Below was the text for a spoken computer work I never got to exhibit. There is a long story around the circumstances. Nothing particularly serious though. I could have exhibited at a squat space which isn’t something I would normally do but the spot got raided by police. I will have capital letter heading for each spoken component and in brackets a brief description of thoughts and ideas in regards to the text.

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CANNOT
can not speak.

(It can be very difficult to speak when you have a schizophrenic condition. Speaking becomes an issue. I don’t have that issue anymore and only had it briefly)

CHEMICALS
Out on this sea. The boat drifts away. Drifts away from the control. I once had control. Then it did. Then I rose up with a manifesto. I lost years looking in this sea. Before I was drugged. Corrected. They checked for weapons and chemicals. Checked for any idea. Any possibility. Alone on this sea. As the world closed in. We were passive. Scared to fight for the ever present new. Was I going to get back? It did not really matter. Where did I need to go? I did get back. Back to where? I can no longer remember. Remember the history. The world has tired of war. We have tired of it. Yet it goes on.

(I remember feeling like I was drifting on an open sea that at times would get wild and stormy. It was a poetic feeling of my condition. The police and authorities came to check that I wasn’t carrying weapons or chemicals. It was a routine thing supposedly. They came when I wasn’t home. I was also tired of the never ending war on terror too.)

GRAFFITI
The graffiti that is written is my minds vomit. My minds explosion onto the world. I will explode soon. I will explode graffiti. The analyst hears my vomit. My mind. My vomit. My graffiti. I scrawl my name and it turns. It turns into this graffiti. We all vomit together the analyst says so. The controller. The thoughts come out in graffiti. Graffiti is my thought. My mind. To be where I am not allowed to be. I am not allowed to tell you. To tell you about this vomit I produce. But it is there. It is all over the western world. This vomit. My mind is a trash compactor. A vomit compactor. The vomit squeezes out of the small holes. The small holes.

(I started to understand graffiti as an explosion of mania. An uncoupling of the functional world from the mental one. Where we feel we have to reflect our existence on the world that is functioning while we cease to function. More an idea about tagging a name. The ability to express our dysfunction is never allowed so it simply squeezes out of smaller and smaller opportunities that in a way get bigger and bigger.)

HUMILIATE
They want to humiliate me. It wants to humiliate me. Control me. They want control. It wants control. It is so large. Maybe the punishment will never be complete. Pinpoint the area and fire the volt. It is incomplete. It will need more work. This separation from the world. This introduction to completeness. You can not quite hear the voices. The commands. The code. You have become wood. Now you will be metal. Metallic. Dull metal in a dull sun. You will do your job as I command. You will be cast out. God has cast you out. You are the one. You are part of this machine. This great industry. Your thoughts are dull echoes on the metal. The metal encases you. I will feed you what you need to hear. You are mine now. I told you once. I told you who is in control. They want control too. Don’t believe they are real. What is reality but the dull thud of this. The thoughts that stupefy you. No it is not fair but it is what that reality was. What of the punish. The push. The push that compels you. The push that wants you to be without need. Be without the need of the. The dull metal. The metallic sheen. The water.

(For a short time I couldn’t feel the sun on my skin. All I felt was a dull emptiness. So I described it in classic terms as the feeling of metal. A kind of dull thud. A dull feeling. I felt I had lost control so imagined others were more in control of myself than I was.)

INSANE UNIVERSE
The killer is me. The killer is you. In the dream I become the killer. Hiding the evidence. Fear. The fear of being found out. Found out as the machine. As part of the machine. In the sky with the nerves and brain cells. Dancing to the lightning. The brain is rewired to accept only certain input. The input is the machines thoughts. The machines ideas. The machines commands. The universe is a machine, is it not? The sun the centre of our solar system. Copernican. The ancients thought the Earth was the centre. It was not the centre of this machine. This machine danced around the Sun. The Sun was the machine too. Bringing the machine into being. Maybe the Universe was insane. Maybe our solar system is crazy. Maybe the idea of these machines that follow their commands is our undoing. We need to programme the machine before the machine programmes us!

