KARNEJ/gestura2 Experimental sound, movement, and poetry performance Alfred Korzybski, the originator of the phrase “the map is not the territory”, believed that human nature could be changed by altering our verbal use of language, specifically through his discipline of general semantics and judicious use of the auxiliary verb to be. In the autumn of 1939, William Burroughs was among 38 students who paid $40 to attend one of Kozybski’s workshops. Phonemes, devoid of context, can transmit meaning through a process more akin to body language than that written signs or symbols. Once more, we mine the expressive nature of breathing for gestura2. This time the source has been culled from proximity and, some might say organically, in the form of El Nido gallerist/curator Victoria Chapman’s 1990 book “The Engaged”. Another attendee was Wendell Johnson, the founder of the Monster Study, which in 1938 purposely inducted stuttering in a group of Iowa orphans to study the environmental causes of said speech disorder. The study was kept hidden for fear Johnson’s reputation would be tarnished in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis during WWII. With gestura2, we attempt an unfaithful transcription of the written word back into speech. The focus is all the different shapes or angles of interpretation we humans can devise through shifting positioning and intent. The "Talking Books Program" (Books for the Blind), was intended to provide reading material for veterans injured during World War I and other visually impaired adults. The arrival of cassette players inside automobiles expanded the target audience to the visually able commuter. Those that, without irony, receive and interpret this speech as an aural transcription of written symbols. And not vice versa. At gestura2, readers selected by a rudimentary lottery system will have their speech translated into a visual sign language devised by Stevie Kincheloe. Their actual words will be sampled and processed through stochastic applications controlled by her interpretative movements and the results recorded into an archive. In this case, an audiobook of sorts. ———- KARNEJ is the origin point of a variety of media instigations. In the past, these have taken the form and appearance of visual art, poetry, and sound/music in galleries and performance spaces in the US (MX Gallery, Filosofi Arts, Interstate Projects, P.S. 1 and WFMU, Montez Press Radio in NY) and abroad (performances in Centro de Cultura Digital, Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City and in Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Vigo, Spain). KARNEJ is a dwelling. A something and somewhere resisting authorship through a faith in personal and collective codes. It prioritizes communion between different modes through chance encounters where the experience of rupture can emerge. For the purposes of the gestura series, KARNEJ is the third Thursday of every month in EL NIDO.