muzikrox

[muzikrox]

The Cyborg Woods: On the Periphery of Nature

As I lay splayed across the patient bed getting my final diagnostic test of the semester, an unexpected cacophony arose to mingle with the wet thump of my mortality on the echocardiogram. The slow swell was the sound of bird calls tweeting and hooting in harmony as if ignorant of the sterile white walls of the outpatient facility around us. My first thought was that I should turn my alarm off. The second thought was, this is a perfect analogy to begin my reflection on my installation piece. The sounds of the room forced myself and this medical procedure into conjunction with the sounds of the woodland. Doing a strange dance, with my heartbeat setting the rhythm. Both opposing and interconnected sounds, one external and one internal. I was located in the center of this struggle, being analyzed and exploring my own body in the company of these digital recordings of birds.

My installation was intended to explore how we experienced nature at the intersection of ourselves and the unnatural. My initial instinct was to make it an immersive experience. I wanted the person in the installation space to be the receiving subject of whatever stimulation surrounded them. The wilderness has always been a place of internal reflection and escape in culture, formed through an appreciation of these places’ ambivalence towards humanity. Author William Cronon states that the awe and power of the wild American frontier was a result of its humbling reminder that we are out of our element. Simultaneously, however, these lands have been increasingly sought after as a place to escape civilized life (Cronon). The hope here, then, is to get back in touch with some sort of primitive lifestyle that is essential to our humanity and might help one reflect on their place in civilization. I took this view of nature and interrogated it. Why must something be at stake in order to truly meditate and explore the self in the wild? As Cronon mentions, this can create a dangerous binary that distances oneself from nature.

There is so much power in the ability to listen to nature. As Erik Deluca depicts in his essay, “Wolf Listeners”, the process of listening to wolves and translating it into patterns becomes a cultural phenomenon. The aesthetic sounds of nature and active listening creates a politicized form of sound that heightens our awareness of environmental changes and relationships, and our position within these relationships. Thus, listening to nature sounds forces us to find our position amongst a complex network of interspecies relationships and activity.

Building the Wild - Audio, Trees

For my project, I chose to experiment with what was “peripherally natural”. I wanted to create a ecosystem that intimated nature but fell just short. To do so, both wavetable synthesis to produce animal-like and natural sounds. I wanted to see if this could affect our ability to locate ourselves within the wilderness. I used a 5.1 surround sound system to create an immersive sonic environment with panning effects on the different sounds throughout the space. I decided against using animal samples early on because of the important concepts and questions I believed electronically produced sounds might raise. While my project inherently isn’t political, because its sole objective is to stimulate feedback from the user, I wanted to postulate a world that was stripped of recognizable nature, and create a replica. The project was certainly site-specific in that I am birthing it in a time where we are at a pivotal moment in environmental history, with the most recent climate change report spelling out irreversible danger in the future of Earth’s ecosystem. Can one garner similar experiences from listening to this new mediation of the environment that one can when in the original manifestation?

I anticipated different experiences, hoped for discomfort (at least a little bit), and wanted everyone to feel as if they were truly enveloped in the space. My sounds behave like how I thought a cyborg wilderness should: they looped, recurred at regular intervals, and their moments of panic were more like a bass drop than an actual organic frenzy. This construction made false trees constructed of cardboard and tinsel feel even less genuine in a very intentional way. The 3 dimensional space, and the sounds I built to envelope it were constructed to acknowledge the lack of biology, and interrogate how what it means to escape to the wild.

The Self - Video

Since I was young, the woods have been a place for me to escape claustrophobia and anxieties of everyday life. Since coming to Providence, my ability to locate myself within nature has been all but stripped, in a city with few parks and vast expanses of wilderness too far for me to go to regularly. This installation provided me with an opportunity to reconcile my lost love for nature and discover what it means to me through the construction of my own woods. I realized that the woods is a place for meditation for me, and allows me to breathe. It was interesting then, that for a place that allows me to relax, there was so many dynamics of control and power in building this project. I was forcing these sonic creatures into the space and seizing the means of production I had available on Brown’s campus.

