BY-Product

This book follows two days of collective work during which outcomes, even objects, were temporarily formed and disbanded, leaving behind exhaustion, rumour, and around three thousand photographs, some of which are shown here.
The term 'collective refers here to a group of four dancers and myself- this group's activity produced a series of objects that are at once fleeting and monumental. The intention was in part to use bodies and movements as the raw material for making the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet, as well as other forms -both messy and succinct - that relate to but also depart from those letters.
As objects, these products of action have special properties which are defined not only by their temporal appearance and their unsettled forms, but also, and more importantly by the fact that these objects are made by, and are comprised of thinking and feeling subjects.
Being negotiated by people, and comprised of people, or bodies, these objects are work, workers, and products, all bound in one irreducible form.
Reification describes the process of an idea becoming a thing, or the move from an object to a subject, or vice versa.
The potential by-product of which is that subjects are rendered passive, objectified. However in this case the points in the triangulation of work-worker-product, or action-subject-object are constantly exchanging.
This book isn't interested in recording single outcomes but rather all the action, the attempts, the 'practice' that takes place pre- and post- object.
The fact that these objects are experienced as photographs belies the fact that the objects depicted are actually never still or final, they only appear to be so because the camera 'captures', stills, or rather pauses them.
As objects they are just moments in the timeline of an extended event. Even if temporary and unstable they are nevertheless objects, albeit objects that might morph, reform, and talk back at any time.
Here letters are built up over time, via trial and error, and once they are formed more or less successfully they are then elaborated such that they morph into what might be called extra- letters. So within the 387 images in this book there are twenty-six familiar letters as well as another twenty-six para-letters, but all the other images gathered here might also be thought of as symbols, and as objects. So this book simultaneously presents objects and represents actions.

The production of a new font is not important; after all, body-fonts have been made before, more important is the process of creating tools to work with, materials that can be used to mould, which is what letters are.
So the studio where this series of images was made, and now perhaps this book are both sites of production, or workplaces where a specific group of people simultaneously act as designer, machine, operator and object. The term 'user' isn't included in that small list.
All the actions, all the movements enacted in the service of making and un-making are shown here, and one image is as concrete and as fleeting as another.
Ben Cain

Afterwards by Ben Cain in English/French/Dutch.
Published by WIELS
Concept and design : Ben Cain
Photography: Tine Claerhout; Ben Cain
Coordinator: Devrim Bayar
Producer: EKXI
Dancers: Lodie Kardouss; Quintjin Ketels; Marta Kosieradzka; David Zagari