Image by George Margelis, 2019

This article has been adapted from a talk delivered at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol (26/10/18), as part of the Friday lunchtime open talk series.

This book was written in an urge to remember, reflect, mourn, overthink, celebrate, and seek meaning in the transparent, or otherwise irrational dynamics of human relationships; while extending the sense of self and feelings. Please treat it with the greatest of care and respect, it is fragile and alive, it feels and it breathes like any other soul.

In this book, the human hand is as important as love. The words on these pages reflect the way by which the idea of you often haunts corners of my mind, echoing the transition and ephemerality of your effect on me; revealing the diminishing value of words expressed on impulse that vanished into the aether, as they were never intended or belonged to anyone, not even to us. My writing will greet your eyes with the same sensuality as the palm of my hand once gently pressed against your face.

(opening text, To You by Yiota Demetriou)

I have created an interactive artist’s book that combines elements from performance, philosophy, creative writing, experience design, tactile art, science, and pervasive technology. It responds to the reader’s body heat. In it is a series of love letters that were never sent, addressed To You, the reader. It is a quasi-semiotext (e.g. books like I Love Dick), poetry written in prose, interweaving philosophical notions of love, attachment, loss (Sartre, Barthes, Camus,  et al.), with autobiography and fiction. I have been contemplating human contact, communication, closeness, and tactictility/materiality for a while now (thinking postdigital).

The book is presented as an intimate reading experience hidden in the pages of an apparently unreadable book. The content draws parallels between the intense erotic delusions played out in the exchange of love letters, and the dynamics of human relationships. Imbued with warmth from a reader’s gentle touch, its black pages gradually become translucent. The writing becomes visible, and traces of fingerprints are left on its pages. Unlike many reading experiences, this book responds to body heat by inviting the reader to lovingly caress it.

The book’s design and the way it invites the reader to engage with it reflects its very content and the way in which it was conceived. It makes visible all those ritualistic and performative aspects experienced when writing a love letter. If you have never written a love letter, I urge you to write one now and return to this article later.

Image by George Margelis, 2019

Creating a book was not my intention. It became a book. The narrative was born out of something highly personal: love letters, as mentioned, that were never sent. A conversation with myself attempting to rationalise and put into perspective what had happened in a relationship. A mode of healing I suppose, by questioning the human condition, the different dynamics at play, and simultaneously negotiating vulnerability with oneself.

At the time, I was conceptualising my performance project, Love Letters (2012-), which some of you might have encountered through an article that was previously published here on The Writing Platform, or might have even participated in: http://thewritingplatform.com/2017/03/love-letters-performance-creative-technologies-audience-participation/

Whilst writing the former article, I reencountered and refamiliarised myself with schools of thought around the ritual of reflective and reflexive writing, writing letters (not only love letters!), autobiography, attachment theory, etc. These notions influenced my writing, not at least the conceptualisation of my performance project, but also my letters, the way in which I discussed, and wrote about my own situation.

Within the intuitive process of the content itself flourishing into a collection, and further into a book, the content was re-written, re-configured, layered, reconstructed, and interrogated several times. It eventually became something that was less about me, or what had occurred, and instead something about being human; finding a space where so-called ‘vulnerabilities’ can live in their raw form, without having to apologise. In the book, I use a Greek word to describe this experience, Apogymnomeno/(a). I couldn’t find a suitable term in English to deliver the depth of its meaning, another untranslatable viscerality. I suppose it’s because I communicate in English, I think in English, but I feel in Greek.  The challenge was to navigate and distance myself from the content without the writing losing its emotionality or rawness.

Image by Yiota Demetriou

The other challenge was the presentation of the content. I wanted the book’s material form to reflect its content; a love union between form and text that work together, responding to each other through exterior interaction. The book had to be alive. It had to resonate with the erratic eruption of feelings, the non-linearity of life, the difficulty of relationships, the chaos and irrationality of emotions, the vulnerability and rawness of things.

While I was thinking about love letters, particularly how love letters are written and encountered, I was inspired by Sartre:

“Love letters are awaited with impatience: it is not so much for the news they bring (supposing of course that we have nothing special to fear or to hope for), but for their real and concrete nature. The stationery, the black signs, the smell, etc., all these replace the weakening affective analogon […]” (Sartre, p.145).

