Yesterday was the U.S. Labor Day. That morning at 8:30am I was sitting in a fancy coffee shop waiting to meet a friend when a regular came in to pick up his daily preorder there (two large lattes). The regular waved and said “Happy Labor Day, guys!” and picked up his lattes and waltzed out the door. I tried to catch the barista’s eye but to no avail. So it goes.
My older child is autistic with ADHD (a very common combination now known as AuDHD). My younger child has OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). This results, as you may imagine, in some fascinating explosions as they both share an extremely small room in our fourth-floor walkup apartment in Brooklyn.
And as you can also imagine, it leads me to late night internet readings, twitter-followings, and instagram ‘likings’ because that is where I seem to be getting most of the ‘parent counseling’ promised but not delivered by the city where we live.
There is so much incredible shared knowledge online where I follow feeds called “actually autistic” and “autistic Callum” and “autistic voices.” I have read such moving and helpful posts and feel extremely grateful that both my kids’ neurodiverse worlds have taught me so much.
This is not the space where I will go into my own deep-rooted connection with most of what I am reading online or why both kids’ experiences feel very familiar, but there’s a lot there to think about too.
One night I was scrolling through a wiki made by and for autists (not the NY pronunciation of artist, mind you) and reading in the range of subjects the contributors had posted. I was learning a lot and arrived at the bottom of the wiki to the links for varying kinds of synesthesia. As is the case for many people, synesthesia remains a longstanding fascination. And as a young person I so wished to have it, thinking it would make me a better artist or more mysterious or something.
And there it was. A link to the secret me that I have always known but never shared and didn’t know what it was and am still having a hard time even typing here, even though I was so excited to find it.
Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, Cortex Journal, 2023*
And here’s the abstract:
Abstract: With effort, most literate persons can conjure more or less vague visual mental images of the written form of words they are hearing, an ability afforded by the links between sounds, meaning, and letters. However, as first reported by Francis Galton [in 1883], persons with ticker-tape synesthesia (TTS) automatically perceive in their mind's eye accurate and vivid images of the written form of all utterances which they are hearing. We propose that TTS results from an atypical setup of the brain reading system, with an increased top-down influence of phonology on orthography. As a first descriptive step towards a deeper understanding of TTS, we identified 26 persons with TTS. Participants had to answer to a questionnaire aiming to describe the phenomenology of TTS along multiple dimensions, including visual and temporal features, triggering stimuli, voluntary control, interference with language processing, etc. We also assessed the synesthetic percepts elicited experimentally by auditory stimuli such as non-speech sounds, pseudowords, and words with various types of correspondence between sounds and letters. We discuss the potential cerebral substrates of those features, argue that TTS may provide a unique window in the mechanisms of written language processing and acquisition, and propose an agenda for future research.
This is NOW, this article came out in July of this year.
This is what I’ve been living my whole life. I couldn’t believe it. I had only started telling a couple of people about this in the past few months, and then hesitatingly, because it seemed so weird. And now it is something that actually exists—has existed—and I’m not the only one. Tickertape synesthesia.
Here’s when I first noticed it, became conscious of it:
I must have been seven or eight years old. I’m in the parking lot between our house and the band field, coming home from McGuffey school. Just about to enter the little wooded buffer between the lot and our house. And I’m mulling over things I said in school and coming up with an idea for a fantastic story. And I’m thinking to myself: wouldn’t it be great if I could just have a little slot on the side of my head, up to the right of my forehead, where the story could just come out all spit out on a long thin sheet of paper, so I could gather it up and not have to go to the trouble of sitting down and writing it. Because it’s all there. Just like that. And then I wouldn’t have to deal with the tedium of putting pen to paper. It’s already done.
Because it’s all there and has always been there and going. Everything I hear is instantaneously translated into text and it goes just like that, in a kind of ribbon of text right up there above my eyebrows. All the time. The radio, the people sitting behind me on the train, even my thoughts.
“Doesn’t it make you crazy?!” my mother asked.
It doesn’t. First because I’m used to it and it is mostly fun. And I can also dial it down a bit, like radio volume, so it recedes somewhat into the background. But I find it enjoyable to be reading everything all the time. And fast.
I kept on reading. Some people have ticker-tape synesthesia where the color or font changes depending on the volume. People describe what the words look like when they’re in a foreign language and they don’t know that language. I never thought about that so I gave it a try. And it’s like the other people described, sometimes it’s spelled out but sometimes it’s more like a fuzzy lump of language mixed up with a blur. It’s so exciting to think about this everyday experience in a different way.
Another thing this realization has done is enabled me to put a different lens on the work I have made over the last 25 years. Another way of understanding the interests that have been driving me for what I pretended were intellectual reasons (and which were of course that too) but also were part of a physical drive to make visible how I was experiencing the world anyway.
I used to really get into those medical articles where they would diagnose Rembrandt (strabismus, no three dimensional vision) or Van Gogh (lead poisoning, digitalis poisoning, epilepsy, bipolar, too much absinthe) and use the diagnosis to explain why their work looked the way it did. But that reduces art to symptom or pathology.
I’m much more interested now in thinking about the exploratory nature of art-making as a deeply felt desire to explain the world to others. At least when I feel good about art and a (very) imaginary audience, that is what I like to consider. So it is not documentary, and it is not just interiority, it is a felt relationship between them, mixed with an enormous dollop of fantasy, imagination, play, and not to be forgotten, frustration.
The 2022 show at MoMA about Matisse’s “Red Studio,” was, for me, another useful way to consider the documentary and imaginative elements present in a work that in most institutional contexts is presented in the museological void.
So the realization I have tickertape synesthesia sheds new light onto why, decades ago, I embraced one paragraph by Benjamin about copying texts (you can read it here). I use it as a simple instruction manual for making a different kind of film. A physical manifestation of what’s happening already.
My project in 1998, Documents for a Report, tracing fifty UN Mission in Kosovo documents, eliminating some text, retaining other pieces, the desire to copy until my hand falls off, the repetition of brushstrokes, five hundred per page, in the 160 drawings for my 2007 installation Sequence.
My frustrations with how boring text usually is in film compelled me to make hand-drawn text animations all those years ago. The dozens of hand-drawn text-based animations I made starting in the 2000s until now, like like Perseverance, Rorschach, Flight, and so many more.
My love of transcribing, the haunting of archives and libraries, the emergence of The Hoosac Institute, unbidden, like some kind of creature coming fully formed out of the lake, or a strip of paper out of the machine in my head. It is all starting to make a different sort of sense.
None of this is meant to obscure the other kinds influences you can see in how I make my work, my indebtedness to so many figures in the history and present of cinema and art and literature. That work is real and has made its way in to what I do.
But this new information, the revelation that the way I know the world is in fact through simultaneous transcription, adds a different level of coherence or connection to the me sitting here pounding away at the keyboard and the me who endlessly foolishly will drag her exhausted self back to the studio or to some far-flung place to make another thing. A thing that not one person in the whole world has asked me to make. But a thing that I have to make, in order to read, see, and feel this world right now.
And don’t get me started about how I “hear” music (spoiler: I taste it).
Thanks for reading.
*Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia, by Fabien Hauw a b, Mohamed El Soudany a, Laurent Cohen a b. Cortex Journal, Volume 160, 2023, Pages 167-179 ISSN 0010-9452
You can see my feature documentary BUNKER on Amazon or Projectr.tv and learn more about it by following this link.