since World War II. In the next 10 years, it will double again. How do we deal with it? She continues, At the moment I am interested in exploring methods of communication through space, considering space as space fields or space solids, through great distances of space, through small distance, such as the space between the nucleus and the electrons of an atom, through distances not ordinarily related to the form of communication used. Wiener treats the poem as a tactical event, an act of communication that occurs through great distances of space. In her 1982 collection, Code Poems, which some of you may be familiar with, there are lists of encoded flag hoists that promise to transmit information even if the exact semantic messages of these lists are not always clear. While Ginz's sentences in WordRain are more concerned with the time of writing in a domestic setting, they make similar claims regarding the significance of spaces, techniques, media, and technologies of communication and the ever-increasing amounts of information available. WordRain's sentences are complexes of signals that transmit and confuse sensation, allowing the reader to become an energetic receiver an accumulator, a transformer even, and I think most visionary of all, the avatar of the writer. So I think it has already been suggested it's difficult to categorize Madeline Ginz in a professional sense to call her just a poet or an artist or a philosopher. And she, in her work, she moves in and out of prose and poetry all the time. And in her 1984 collection, what the president will say and do, she returns to more sort of traditional, lineated poem form. And although in 1994 when she publishes Helen Keller or Arakawa, this is another sort of novel-like piece of writing like WordRain, she's always stretching these categories in highly original directions, blending observations about the activity of consciousness, language, English syntax, as well as her own body and environment with the rye humor regarding the oddness of the very existence of meaning. So although what the president will say and do does not appear in the exhibition, you can see both WordRain and Helen Keller or Arakawa in the exhibition. I wanted to talk about this book a little bit as well. Does that mean that I'm, okay. Sorry, I did not realize that. I'll just, I'll go quickly here and just say that this is an interesting book about, it's a book about authority, essentially. And it contains various different forms. There are aphorisms like these, which I find to be very funny. These are sort of answers to the question of what the president will say and do. For example, always place infinite systems, hang six scarlet bands to come within inches of the floor, et cetera. And you can see there are these other strange elements that are included in the book, these sort of like essay stories. And then finally, this is the end of the book, and I just wanted to show this to you because I think it's hysterical and relevant as they say. I thought I would just point out this one line in the list of ways in which the president reacts. The president says, it made me very, very sad. I thought that was funny. And then the president also says later on, I don't mind anything except the fact that my penis was mentioned several times. 1984, folks. Really great. Okay, so I'm out of time, unfortunately. But I just want to conclude with one of the poems from the archive, which is also included in the exhibition, which is this poem, which is a poem that is about love as a schema, but also about, you know, speaking of the cybernetic, the impossibility of reducing it to a gesture of control. And I'll just read this poem for you. How do I love thee? Let me graph the ways. I love you past the margin of error to where the seepage of the calculus knows how to reassemble, to where parody outstrips itself. I love you diagonally as mind holds body. I love you with the sonic union of the point. I love you with the wraith of asymptotic breath and with the parabola, which phrases speech. I love you in any transformation as in above. I love you as transformation, near and by. Any unit holds you. So I'll stop there. Thanks. Great. And now we'll hear from Leopold Lambert. Hi, everyone. Big, big thank you to Irene and Tiffany for having organized both the exhibition and this event. I think for many of us, it's quite an emotional moment for this to happen, maybe much less for, much less, because we might have needed some sort of validations to recognize the work of Arakawa and Madeleine Geens, but maybe more so because it allows us to share this work with a bigger amount of person, including people in architecture, which I'm always very thankful for this kind of conversation to happen. So today I will speak about a political reading of their work, which I should say is a little bit difficult to do because when you speak about your own work, you're only able to damage your own work, so that's kind of okay. But when you speak about other people's work, then it becomes much more complicated. So I would say it's very much my own interpretation of their work. It is a very sort of unsubtle reading of their work, so I would maybe bring that to your attention. But that being said, I think it's actually a very important way also of reading their work, in addition of all the other sort of propositions that have been made so far and that will continue to be made throughout the afternoon. So one thing I want to do is to, before really talking about their architectural work, I want to talk about maybe what I consider to be, maybe not as much their exact antithesis, but let's say some things that I would call models of inclusion in versus the revolutionary paradigms that they might embody through their architecture. So for me, this sort of paradigm of inclusion goes through the work of American designer Henry Dreyfus. And I think it allows us to see how architecture is systematically designed around a set of standards, a set of bodies, of normative