In a way, the experience of reading To You and engaging with it reflects Sartre’s thoughts. For Sartre, love letters awaken an affective analogue, a physiological or psychological element that is a constituent of a person’s imaginative state. This is the ideal and subjectified reality or imaginary affection of the lover for the beloved. It is the subjective idea that the lover holds of the recipient of the love letter, which serves as a substitute when the beloved is absent. This emerges from within the person engaged in the physical and conceptual ritual of writing the love letter. For example, at the moment when the beloved becomes absent, the lover’s desire transforms into an irreal object – something produced, not by the beloved’s existing image or presence (beloved-as-real), but by the lover’s idea of them, which is trying to fill in the gaps of their beloved’s presence (beloved-as-imagined). As this irreal object becomes difficult to imagine because of the physical absence between the lover and the beloved, it confirms the lover’s desires. Due to the physical absence, the affection and love between the lovers reverts into a type of ‘deprived’ or empty love, “a love for love’s sake, a love that is in love with nothing other than itself” (Kearney, p.68). In this sense, the lover uses their ‘analogon’, their own perception, to make present to themselves that which is absent, the imagined beloved. The very practice of writing love letters makes this emotional process of a relationship between the lover and the beloved transparent.

For both Sartre and Roland Barthes, the lover’s anguish over the beloved’s absence and the longing for their presence is desire, which uses imagination to cover the voids created by an absence. In this sense, it is only the imagination writing love letters to itself, responding to its desire with its own desire. The aspects of presence, absence, and embodiment are central themes that To You engages with, and perpetually returns to and interrogates, throughout its narrative.

First Prints, 2017

The book is printed in thermochromic ink that manifests these ideas and aids their materialisation. Through a lot of trial and error I eventually ended up with an object, “that was less like reading a book and more like handling a precious treasure”, as a colleague has commented. She also said:

Somehow you already feel a personal connection. Pressing your hand to the black pages, your body heat creates a flare of white appearing between the web of your fingers, and you feel as though secrets are being shared in the dark. You see the object you are holding take the impression of your own body, and yet you see only windows onto the words below. Like a lover, there is great intimacy of a hand pressing the page, and yet the text underneath retains its enigma. Zoe Heron (†) Comedian, Multimedia Performance Maker, and Academic.

Another person, who experienced the book during its prototype testing, commented:

What’s fascinating about the overall experience of reading and touching, especially the aspect of covering and uncovering or unraveling thoughts through this type of interaction; and the way the book is put together, in concertina form, is the possibility to connect with the more ‘irrational’ aspects of being human. The moment I pressed my hands onto its dark pages, was also a moment of paying attention to the flow of emotions inside of me: the content becomes transparent from my own warmth; emotionality that is sometimes frowned upon is suddenly allowed. These seize to be dark by my own engagement with it as if reclaiming my own state of being. Like relationships, of any type, the book echoes the effort needed to sustain them – so the book can almost feel comfortable to open up and talk to you.  Francesca Prandelli, Journalist.

The design of the words in the book follows a signiconic approach. Text and image merge to provide the reader with a new perspective that has as much to do with semiology and language as it does with experience and emotions. In this way, the book attempts to materialise the emotions behind words. This emerged through conversations with my co-conspirator, (I think that’s a suitable title), Tom Abba, a well-known book artist/designer (based in Bristol), and fellow erotographomaniac. To You allowed space for collaboration, a space for another voice in the piece, where Tom’s contribution to the visualisation of the text, amongst other things, became highly significant to the work – “much as the work itself is a voice communicating with an (absent) voice”, he says…

Image by George Margelis

All components that make the book what it is, indicate the necessity of affection through touch, and thus the significance of the human hand as an organ both of performance and of perception. As I said in the beginning of this article, “I have been contemplating human contact, communication, closeness, and tactility/materiality for a while now”. For Aristotle, the hand is the “tool of tools”. It is strength, power and protection, generosity, and hospitality. For Quintilian: “The hands may almost be said to speak. Do we not use them to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, supplicate, express aversion or fear, question or deny? Do we not use them to indicate joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, penitence, measure, quantity, number, and time? Have they not the power to excite and prohibit, to express approval, wonder, shame?”. I find it interesting reading up on the symbolism of hands, and explaining how this is associated with my overall artistic practice, but this is perhaps a subject for another article.

The book’s design makes it difficult to read. You need to give it warmth, you need to give it love and attention, you need to make an effort. Sometimes it is not easy, you need to touch it… you need friction… You will put it down, pick up it, make a cuppa and warm your hands up; you won’t read it all in one sitting. That’s what it is really about; physical bodies relating to the work. The letters return to the idea of physicality, tactility, materiality. The book asks to be touched, it seeks intimacy and attention. This is revealed through its very first lines: “In this book, the human hand is as important as love.”