This complicated relationship I had with my piece made me question how I could place myself within it. To demonstrate this and my soul-searching behavior, I embodied several characters on three projectors surrounding the space. I hoped that those in the space would be able to project their own experiences of self-exploration in the cyborg-woods. Quite literally, their silhouettes became characters alongside my own because of the ways they intercepted my projection. It was impossible for anything in the space to not join my saga of identity exploration because of this surround-projection.This was just another method I employed to soak my audience in the cyborg wilderness. Everything the light from the projectors touched became riddled with mediations of actual foliage, and the space shook with vibrations from the digital animals I constructed.

Notes from the Field - In the Cyborg Woods:

Within minutes of constructing the installation, I found myself asleep on the “forest floor” surrounded by the cawing of my fake birds and the trees I built. It was very obviously not the wilderness I had known growing up. The projections of my video pieces did expand the space tremendously, which helped with the illusion of the open wilderness. However, it was impossible not to acknowledge the inorganic composition of the space. I realized what the space was lacking was the potentiality of the wilderness, and the ability to touch and feel and re-present nature. This space had limits on what I could do inside it. Furthermore, a room in the Granoff carried much less danger than the frontier, lowering the ability for me to get in touch with a more primitive side of myself. However, much like in natural spaces, I found myself able to meditate and reflect because of the repetitive and calming noises and visuals around me. With this, I gained some sort of satisfaction similar to that which I gain from being outdoors. Although I could never bring the outside indoors, I did manage to recreate a bit of its therapeutic aspects into my installation space, which is what I was hoping for. Overall, I wish I could have kept this space open for a longer period of time. I would like to include a journal in the future in the center of the space for people to etch in their feelings or thoughts. I believe that this is the next step in my analysis of the effects of the peripherally natural and the self.

[muzikrox]

Misplaced Sound

In Halberstam’s book, The Queer Art of Failure, she demonstrates a theory in which failure can provide productive ways of viewing the world and challenging hegemonic belief systems. Halberstam’s sardonic proclamation, “...the intellectual worlds conjured by losers, failures, dropouts, and refuseniks, often serve sas the launching pad for alternatives precisely when the university [or any institution] cannot”. Thinking in terms of sound, her discussion of alternative pathways to success reminded me of Atlanta-based singer Abra’s music video for her song Pull Up, in which she intentionally misuses sound to demonstrate the wild nature of her night out in inner-city New York. Abra uses the art of following, which is the practice of syncing up sounds to video in post production to create what is usually a logical soundtrack for a film. However, the singer goes against logic, and replaces the anticipated sounds from the action on screen with sounds such as horse neighs and bird calls in place of voices, a gunshot in place of a car door slamming, and crickets chirping to replace the low rumble of the city in the background. This use of sound is captivating because it takes a moment to process what is happening because of how we are bred to expect the right sounds to align with the video we watch. In her video, Abra’s use of the sound portrays her perspective of the city as an urban jungle, with a slightly ironic twist in that it denotes the “natural” happenings of catcalling at the beginning of the video.

For this exercise, I wanted to play off of the misuse of sound in space. I believe that in everyday life, we are attuned to certain sounds residing in certain locations. In Miwon Kwon’s article The Wrong Place, which discusses location in terms of artmaking, she explains in a rather existential fashion that there may be no true place for the work of art in society, misplacements. Furthermore, in Seth Kim-Cohen’s article, he describes the need to build a sonic practice that is not based around normative structures, but rather the flux of political, cultural, and historical events which organize around the discourse of sound aesthetics. This idea of sound art is submissive to the whirlwind of society and people and environments oscillating around it and through it, with no place but rather with a placement to be decided by the will of fate.

