{"id":491,"date":"2024-11-22T12:43:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-22T19:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/?p=491"},"modified":"2025-02-01T11:22:29","modified_gmt":"2025-02-01T18:22:29","slug":"reflections-on-a-name-and-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/reflections-on-a-name-and-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on a name and time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

5 minute read. Content warning<\/em>: None<\/p>\n\n\n\n

chatGPT Summary<\/strong>: Kay reflects on their October 2024 residency at FLEET Granville Island, where they publicly framed their ongoing non-verbal practice as The Radical Silence Project<\/em>, exploring silence as a form of agency, access, and artistic inquiry in a semi-public space, ultimately deepening their understanding of permission and non-verbal engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been practicing radical silence for years in different ways, but it wasn\u2019t until October 2024 that it had a name. FLEET: Granville Island<\/a> was the first time I publicly declared my month-long practice as “The Radical Silence Project,<\/a>” placing it in a container that others could interact with, question, and challenge. In a way, it felt like the first official iteration of the project, even though I had been engaging with non-verbal practice privately and professionally for much longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The FLEET residency offered an interesting space for this work\u2014an artist studio that was both semi-public and semi-private, a glass box in a pedestrian-heavy environment where visitors could observe or step inside and engage. Granville Island, a hub of tourism and commerce, created a different audience than my past non-verbal engagements at grunt gallery. Here, my silence was often viewed as an artistic statement rather than an access practice, and that was revealing. It became a performance to the outside world, whether I wanted it to be or not. Some saw my silence as an experiment, others as a gimmick. Some approached cautiously, others not at all. But for me, it was not a performance\u2014it was an invitation, a test, a lived experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The residency had its own logistical challenges. The FLEET studio was unheated, and I quickly realized that my ability to work with my hands was limited on colder days. I had planned to focus on mapping Granville Island through a mixed-reality lens\u2014exploring digital navigation tools for d\/Deaf, hard of hearing, blind, and mobility-device-using visitors. However, lack of WiFi access disrupted my plans, and I pivoted toward storytelling through shadow puppetry, rethinking how mapping could take shape in an interactive game format. The project, as always, was adaptive, iterative, shaped by circumstance and restriction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the core of the residency was radical silence. Unlike previous engagements where I structured the space as entirely non-verbal\u2014setting the tone and expecting visitors to participate in silence\u2014FLEET allowed for a more open approach. I didn’t require others to be silent. Instead, I simply did not speak. This was a significant shift. In previous iterations, silence had been an imposed, shared experience; at FLEET, it was my own. I was present, I was available, but I was not verbal, and it was up to those who engaged with me to decide how they wanted to meet me in that space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many, the expectation that I would adapt to them was palpable. They spoke, expecting me to respond. Some stumbled, unsure how to proceed when I did not. Others took it in stride, adapting effortlessly to text, gestures, or simply allowing silence to exist between us. I found a deep sense of agency in holding my ground\u2014not forcing silence upon others, but maintaining it for myself, and witnessing how others responded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I learned at FLEET was that radical silence is not about enforcing quiet\u2014it is about creating a condition where non-verbal communication exists as an equal option. It is about shifting the balance of expectation so that silence does not need to be explained, justified, or excused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This experience sharpened my understanding of permission, a theme that has continued to shape the project. At grunt, where I was among colleagues who already supported my work, silence was something I had been granted, a collective agreement. At FLEET, surrounded by strangers and tourists, permission was something I had to hold firm on myself. I had to give myself permission to remain non-verbal, to not make things easier for others, to resist the internalized urge to adapt for the comfort of those around me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of the month, I felt a deep clarity: Radical Silence is not just about what is missing (speech), but about what it makes possible (space, agency, permission). I carried this understanding forward into the next iteration of the project, ready to continue refining and expanding what non-verbal engagement could be\u2014not just as a personal practice, but as a mode of artistic inquiry, community building, and cultural critique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

October 2024 was a turning point. Radical Silence was no longer just something I did. It had a name, a shape, a future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technology note:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I continue to test the use of AI within my writing and artistic practice. I narrated the entirely of this blog and then used Otter.ai to transcribe it. I edited the transcript and then fed it to chatGPT 4o to review my thoughts. I used chatGPT to create a summary and reading estimate, and recommend some content warnings for this blog, and Grammarly to assist me in spelling and grammar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

5 minute read – Kay reflects on their October 2024 residency at FLEET Granville Island, where they publicly framed their ongoing non-verbal practice as The Radical Silence Project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,12,50],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-october-residency","tag-chatgpt","tag-grammarly","tag-radical-silence-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":500,"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions\/500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kdot.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}