To You, will be made available for purchase soon! To keep updated and find out more about the book, follow Yiota on Twitter @yiota_demetriou, or visit the book’s site: www.to-you.live. Sign up to the book’s mailing list via the site above, to follow its journey.

The project is supported by Dr. Tom Abba (Bristol-based Book Artist and Designer), and Prof. Kate Pullinger (Novelist and Academic) through the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (@CCCIBathSpa), at Bath Spa University.

“[…] the special dialectic of the love letter, both blank (encoded) and expressive (charged with longing to signify desire)” (Barthes, p. 157)

I am a performance practitioner and researcher, interested in archives, personal collections, and spoken histories. My work is immersive and allows for audience participation through using audience stories as the main focus of the piece presented. It further employs creative technologies and sound art installation to exhibit and present the stories collected during each performance. In this article, I will be concentrating on one of my performance projects called Love Letters; while touring this work  I have collected 200 love letters written by audience members. In this article I will describe  the diverse narrative/storytelling ‘interfaces’ used in the performance  as well as how we aim to redevelop Love Letters by making the costume/dress, used in the piece, a storytelling object that will narrate past audience letters from the collection to present day audiences.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.

Love Letters is a live, durational performance with a performer wearing an interactive dress, a station for writing love letters, and an installation of letters. It is a performance project that has toured international performance festivals and art-related events since 2012: Performing Documents (2012), Performance and Live Art Platform (2012, 2014), Tempting Failure (2013, 2014), Latitude (2015), and iDocs (2016). Reviews about the piece have been published both in online and print media, in Vice Live Art Almanac Vol. 4 and EXEUNT magazine.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

The piece invites participating audiences to write letters that capture platonic, familial or lustful emotion, to share other audiences’ letters and to interact with the performer’s costume by attaching the letters to her dress in addition to documenting memories and streams of consciousness onto both the costume and the performer’s body. The collection of letters contains audience love letters about moment in time, letters to old friends, old lovers, family, about falling love, or even love that can never work. At the end of the performance, the dress I wear is full of audience love letters. In each performance past audience letters are revisited and new love letters are added to the collection.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Through a collaboration with creative technologists and interdisciplinary artists we aim to redevelop the dress as a storytelling object using creative technologies,  as explained below. This will enable us to build upon the audience-led experience of the love letters collection encountered in the performance.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Inspirations

I have been living away from ‘home’ for the past 11 years in order to pursue my academic research and artistic practice which includes developing interactive approaches to curating and exhibiting oral histories as well as  new ways of storytelling with and for the public. Within this timeframe, I have moved between 3 countries, 4 cities, and 13 houses. The process of unpacking each time is not only mundane but sometimes painful, as I often find myself, as one does, going through boxes and boxes of old photographs, reading strips of paper,  dwelling on postcards and letters. This memorabilia  – remnants of relationships long past, traces of intimate relationships that no longer exist, recollections of desperate apologies –  is too precious to discard. Thus, it ends up hidden in the depths of my wardrobe or roughly preserved in suitcases under my bed.

The process of self-archiving – unpacking, reading, labeling and preserving my own collection of love letters and emotional luggage – made me think about how, if I consider my memorabilia  important enough to keep, then other people may share similar emotional attachments to such tangible traces. This prompted a further question: is the practice of writing love letters vanishing because of technology? Surely, the love letter  hasn’t disappeared, but rather it has been democratised and made commonplace by technology. However, what about the actual ritual, the analogue procedure, the aesthetic, conceptual and emotional value that is found in the very act of handwriting a love letter, the physical artifact that lives on?  Does the digital form of the love letter share the same value as its material form? Is it able to capture the emotional registers (anguish, longing and desire) that make the performance of writing love letters so powerful?

“Love letters are awaited with  impatience: it is not so much for the news they bring (supposing of course that we have nothing special to fear or to hope for), but for their real and concrete nature. The stationery, the black signs, the smell, etc., all these replace the weakening affective analogon […]” (Sartre, p.145).

