I’ve mused before about the unreality of recording. A recording seems to be a thing, but that is illusory. I’ve called my recordings postcards, after a metaphor by John Cage comparing a post card photo to the actuality that created it.

I recently participated in a performance of sound poetry by the Apocalypse Crunchmen. Afterwards I looked up the website of Olchar Lindsann, one of the Crunchmen. I was delighted to find that Olchar’s regard of video documentation of live performances is quite similar to my own. He calls them relics, an even better term than Cage’s postcards. I quote Olchar:

Performance, of course, cannot be ‘documented’, since the performance itself is the situation itself in which one exists in the moment as it passes. The space in which performance acts is experience, not spectacle. Videos, photos, etc. are relics whose relationship to the event is no more direct or comprehensive than the scraps of broken props picked up from the floor in its wake. The visual traces of the moment are no more or less integral to that experience than the temperature in the room, or the communal awarenesses that unite or divide those present, or what an individual has eaten prior to attending. They should be looked at as fragmented traces of a situation unknowable except in the fleeting moment of its actuality, from which one can creatively speculate on what the experience might possibly have been.

https://olindsann.blogspot.com/p/relics-documentation.html

I invite you to visit Olchar’s website.

I am posting this the same day – and just prior to – posting a relic of my own, the second and last variation on Hemispheres.