On Aravind Adyanthaya’s "Unbounding [sic] Prometheus"
We walk in on a familiar scene of writing. The writer already sits at his laptop, a page already open on screen, a file already made, a cursor already waiting. The fan of the projector, casting the laptop’s screen onto the wall, already whirs. We, the audience, have all been handed clipboards, many of us already beginning to write.
By the time Aravind Adyanthaya’s piece Unbounding [sic] Prometheus begins, several moments have already passed that might be called its beginning. The piece troubles the question “when was it written” to a point beyond answering. In one response, you could address the piece it draws from, which was written between 479 BC and 424 BC by Aeschylus. In another, describing how it revisits his original performance, Prometheus Bound, you could answer: in the early 2000s. And in still another, speaking to the piece’s use of predictive text and large language models, the answer is multiple: “in the instantaneous present,” and “in the moment the word appears on the page” and “only after having been trained on a corpus of text drawn from incomprehensible amounts of previous human writing.” In other words, sitting in the room as Adyanthaya and his collaborators, Alejandra Maldonado and Christopher Cancel, perform the piece, “the text” is not an object that arrives pre-written. Instead, it is always writing, an act insistently now, made utterly present. Just as Prometheus Bound has become Unbounding [sic] Prometheus, what has been written is both un- and re-written, remaining insistently writing, bound and unbounding.
Unbounding [sic] Prometheus, as well as Adyanthaya’s other work, often takes the familiar and almost invisible tools of writing, and transposes them back into complexity. For the past two decades Adyanthaya has worked in a mode he terms escritura acto, which situates writing not as a stable remnant of the past, but reflective of the present. Writing is always moving, it’s in a state of perpetual flux. In his essay, “Toward a Poor Techno Theatre,” Adyanthaya describes how, “as it moves away from the notion of an original source, escritura acto relies on a function of the present, a linguistic and spatial negotiation. It forms an experiential junction point in which no attempt of recapturing or copying the past is made. Instead, a here and now is engendered, an occasion open to the past’s disrupted and disrupting materialities.”
“As it moves away from the notion of an original source, escritura acto relies on a function of the present, a linguistic and spatial negotiation. It forms an experiential junction point in which no attempt of recapturing or copying the past is made. Instead, a here and now is engendered, an occasion open to the past’s disrupted and disrupting materialities.”
The materiality of Adyanthaya’s voice, for example, is both concurrent and dissonant with what is typed on screen. The role of the voice is not simply dictation; the role of the text is not just transcription. Instead, the piece splits voicing from writing, and writing from voicing, the two practices sitting in frictional proximity. As we move through Unbounding [sic] Prometheus, the cursor moving us to each new page, we continually encounter these “disrupted and disrupting materialities.” The materiality of writing and the materiality of the voice are both bound to, and unbound from, their material substrates: the page, the screen, the body. Throughout the piece, moments of conflicting boundedness and unbounding occur:
When, after at first only hearing the sound of typing, we begin to hear Adyanthaya’s voice, which at times voices what we see on screen, but at other times diverges, typing “to close” while saying “to open,” a path of the text not recorded as the typing moves unrelentingly onward.
When Maldonado rolls the computer away from where Adyanthaya sits, and activates the computer’s speech-to-text, so that Adyanthaya’s voice now travels across the stage to be imperfectly translated onto the screen. The text shifts and rewrites itself, listening for the ends of a phrase, writing and rewriting, disregarding the linearity of the typed line. Ghostly predictions open up other texts that exist only as momentary possibilities, before further speaking forecloses them.
When Adyanthaya follows the path his voice has already taken, standing and walking with difficulty, coming to rest at his keyboard, a reminder that we are material, feeling beings, physically bound, and yet our voices extend beyond us.
When, after being helped to the ground by his two collaborators, Cancel anoints himself with oil, and comes to hover over Adyanthaya as he lies prone in front of the screen, his arms extended on each side of Adyanthaya’s body like a cage. The recordings of past performances play behind them, but filter through a palpable physical tension, as Adyanthaya and Cancel hold still.
When Adyanthaya, still lying on the ground, asks for a story, and Maldonado inserts parameters into a text generator, where stories appear, from which she pulls out words and phrases. Cancel, writes using the same words on his clipboard, a phone camera projected his hands seeming to write as fast as he physically can.
When Cancel then moves among the audience with the phone camera, projecting clipboards from the safety of our own laps. What we might have called our own writing leaves us, transported into something no longer familiar.
I don’t know where to end this list, especially for a piece that makes me aware of writing itself in this particular moment. (I’m thinking, as I write, of Adyanthaya saying that “Writing is a transaction of loss; it is like the noise on the street that I have been blocking from my senses until now. La escritura es la pobreza. (It is poverty.)” I will end instead at one beginning to Unbounding [sic] Prometheus that has remained with me since the performance.
Adyanthaya types, each key sounding into the silent space, and moves the cursor onto a new page of the document. He types a single quotation mark. This small character, sitting alone for half a second before any other text appears, suddenly opened space for all of the many implications of the title, Unbounding [sic] Prometheus, to fully resonate. The quotation mark points outward to a voice from elsewhere and yet conjures that voice in the present. It is both a sign of faithful transcription, and yet unfaithfully translates that voice, bringing it into another time, another medium. Likewise, in the title, from the Latin “sic erat scriptum” for “thus it was written,” [sic] also denotes both fidelity and divergence, often used to prevent the erasing of an error in a transcript, insisting on preserving something about the original that defies standardization. But, revealing of how the voice can sit in excess of writing, the sound of [sic] is also sick, reflecting how Adyanthaya revisits his text Prometheus Bound through the experiences of sickness and disability, experiences that necessarily move the text, the voice, and the hands that write, into new negotiations with the present act of writing.
Blair Johnson is a teacher, writer, and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is a PhD candidate in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo. Her obsessions include: unfaithful translations, the material specificity of paper and screens, code as a poetic language, and geologic time. Her work has been published in Diagram, Boston Review, Best American Experimental Writing, The Tusculum Review, and Quarantine Public Library. Since 2020, she has worked as the web and book designer for Essay Press.