In this project, I chose to depict sound at the whim of an uncontrolled force. Thinking in terms of acoustics, the most obvious, controllable way to designate space of a sound is through the use of reverb or noise gating. I went out into the field and gathered sounds which I could then add some of these filters onto - noise gating to make the space of the sound “smaller”, and reverb to make it “bigger”. I thought critically about the space various sounds are expected to fill, and compiled reverbs and gates to oppose the scale of this space. For instance, I added a significant reverb to the sound of my friends whispering to one another to expand this sound which is typically expected to be quiet and take up minimal space. I hope this project makes you at the very least feel uncomfortable!

[muzikrox]

Non Cochlear and Deafness

“In the Blink of an Ear” is perhaps the perfect title for Kim-Cohen’s article, for it immediately had me thinking about what it means to have a sense that can never be shut off. I immediately remembered the times my alarm had forced me out of peaceful slumbers, or the moments when a loud room quieted to a low rumble around me as I talked about something embarrassingly personal. Then, I realized, I only acknowledged these sounds because of their position as an interpolator in whatever normal state I was in. But what about sounds that slip below the surface of our consciousness? How can we appreciate sounds beyond merely those we choose to listen to, or ones rooted in musical and functional purposes?

Kim-Cohen discusses the concept of developing a concept of sound that is concerned with processes around the development of sounds. I think that this is a very important step in the right direction towards creating more open-minded and accessible sonic art. Thinking critically about the importance of all sounds, beyond those in music and aesthetic forms could be a very powerful way to escape from the restrictive binds of capitalism which limit sound to particular genres and functions. One artist I discovered while examining alternative uses of sound is Natasha Barrett, who experiments with space to build new worlds and environments through sound manipulation. Sound that exists as something more than purely aesthetic and seeks to create space in cultural, linguistic, and political history (among other histories) can help widen our appreciation of the different forms of sound, from its use in protests and rallies to presence and value in day-to-day human life.

Furthermore, from our class discussions about the use of sound by deaf people, it is very intriguing to realize the potentiality of utilizing sound even if it is not fully accessible to that person. Contemplating the alternative ways one can access sound brought two questions to my mind: in terms of Cochlear implants, how can the predetermined sounds and range of hearing (designated by electrical impulses) be problematic for users? From what I read, when thinking about the continuity of hearing, these implants are constantly stimulating the ear, but may emphasize sounds that are considered “not useful” for human conversation and use. I feel that this sort of solution applies a falsely optimistic solution to the issue of hearing loss; it sort of slaps a band aid over a complex issue and is more concerned with returning hearing to a “standard” rather than considering how this standard ignores many lifestyle and biological differences amongst individuals. Perhaps educating our society on methods of transducing sound, or utilizing communication which is based less in the physicalities of language, like braille or some form of visual interpretation like sound wave graphs.

[muzikrox]

~ The Body Electric ~

In my piece, Monitor, I utilized very organic sounding things and blended them into a monotonous droning tone representative of the electrical current surging through the wires in my monitor. Ideally, with more time I would have liked to find a way to physically transduce different electrical signals from my body into sound waves and vice versa to create a more visual connection to the sounds, but that would require a bit more research. I think that this sort of introspection into our bodies is important in a time where we pay so much attention to the technologies that alter them.

My piece was intended to capture the sounds my body makes. I’ve been wearing a heart monitor recently and it caused me to contemplate the similarities between sound waves and the electrical impulses that my heart monitor demonstrates. Because of this, I used a sine wave with a short attack and release to represent the electrical impulses from my heart. I think the piece sort of speaks out about the anxieties over the organic body and attempting to organize it through medicine and technology. Overall, while irritating, the monitoring my body this way has become sort of reassuring to me, which is why the piece has a meditative tone to it towards the end similar to the drone tones of Pauline Oliveros’ Accordion and Voice piece that we listened to in class. 