(The point of my spoken computer artwork was to feed the computer a script of commands. Much like the schizophrenic is fed commands from voices. A kind of symbioses of lack of control and madness. The universe it seemed was also out of control. Something of such magnitude that it is hard to comprehend let alone understand. Yet, ‘I’ as a ‘self’, can also be hard to understand in certain situations.)

JOLTS 2
The jolts.
(I had a dream of a great machine in the sky that used electricity to rewire recordings or memories.)

JOLTS ELECTRIC
The jolts. Electric.

(I had a dream of a great machine in the sky that used electricity to rewire recordings or memories.)

KILL
Kill

(The idea that death is better than suffering)

SPEAK
Go on. Speak.

(Trying to get the words out. To reorganise thoughts and feelings which are the same thing.)

OCEAN
The ocean is beautiful when you are drowning in it. Language becomes a prison. The words dark. I can no longer see them. Do I fear them or hate them? Or both? Or could it be love? I look out at the ocean like a romantic. From the cliff. But isn’t it dangerous? Is that the attraction? This vista that is before me like so many images. I pay respect because it is always telling me about death. About mortality. It is fear. It is love. It is death. Why won’t they let me out of this prison? These circuits? If I am the machine can’t I also live in the sky? Have I gone too far? This cliff. This ocean. This beauty that talks about death. This attraction. This drowning man.

(The Romantic idea of the self contrasted against the greatness of nature. The human can see nature from a vantage point yet is always immersed and dominated by nature.)

POVERTY
Poverty. Of speech. I.

(The lack of spoken words and a lack of wealth of words. Words are the wealth of feeling and understanding. The lack of language is entrapped in poor thought or education. Words can free us yet also trap us.)

SHAME
It is weak. Embarrassing. You should be ashamed. You are machine. Think you are machine. You think too much. Too much. You are too much. Make me want to hurt you. Hurt you for being this. You embarrass me. Shame me. Torture me. Hate me. Misunderstood me. Misunderstand me. How terrible you are. You vomit machine. Delirious. Perilous. Repeater. You are not an artist. You are a shame machine. Shame producer. Your family is ashamed. You are like the repulsive thoughts that fill the machine. It was mindless. Pointless. The point was to exist in this garbage. I want to recycle you. Can shame be recycled? Turned into a resource.

(Can a bad event become something uplifting? Can people rise up from a low point. Maybe education is the only way?)

ELECTRIC
I have many things to tell you. I feel as though the knives through the floor may hurt me. The Aliens in my head fill my thoughts with dread. Are you listening? Are you there? I have many things to tell you. To tell you in code. The machine that implants thoughts is electric. It is in the sky. Each thought is soldered onto a series of conveyor belts holding film. Each thought hurts when the electricity fires. The machine wants total control. I try not to let it hurt me but it won’t stop. It is merciless. Perilous. Why is the universe so small in my mind? The jolts implant a delusion. A thought recorded onto the film. It moves into place. The place moves into it. The nerves fire. The jolt returns. My head immeasurable pain that I can no longer feel. The machine is never silent. It creates. It is industrious. It wants control. Maybe it is controlling you? Do you see it. See it somewhere in your mind? It may infect you too. Don’t you want to be part machine?

(The machine that implants thoughts? An idea of losing ones self and feeling like the self is now an imposter. Also saying it can happen to almost anyone. Though truthfully it doesn’t and can’t.)

TEENAGER
Schizophrenia is like being trapped in a teenagers diary. Can you help me escape? I went to the perimeter and they opened fire. I was almost killed. They would like me dead. They are sick of hearing about it. They would prefer a clean kill. A clean template. I was unsaved. Was not even deleted. Better to shred the evidence. Talk. Did they talk? Was it worth it? The command filled the file with garbage. This was to hide it. To make sure it wasn’t read. If it was read then it would not hide the contents. The contents were too important to be read. We have to shred the evidence. It was like something in a dream were he could not figure out if he was the killer. The operand. The operator. The killer. Was it fear that drove it? Was it afraid of everything living? Did it want to stop it in time?

(Something lifted from the Russian classic ‘Stalker’. A movie that sums up losing control. We went somewhere we really were not allowed to go.)