For Sartre, love letters awaken an affective analogue, a physiological or psychological element that is a constituent of a person’s imaginative state. This is the ideal and subjectified reality or imaginary affection of the lover for the beloved. It is the subjective idea that the lover holds of the recipient of the love letter, which serves as a substitute when the beloved is absent. This emerges from within the person engaged in the physical and conceptual ritual of writing the love letter. For example, at the moment when the beloved becomes absent, the lover’s desire transforms into an irreal object – something produced, not by the beloved’s existing image or presence (beloved-as-real), but by the lover’s idea of them, which is trying to fill in the gaps of their beloved’s presence (beloved-as-imagined). As this irreal object becomes difficult to imagine because of the physical absence between the lover and the beloved, it confirms the lover’s desires. Due to the physical absence, the affection and love between the lovers reverts into a type of ‘deprived’ or empty love, “a love for love’s sake, a love that is in love with nothing other than itself” (Kearney, p.68). In this sense, lover uses their ‘analogon’ to make present to themselves that which is absent, the imagined beloved. The very practice of writing love letters makes this emotional process of a relationship between the lover and the beloved transparent. For both Sartre and Barthes, the lover’s anguish over the beloved’s absence and the longing for their presence is desire, which uses imagination to cover the voids created by an absence. In this sense, it is only the imagination writing love letters to itself, responding to its desire with its own desire. As discussed further on, absence and presence are themes that my performance project, Love Letters, plays with strongly; for the reason the performance employs creative practices that encourage human expression and therefore evoke emotions such as grief and loss. Hence, does typing a love letter, faxing it, emailing it, coding it, posting it, sharing it – have the same effect, even if its purpose is to communicate via written word the same raw emotion of human pathos?

Love Letters at Wickham Theatre, 2013. Image by YD.

The love letter has been cherished for centuries, written by: Beethoven and Embry, Napoleon to Josephine, Jean Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir; Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, Leo Tolstoy to Valeria Arsenev, Allen Ginsburg to Peter Orlovsky; Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf; John Keats to Fanny Brawne, Voltaire to Olympe Dunover, and the list goes on. Throughout history, love letters have taken a biblical tenor, literary forms (early Renaissance, evolving in the Enlightenment), going beyond being written as literary device for romance and affection. Instead emerging into a political act of wisdom, an opportunity for self-reflection and introspection.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

For instance, Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey’s computer-based, automated love letter generator is well-known as one of the the first attempts to humanise the computer by digitising emotive writing, exposing the mechanical nature of romance. Frantic and random love letters started appearing on the notice board at the University of Manchester’s computer lab in August, 1953. This was the outcome of Strachey’s programming for the Manchester Mark I computer (M.U.C.), a Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first general-purpose and commercially available machine of its kind. The love letter generator was among this early computer’s many programmes. In Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts (2016), David Link maintains that Strachey’s program was one of the first experiments in producing text-generating softwares or electronic combinatory literature created from Alan Turing’s random number generator. “Ultimately the software is based on a reductionist position vis-à-vis love and its expression,” Link writes. “Love is regarded as a recombinatory procedure with recurring elements.” The computer would insert nouns and adjectives of endearment randomly selected from its database and through this the computer would become the author of a one-sided epistolary romance. All the letters were variations on a basic syntactic template: “you are my [adjective] [noun]. my [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verb] your [adjective] [noun].” And the signatory was always the same: “M.U.C.”

I used an online interface that uses Stratchey’s code to produce a computer-automated love letter:

FANCIFUL DEAR,

   YOU ARE MY CRAVING FERVOUR, MY PRECIOUS FERVOUR. MY LOVE EAGERLY LUSTS AFTER YOUR LOVING FONDNESS. MY PASSION PINES FOR YOUR ENTHUSIASM. MY SYMPATHY FERVENTLY HOLDS DEAR YOUR HEART.
YOURS ANXIOUSLY,
M.U.C.

The chaotic remix of sentimental words indicates an ‘ache of longing’ which journeys “beyond the one that already accompanies the genre: one can almost sense M.U.C.’s thirst, as if the computer were struggling to speak from the heart but discovered that its vocabulary had been arbitrarily limited to the language of clichés”  (Wardrip-Fruin, 2011).

Returning to my initial point, the value and beauty of this ritual of writing a love letter lives in the passionate and intentional desire to capture the message in writing, turning the praxis of writing a love letter into a performance of composition and reflection with the recipient at the heart of this action.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.  