I utilized very organic sounding things and blended them into a monotonous droning tone representative of the electrical current surging through the wires in my monitor. Ideally, with more time I would have liked to find a way to physically transduce different electrical signals from my body into sound waves and vice versa to create a more visual connection to the sounds, but that would require a bit more research. I think that this sort of introspection into our bodies is important in a time where we pay so much attention to the technologies that alter them.

[muzikrox]

Art in Digital Spaces

Our discussions of space in class this week had me thinking critically about the way I interact with media from digital spaces such as streaming services and social media platforms. According to Groys in his paper on Art in the Age of Biopolitics, installation art has become essentially the creation of an aura of life, by presenting documentation-like art of the biopolitical subject in a unique space (a gallery or some sort of performance space). I believe that while art documentation can certainly be a depiction of life itself, it is important to consider what happens to art which is distributed through mass channels such as online streaming and art on social media. I believe that overall, the gallery setting is valuable as a mediation of life at a certain point in time, but this sort of space can also be privileged an inaccessible to those who don’t have the means to travel to a museum or such space. Furthermore, the gallery can often be a restrictive space, adhering to a dimensional guideline (the building’s floor plan) and media that can function in a gallery space. I believe that digital art distribution may be an interesting form of artistic experience and perhaps even more parallel to the experience of life because of the ability for fresh interpretations and experiences with each interaction with this content. This sort of user-content feedback loop that occurs in digital spaces reminded me a bit of the Sonic Spaces project at NYU’s Steinhardt school, a “sonic ecosystem” which one can input sounds into and receive algorithmically produced sonic feedback in return. This is very much similar to the concept of digitally-streamed art, because of its root in the individual experience in its function. Thus, with the ability for streamed content to interpolate directly in the audience’s life, it can be even more of an accurate depiction of the biopolitical lifespan. The songs I listened to on the bus motivated me to work hard in high school, and television shows such as Dear White People present an important cultural discourse to the individual viewer, which she or he can then take into their own social lives and discuss with their peers. Thus, art in the age of digital streaming can be seen as analogous to the lifespan itself, because of its proximity to our day-to-day discourse and emotive states.

[muzikrox]

Making Experimental Sounds Friendly

I vividly remember the first time I tried going to bed after coming home from school my freshman year at Brown. Something was very eerie but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. After shifting around trying to make myself more comfortable for several minutes, I realized the problem wasn’t how I was feeling, but rather, what I was hearing: the sonorous evening hum of Providence had been replaced by the omnipresent silence of the suburbs. I realized that through exposure, I had come to appreciate this noise as a part of my life.

David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny’s discussion of the discursive value of noise as a product of othering got me thinking about how noise, while typically considered an element of disorder or otherness, can be ordered and developed into existing structures, and how noise can be familiar in spite of being undefinable. For instance, in music genres like avant-pop (Grimes, Charli XCX, Bjork, etc.) in helping society become comfortable with a wider palette of sounds. These artists utilize sounds which deviate from ordinary instruments, but remain within the structure of popular music to further the pop industry.

For instance, SOPHIE crafts her music through a software called Elektron Monomachine, which allows the user to build waveforms; she uses this software to create sounds which just nearly resemble those of advertisements and consumerist culture. Through her use of noise, she calls out consumerist culture without ever visibly showing it. This use of noise is interesting when coupled with her position as a transgender woman; while she never details her music in relation to this aspect, her image and use of noise to deteriorate the highly produced sounds of advertisements to create a statement on the placement of people with marginalized communities in this materialistic universe.

Noise does not necessarily have to imply displacement, or an underclass. I think that the use of noise as something simultaneously euphonious and other-ly is a valuable tool for calling attention to the meaning behind these sounds, and pull people closer to the noise rather than pushing them away. On a larger, societal scale, it means harnessing the power of noise that is traditionally considered harsh and unacceptable and, while maintaining its core characteristics, formulate it into a system that is familiar to the mass consumers.