The Weirding Module Numbers

The Weirding Module listens into spoken word and the voice in contemporary art and experimental music but what can we say about the genocide in Gaza? and what else can we talk about but the genocide in Gaza?

As the death toll rises, a constant stream of statistics flow from the greyed-out media space, these numbers are debated, weighed against each other and cast into doubt by press and governments who explicitly or implicitly support the violence. Statistics are mute and brutal, they don’t allow for the specificity of the lives that they collectively document. They no longer contain any sense, yet it’s impossible to ignore them and incumbent on us not to look away.

There is a whole strain of contemporary poetry and music that utilises numbers as text, as language. Its not easy to categorise or generalise but maybe its a form of structuralism that uses technical and artistic frameworks as content for artworks, intentionally inward looking and unsentimental. This episode explores some of these works but in the context of the genocide in Gaza where the constant stream of ever-growing numbers attempts to quantify the monstourous scale of the situation, to signal its urgency and to reveal its patterns. But no person, house, moment, land or life is the same as any other and in numbering them we lose their specificity, we cannot hold so many specificities in mind and this inabilty is itself horrifying.

For this episode I designed an intervention in which guests: Wietske, Daniel, Jason and Sam were shown a set of statistics from the ongoing crisis and asked to read out only the numbers. Thanks to them for agreeing to this heavy work.

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