The symbolic actions engaging audiences in the performance project, Love Letters, do not only intervene in the idea of keeping memories private by compelling the audience to participate in an exchange of memories, but also creates a second level of intervention by compelling the audience to witness other people doing the same. This is realised by ‘exposing’ their intimate and personal testimonies (with their consent). The audience accounts – composed and narrated during the performance of Love Letters – make evident how narrative is a vital component of the human mind, key to making sense of the world around us. Thus, the collection of these letters acts as a type of candid cultural artefact or resource that carries  ‘intangible’ personal heritage – the letters tell stories that are sometimes profound and intense, and at other times superficial and trivial, and are then given existence through their mediation within a performance setting. The action of writing a letter is  used in the piece as a tool to evoke memories. This is achieved by having the audience engage with the performer by addressing and dressing her in particular ways so that the shared memories become attached with new environments, connotations and other ways of telling. These modes of engagement occur through two strands of audience – performer interaction: (1) writing the letter and reading an other letter aloud; (2) pinning the narrated letter onto the dress and writing on the dress and on the performer’s body, which in the performance act as narrative interfaces.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

The dress worn in every performance is the same. It is ‘stained’ with past and present audiences’ contributions, playing with the notions of presence and absence. As described, the audience makes notes on the garment and or the performer’s body, ‘memo’-type messages left on it, for others to see and perhaps to not see. In consideration of this, the dress/the costume used in the performance is a crucial component of the piece. It becomes part of the audiences’ recollections, not only for its traces of past written and narrative acts, but also as an in-between, a mediator, of what was said and what was lost. It most importantly becomes a vessel that embodies audience members’ intimate stories. The dress witnesses the different tellings and shares a different type of intimacy with each and every audience member who  has interacted with it. It is a technology that is physically embedded with their memories, as well as the cultural connotations it carries because of its material form.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.  

Further research has posed new questions for the project: what if the performance’s dress narrated letters written by its past audiences, as a response to its interaction with present audiences? To explore this I put together an interdisciplinary team of creatives, including artistic practitioners and technologists with experience of developing interactive technologies for storytelling and immersive performance purposes. Together we aim to concentrate on redeveloping the letter writing engagement and technological interactions of the dress, making it a storytelling object or device. To achieve this we plan to create a technological speaking attachment to the dress using electronics and by augmenting the dress with recordings of the existing collection of letters. This will allow it to speak its past audiences’ letters to present-day audiences, as part of a narrative exchange in the performance. Following the original live performance process – writing love letters, depositing these in the space, reading other letters aloud and attaching these to the dress – the audience’s engagement with the costume will trigger a reaction where the dress narrates another story from the collection as a response. The dress will become an interactive storytelling object and a type of ‘worn’ sound installation, which will give the audience a further creative agency and shared ownership over their letters and the entire collection. The primary importance is not the technology itself but the pervasive effect it has on the storytelling process. This work makes use of technology, whilst offering audiences agency/ownership allowing for creative expression and imagination, while not drawing the attention away from the performance and storytelling aspects of the piece.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

To undertake this project we recently launched a crowdfunding campaign. We need the public’s support to redevelop this piece. Our aim is to raise enough funds to develop the technology for the piece to build on an audience-led experience of sharing memories. We have planned two public events to showcase this work: in the UK at Centrespace Gallery (Bristol) and in Zagreb at the Museum of Broken Relationships (Croatia), where we intend to donate the entire audience love letters for collection once the project is completed. It is important to us that the letters audiences have entrusted us with in each performance are preserved in a safe and loving space, for other people to read and appreciate.

You can check out our pitch here: https://spsr.me/FxkW.

We appreciate any kind of support, If you don’t feel like contributing financially, maybe you would like to send us a love letter instead. Send love letters (addressed to a significant other) to p.demetriou@gmail.com, subject line “love letter donation”.

Supporters of this project include:

• Museum of Broken Relationships
• Pervasive Media Studio
• Centrespace Gallery
• The Writing Platform
• Making Books: Creativity, Print Culture, and the Digital Research Centre (BSU)

Find us here

@yiota_demetriou

http://yiotademetriou.com/

https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/projects/love-letters/

p.demetriou@bathspa.ac.uk

References

• Barthes, R., (1977), A Lover’s Discourse, (London: Random House, New ed. 2002).
• Demetriou, P. A., Pappas, O. and Kampylis, S., (2017) “Love Letters: Wearing Stories Told – a performance-technology provocation for interactive storytelling”, Body, Space & Technology Journal, 16. ISSN 1470-9120, <http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol16/>.
• Kearney, R., (2006), Poetics of Imagining, (New York: Fordham University Press).
• Link, D., (2016), Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, (Minnesota: Univocal Publishing).
• com, (2017), Love Letter generator, [online] Available at: <http://www.gingerbeardman.com/loveletter/> [Accessed 13 Mar. 2017].
• Sartre, J., Elkaïm-Sartre, A., Webber, J., (2004), The Imaginary, (London: Routledge): 145.
• Wardrip-Fruin, N., (2011) “Digital Media Archaeologies: Interpreting Computational Processes,” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press): 302-322.

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