For Virginia and Lauren, collaboration is not simply a method for working, but is the work itself: a mutual aid approach to making art, a way to lift each other up in a crisis; collective resistance to cultural capitalism, and a necessary response to precarity.

Fermenting together inside of this residency was an opportunity for Lauren and Virginia to have dedicated time to explore what began as a spontaneous and unplanned coming-together across spacetime; a chance to formalise the collaboration which began on Lauren’s twitch.tv channel and to continue to follow the adventitious flows which emerged from this open system of production. These unplanned collaborations on Twitch would flow for anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour, taking on the form of a song-cycle. Lauren would ‘ferment’ Virginia’s words, singing them back though a multiplicity of ways: automated vocal-buses and recursive delay loops. These song-cycles would arc, stumble, collapse, until they would ultimately come to some kind of quiet resolution.

Lauren plays long-form improvised electronic music streams (via twitch.tv/jemisahologram); experimenting between circular ambient streams and progressive techno, with a fascination with the hauntological possibilities of automation, especially when applied to the voice. During these initial encounters, Virginia channeled poetic improvisational text via the twitch chat box, which, without discussion, Lauren began to incorporate into the stream. Virginia’s words are framed within a kind of sensory immersion meditation,
stemming from their yoga and guided meditation practice as well as performance-based responses to the idea of labour and capital. They called these experiments Guided Speculations. The Guided Speculations ask those on the journey to visualise the networks of power we are complicit in upholding, the connections between flows of labour, capitalism, nature, and the individual and to speculate on the potential for reconfiguring those networks of power, ultimately exiting the labour body.

The result is the production of a semi-improvised performance, Capital and Darkness: Guided Speculation that plays in the space of the original encounters on Twitch, as well as an interactive webpage hosting a series of web-based works that gesture towards the performance:

Capital and Darkness: OFFICIAL WEBSITE

The works include:
A web-based audio-sampler which sings; via the user hitting the QWERTY keystrokes to sample Virginia’s words with Lauren’s voice, offering endless compositional forms of a single poetic string;
A randomised poetry generator accompanied by a freestyle reading by Virginia;
A bespoke Capital and Darkness Instagram filter.

Special thanks to: Linda Dement, Thomas Capogreco and mycelium.