set of bodies, which have much less to do with a question of majority or a question of average as we usually think of normality, but very much in a question of power. The normalized body being the body that very much crystallized a certain set of dominations of power and it is very much a racialized body. It is a gendered body and it is a body involved in ableist logics. And so obviously when it comes to that and when it comes to work that has been trying to sort of make explicit this normalized body around which architecture and design are built around, we can think of obviously of near-fert and architect's data and maybe, I don't know, Le Corbusier's modular or this kind of paradigm. And then what I like with Dreyfus is that he sort of includes what we would again call inclusivity in trying to sort of very much includes differentiation in the types of body around which architecture would be built or designed in this case because he was an industrial designer. He would even include a gendered differentiation but I think if you look at his work you would realize very quickly and his work is just a symptom of something much bigger. It's not about his work per se, but that very much this gendered differentiation of body is very much a sort of calibration of a gendered attribution of labor and the division of labor in particular in the domestic spaces. He would go as far as designing for people with disabilities, being in WorldShare or walking with crutches or canes and I'll go back to the idea of the cane a little bit later. And obviously around this normative body comes a normative space that keeps being involved in this sort of loop between the norm informing designs that itself reinforce the norm and so on and so on. So I think the various attempts at sort of something we might call inclusion that Dreyfus may have been involved with is very much reinforcing in a very strong manner this loop, this violent loop. And we can see as well how there is a question of the proportionality of violence. It's like the further away you are from the dominant bodies the more the violence of design will sort of be expressed to your body. And we've been talking a little bit about children earlier and we've been showing also some folks that were maybe a little bit more aged in the Mittaka laughter earlier and I think that's also something we can... there's a sort of universality of this violence as children and elderlies that we might experience regarding normative design but I think in the more specificities we can also see how design is very much involved in various logics of structural racism, structural misogyny and ableism. So we can see how far this violence of the norm informing the space and the space itself, reforming the body is operating through Dreyfus drawings. I mean he himself talks literally about something he calls human engineering which I think also says a lot about how the loop is complete like it's not just about the norm informing design the design itself is very much trying to re-influence the body and to somehow push it towards this norm. And so I think what basically those examples are telling us are first and foremost that they think what a body is because they very much show us what a body is and the various attempts at inclusivity are perhaps suggesting that we might not know what a body is but somehow there's still some sort of underlying truth that a body might be something that is within the possibility of knowledge. So a text that my good friend Minha Fahm and myself have written in 2015 was very much trying to go against that with maybe a funny big title for the new Inquiry Race Spinoza in a t-shirt but the subtitles being a manifesto for designs that do not know what bodies end. So like it's double negation. It's not that we don't know what body is or sorry it's that we don't know what body aren't. So we were interested in this double negation in the impossibility to sort of establish any definitive knowledge on the question of bodies. We've been looking at various examples maybe less of those ones but others. I mean we're going back to come the garçons that has been a very interesting collaboration between Reika Wakubo and Madeleine Ginz in the very last months of her life. So I was lucky enough to participate in as some other of us. And so that's something that we particularly see when it comes to closing because of its more immediate relationship to the body but I think I'm interested in looking at how architecture also has been informed in that so another sort of body of works that I find particularly interesting in putting in dialogue with the work of Reika Wakubo and Madeleine Ginz the oblique functions that Claude Parrot and Paul Virilio have been sort of thinking about in the 60s all the way to the 90s. Very much involving, you know, we were talking earlier about a non-flat architecture and I think that has a lot of resonance with the architecture of Reika Wakubo and Madeleine Ginz. Even though I would say I'm fairly, fairly confident there's no box with like any architectural reference whatsoever. I think I can say that with pretty high confidence. And so going to their work themselves and looking maybe at some drawings that sort of would have something that could echo those very rigid and normative drawings that Dreyfus have been establishing. I think we can look at that and in particular the way they've been mapping what they call themselves landing sites and thinking of bodies in a much less essentialist manner. I'm sorry, where am I? We talked also about Helen Keller which I think remains like a fundamental figure of the work of Reika Wakubo and Madeleine Ginz when it comes to architecture. And I think everything was said by Momosa and earlier in the idea that it's not so much, we're not talking so much about a person that we sort of assign the label of disability and sort of see how they replace this disability with some other skills but much more how we are so closed-minded on the possibility of