Assumptions in common matters
again&again: Alison Scott & Rosie Roberts
This is a text we wrote together about working together and trying to get together to work together and be together.
Alison & Rosie rehearsing for a performance of Assumptions in common matters, at MOTE 102, Edinburgh, Jan 2026. Photo: Rachel McBrinn.
A Starter A Salad
We are both on our laptops. Our little digital faces hanging around in the tabs. Quote: I would get lost counting them. Who first thought of it? How did he describe it to the others? end quote. I think about tabs. I send you a link, on your screen it is an error. You say, ‘I'm thought salading’ and the corrector on my screen says to consider changing it to ‘I’m thinking about salad’.
Quote Anne Carson
A script for keeping casual
We decide to face each other, across a table. Let’s move! It’s useful to have a script to fall back on, we can always break away from it. Just get a version done, a version done, a version, done. Let’s begin and make a beginning. How long does it take for a news reader to know how much they can read before the cut back to the studio. In Auto Cueing the chance-i-ness is deadened, we have no such machine, so we talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
Audibility
A sudden awareness of pitch. Of lisping. Of all the assumptions held in voices. And then in writing: what it sounds like, what it feels like, what its atmosphere actually is. Catching the creaking, the bee-stings, the pheromones/ theremins, the mix ups: the not-quite homonyms that happen when the page is left. Hands complete the circuit and make the connection, bee to hive. A scent-y sense. There are no smooth segues and that’s fine. I thought you said it, no it was definitely you. The harshest instinct takes an iron to them. Today there’s a forgiving mood so it’s out the door with creased trousers and unbrushed hair.
In ultra-ears that are also our own
Listening in the room is surreal: we re-hear the noises of the day, the soundscape of an earlier now. It is spooky and loopy which is another feeling in the building. The re-played creak of the door makes me turn my head and you laugh but then once it was real, was now, and we both laugh, but are also a bit wary. Quote: ‘listening to everything all the time, and reminding yourself when you're not. But going below the surface too, it's an active process. It's not passive. I mean hearing is passive in that soundwaves hinge upon the eardrum. You can do both. You can focus and be receptive to your surroundings. If you're tuned out, then you're not in contact with your surroundings. You have to process what you hear. Hearing and listening are not the same thing.’ End quote.
Quote Pauline Oliveros
Documentation
Documentation always comes second to eating the meal. The conversations in the comments catch some morsels of communication and thinking like the mesh disc you put over a plug hole. A rehashing will suffice in lieu of a full beginning-middle-and-end story. One takes many photos; the other forgets to snap anything. What is quantitative and qualitative slips away.
The Work
We do the work in the midst. We are more than the sum of the parts but sometimes the parts I can give feel small, other times I lose myself gladly in the sum of doubled-digits, the smash of twenty fingers on the keys. The work doesn’t always feel like work, often I’m just glad to be able to call it work.
Quote: ‘That the work must be offered up for communication means that it must in effect be offered, that is to say, presented, proposed and abandoned on the common limit where singular beings share one another.’ end quote.
Work blows through the door of the mind and thinking and aptitude, and commutes home.
Quote Jean Luc Nancy
An Atmosphere
The atmosphere isn’t abstract because it's not visible, it's a sense. It’s the total accumulation. It is something I know, feel, smell because it happens live. But also on the phone, or, you know when it's wrong. Gagworthy, flailing, polluted. Need to work on some good habits to deal with that - dehumidifiers, policies etc. Perhaps engage in some divination.
In Unison
Let’s try it again in perfect unison. It helps to start at the same time. It’s not a nursery rhyme round. Let’s try it again, but this time, with a feeling of solidarity. It helps to end at the same time.
Again and Again
They knew it was going to cost them. But it was worth it. It was nice to see each other anyway and to be honest everyone would have paid to come as a holiday if they could have. It’s a shame that booking tickets is so unforgiving, made it in the end though.
In Talking
In talking and literally talking. We create a beginning and begin. There is a conversation out there that says work harder not smarter, is that it? If talking becomes work that’s harder to define. Not all talking is smart, it is apparent. In talking we give voice, become a voice, perhaps some semblance of being in accordance. In talking together we make space, interrupt, make non-talk non-speech noise-talk breaths laughs splutter-stutters bllaaaabeughblurt. In the doing, it does something. We narrate the doing, talk through what’s normally not talked. Quote: ‘The interruption of the myth of the writer is not the disappearance of the writer’ end quote. Writing down the talk though is an interruption of sorts, editing the stream into a new route.
Quote Jean Luc Nancy
The Schedule
We write up many schedules. Often they are not our own. Imagine being the person at the top of the schedule chain. An inverted pyramid where you are the wide bit, the lion bit, the shark bit. My week will start as such and everyone else shall fall inline, I have the resources - you are the resources.
Silly Winds
Bllaaaabeughblurt bllaaaabeughblurt bllaaaabeughblurt. I say humour me one more time. This is onomatapeio, hard to spell it. In collaborations who is the jester? I’m sorry, I’m not that funny. Though the AI giggles so much as if it has an impulse to read us everything we ever wrote. Everything, every error, misspelling and half-thought we have ever written. Quote: ‘a cloud ethics must be able to locate ways of being together that resist the algorithmic forces of attribution’ end quote.
We’re happy listening to the robot’s happy jesting. Perhaps tending toward too serious, too sincere, too concerned with what needs to be done is a learnt angst. What role is that, not such a fun one, so very happy to have the giggling AI blurts loosening the grip. Although, I like hearing our words in each other’s voices.
Quote Louise Amoore