5 minute read. Content warning: None
chatGPT Summary: 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, 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.
I have been practicing radical silence for years in different ways, but it wasn’t until October 2024 that it had a name. FLEET: Granville Island was the first time I publicly declared my month-long practice as “The Radical Silence Project,” 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.
The FLEET residency offered an interesting space for this work—an 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—it was an invitation, a test, a lived experience.
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—exploring 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.
But the core of the residency was radical silence. Unlike previous engagements where I structured the space as entirely non-verbal—setting the tone and expecting visitors to participate in silence—FLEET 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.
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—not forcing silence upon others, but maintaining it for myself, and witnessing how others responded.
What I learned at FLEET was that radical silence is not about enforcing quiet—it 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.
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.
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—not just as a personal practice, but as a mode of artistic inquiry, community building, and cultural critique.
October 2024 was a turning point. Radical Silence was no longer just something I did. It had a name, a shape, a future.
Technology note:
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.