sensory systems that the body might embody and how to use your words. Helen Keller was using senses that we don't really have names for. I thought that was extremely helpful to think that way. And so looking at the architecture itself of Reika Wakubo and Madeleine Ginz, I think we can very much see how there is no attempt to inclusivity, there is no sort of essentialization of some bodies that would probably work better than others in their environment but very much an environment that challenges everybody into words. And that does not necessarily and that is also not necessarily meant to be fully experienced which is also a big difference with a sort of very optimized vision of architecture as a fully experientiable space. So looking at different architecture I think we can very much find a similar approach to that in various ways. In the Bioschleve House in particular and in relationship as well to the way the body is also perceived in space with this sort of play on the height of the building in relation to bodies as well. And so, yeah, I like very much like this photo because Madeleine is on it and it was a very fun lunch. And so, going back to those very joyful and playful photos of the Mitaka Laugh I think some things that struck me when we had talked again with Mouyo-san when I realized an interview of her that you can listen online is her talking about one of her close relatives that usually walks with a cane going back to the idea of the cane on flat floor would not actually need one in the loft and I think there is a sort of very closed-minded way of reading that as a sort of resurrection of the body by the loft when actually we could think much more closely that the cane is not so much something a sort of prosthetics that helps that would help a body to sort of deal with its own degree of disability but very much sort of a symptom of the highly normative nature of our common environment I mean the flat floor being one I mean someone mentioned I think it was Julian earlier who mentioned like, yeah, I mean when you don't see your flat floor it's a little bit baffling but I think Madeline would very much often say that flat floors are not made for human feet to start with I mean we don't have flat feet do we it's very much made for a sort of optimization of the use of the floor by things maybe like the wheel so like more vehicles or and so all that being said again like I said that maybe that's my own interpretation that maybe the word even political would not necessarily be a word that Madeline and Arakawa would like to hear necessarily associated with their work in such an explicit way but I think I cannot resist also and also to very much echo with Lucy's presentation to finish with my favorite poem by Madeline in this book of what the president will say and do so you have to go a little bit fast but I can also add up a little bit to it and I'll try to read it even though I have there's absolutely no ways that I will have the same eloquencies that Lucy demonstrated but okay let's go all men are sisters there simply could not have been a woman who would have said left side, right side then stuck to it for a woman it is a question of at least seven sides at least one of every of every you you such subtlety contributes to the subtle difference one thing men haven't realized is that unlike them all men are mortal women do not die this makes all the difference although some women have been brun bitten by sheer syllogistic brun have had times pretended most women do not look like themselves although many women do assume the form of woman some are men other gas and electricity and still others are indistinguishable often being constructed of living material women are a volatile force in society and are such dangerous and should not be left near adolescent I think is the following and this is from 1984 with yeah very high with our current I love that you say that and I will end up on that because I just so much love this one so thank you very much great thank you so much those were wonderful presentations and now we're going to put Lucy and Leopold in conversation I know they've been emailing each other but they actually just met today and have a really shared interest in Madeleine's work especially and after their conversation hello Leopold hi one thing that I didn't that I didn't get to say and I feel I would be remiss if I did not do this is just to mention that the two books that I talked about by Madeleine Wordreign and what the president will say and do both of these books are out of print Wordreign is very difficult to come by I see although what the president will say and do is somewhat easier to find however I want to emphasize that both of these books can be obtained by you from the internet and various booksellers and they are so wonderful and you can just you can you can do that and you can have them and I so I'm hoping that we will be able to produce a collection of Leopold's writings so that all of these books can be collected together along with her unpublished works but I just want to emphasize that these books are out there and that they they need love so please please look for them and also for Helen Keller or Arakawa which is also out of print I want to say that what the president will say and do is also available in open access of it, somewhat less beautiful than the book but nevertheless legible so to go to the point of this sort of like the normative body I think there's a resonance with that notion and a kind of like normative reader or things around literary genre that I see Madeline fundamentally resisting but not even responding to she just does something else it's not about a response to that she's already doing something else right out of the box and I'm just curious about your experiences with Madeline as a writer and as a poet if you could talk to us a little bit about how you experienced her in that way that's funny I'm more used to actually interview people than to be interviewed but okay yeah exactly well I think maybe I can answer about that maybe going back to also something I wanted to talk with you about because I was very glad you said that sort of addressed the fact that you tend to perhaps a little bit too quickly associate her writing and their work in general as being deliberately unintelligible which I also think is is not a very fair assessment and I think similarly in the various conversations that we could have they would be they would need a little bit of a work to sort of to sort of take the time to interpret what had just been said like Madeline was not someone who was sometimes a public figure and you know at the office or somewhere else being like someone else or something she was very much a holistic person for that matter so when you would speak with her she would tell you things that you would think are very complicated to understand also because even though they might not be a big reference towards architecture I think they are as you show a little bit there's a lot of reference in their work to to philosophers and to literature work and to poetry work and understanding very much how a word could have possibly been corrupted by decades if not centuries of sort of additional meaning to it would probably leave let them to create their own words a new to express exactly what it was that they wanted to say so when you work with her on a daily basis sometimes it has its challenges because you you just ask okay should we do it two feet or should we do it one foot it's like well it's a very interesting conversation based on a very simple question but I think that's sort of the magical part of it in how much it allows to also participate to this project with your own sort of understanding of what it is that was being said and I really don't think there was any sort of I mean I think the the anecdote about talking for 10 hours the first time the first time you meet even though you probably would guess that it was going to be five minutes is very much showing that there was no wheel of obscurity for the sake of obscurity and there was very much a very very big generosity in talking as long with anyone really I mean at the end of her life Madeleine had had someone coming at home a nurse coming at home and the conversation they would have would be very much to the same to the same of the same nature that she would have with anyone else and so I think that's really that was really great to be able to also build your own meaning based on what you would hear but I don't know I would like to ask you about this relationship to intelligibility or not intelligibility since you started with it well you know one way that you can think about and really because I did not I did not know Madeleine and so I'm a person who relates to her through her writing and through her books and I just want to write that out that may already be obvious to you but there's a great deal of ignorance of the person that is a part of how I act as a reader of her work but to say that there's something about you know when you go and look at listings and different descriptions of word rain online in library catalogs or on the part of booksellers often it's referred to as an artist's book so what is an artist's book an artist's book is a book by an artist that's not it's a sort of vague description but it's a kind of book in which certain kinds of conventions not only are mutable but we expect them to be altered or touched or affected in some way and this book does that very much in one of the slides that I showed you could see a photograph of a hand reaching up to touch the page and this is also visible in the copy of word rain that Irene has placed in the exhibition so this has nothing to do with what we consider literature right this is a sort of like visual intervention do I need to interpret this engage in an act of interpretation in order to understand what this is yes and no and it's that yes and no that I use also as a reader of Madeline's work so in other words when I read her work I also look at it as she continually in her writing instructs me to do as well so I'm just doing what she says honestly and when I engage in that kind of reading act instead of relentlessly attempting to find the meaning of what she says quote unquote then I'm fine I don't have any problems because I can just look so that's my recommendation around these issues in relation to intelligibility and the same could be said although what the president will say and do doesn't have the same kind of artist books interventions in it and Helen Keller Arakawa sort of doesn't either although there's some sort of typographic interventions there you can still engage in that that looking and so that that is how I I do not find that there's an issue with intelligibility but that also makes the works maybe impractical as literature so that's another but that's another question so different one and and so since you're writing specifically about Madeline's writing do you do you actually stop somewhere in the bibliography or do you actually go all the way to the to the very last manuscript that she was writing well okay so about what I am what I am writing right now I mean I'm writing some articles about her work and my primary work in relation to her writing is as an editor so I'm not writing a book about her I would like to do that at some point sure but I'm editing a collection of her writings and so far I'm still I still find myself in the beginnings of this and I'm at this point as you're seeing from my talk of fascination with her work in the late 60's and 70's there's a great deal of poetry in her archive that is that poem that I read is one of them from the 60's and 70's it's just extraordinarily beautiful and it's unpublished and I really hope that it can be published but so the goal is really to go through everything and yes to the the final work and and everything like that but there's just an enormous amount of material and she changes over time to her interests change and so it's also a challenge to sort of figure out how does it all like how does it all connect and maybe it's not necessary to come up with some theory or like perfect through line I mean honestly usually that's not that helpful around someone's work to sort of like be able to see it as a whole like it can contradict itself it can do things that are not anticipated are forgotten and so on and so forth so yeah I think that's my answer to your question but I want to ask you more about if and and how you know did you ever like write with Madeline or was that part of practice that you guys shared no I would have been I would have been very embarrassed I suppose but but some did yeah but more of an essayist than an actual writer so but no I can actually share something funny about what we worked on I mean we mostly work as well with T-Luck was right there we worked on the and of course we worked on this this incredible biotopolitical scale juggling escalator that you've seen in Manuel's presentation but also on something extremely funny which is a sort of I was doing the illustrations of a poem she composed about the Krebs cycle so the logical cycle involved in the digestion so it was like molecules molecules transforming I mean you were talking about you involved transformation earlier so a very again like a perfect example of how how philosophy was able to meet poetry was able to meet science was able to meet architecture and art in this practice which was really wonderful okay well maybe we should should we stop there or open it up I don't know depends if we have time or not I don't know I have a few questions maybe a couple minutes if anyone has any maybe not if you're too intimidated you can ask any of the speakers during our short coffee break and I'll round you up in about 15 minutes or so oh wait there is one kind person it's a very simple question but what happened with these drawings and it goes I was trying when I saw the exhibition yesterday with Tiffany that many of the drawings that are included in the exhibition have never been shown and actually there was as far as I understood there was even the question of how to to exceed in them because there's no record so probably you can give a very sorry you can give us a testimony of what was the way the drawings and the production of Madeleine and before Arakawa and Ginz troubled to other spaces in your case in your experience you're referring to the drawings I was just talking about in terms of the exhibition those ones in particular and if you now let's say what happened to other drawings for instance in the exhibition there's drawings that were never exhibited before very intriguing what was the way that their future and their trajectory was envisioned within the space where they were produced yeah I mean I think that's also why as Irene and Tiffany pointed out this current exhibition is very much oriented on the production of the 1980s beginning of the 90s and I think there can be three more following that based on different eras even though it's probably interesting as well to break from the strict chronological rule as well at some point but I mean yeah I mean the office was so I left the office before when the office was still the office so to speak as this one to four Houston Street there was a pretty good building like magical building and it was still full of drawings everywhere I don't know what happened to them it's probably very well archived somewhere but yeah they might surge again somewhere sometimes but I think it's kind of interesting to also sometimes have them sleep a bit and then sort of exhumed them again I think it's quite interesting and that's been also my privilege despite our sorrow to have lost Madeleine in January 2014 to continue working at the foundation to go through the archives because it was pretty much every day discovery of new documents and even you know the most the most moving moments are the photos obviously of that sort of documented and I'm very happy that some were included in this exhibition as well thank you this is a difficult question for me to answer and again what I have access to are these material things that exist in accounts of other people who knew Madeleine but I because I am so interested in this early work I want to say something about the publication of Word Rain so Word Rain was published by an individual named Richard Grossman who had his own publishing concern Grossman publishers and it even though it is an artist book it was not published in the way in which artist books aren't I guess normally I'm not sure if there is a norm published I mean it was it was reviewed somewhat widely people were kind of confused about it there is a review of it in publishers weekly really you can go look at it on the internet it's quite interesting so I don't know if Madeleine thought I'm going to be a novelist with a capital N maybe she did I would kind of like for her to have thought that and there's a way in which also in you know you have these traditional kinds of materials here like here's your author photo and then there's a little description of the author and it talks about other books that she's working on so that you can get ready to like go out and buy them you know just like be waiting for them to come out and I like why isn't there like a million books like this I just want it to be that way it's so this book is so extraordinary and so beautiful also because of the way that it ignores kinds of limitations that we would just take for granted now divisions between the worlds of art and poetry and so on and so forth so I think that's my answer to that but I don't know you know it seems like things change as time goes on and her practice and her relationship with our color change and so on and so forth but she does appear as an as an author in the in the way one does as an as an author even though her practices as a writer are not those that we would normally associate with authors and that's that's quite interesting