The Last Silent Movie opens the unvisited, silent archives of extinct and endangered languages to create a composition of voices that are not silent. They are not silent because someone is listening. The work sets free some of the ghosts and spectres haunting the unacknowledged unheimlich of sound recording which allows us to hear the words and voices of people mostly now dead. In The Last Silent Movie, some of them sing, some tell stories, some recite vocabulary lists and some of them, directly or indirectly, accuse us, the listeners, of injustice.
A hero of the New York performance and poetry scene, EMILY XYZ's poems often go so far as to demand a second voice to carry their multilayered punch -- she most often performs with actress Myers Bartlett, who appears with her in "The United States of Poetry." Hailing from upstate New York, Ms. XYZ has recently released her first record Electric Magistrate (Mouth Almighty Records), with music by Virgil Moorefield.
quoting Toop ...'I was wondering what the nature of listening actually is. It’s an everyday experience, not necessarily a special thing, but it has elements of the uncanny about it because sound is so fleeting. Where does it exist in space? Where does it come from? It’s one of the peculiarities of listening that when we can’t identify the source of the sounds we’re hearing, we make assumptions, and, of course, that leads to ambiguity. That’s accentuated by the fact that sound seems to be at its source, all around us, and in our heads simultaneously. There’s a strong overlap there among what exists, what we think of as the real, and what may be auditory hallucinations. All this material is mixing in our mind with the constant flow of thoughts. The term I came up with was mediumship—there was some sort of power there. As we listen we’re trying to draw out information from something that has already passed, and was ambiguous anyway. This seemed to fit with the notion that the representation of sounding events or listening experiences can exist in silent media. It’s not so big a jump to think of literature in that way, because it’s a verbalization of experience. But a 17th-century painting is a bigger jump..'
I've been reading alot of things lately ph(bloody)d, but Graham Harman's Object-Orientated Philosophy and his Tool-Being see below, on Heidegger, is ringing my bells. His anti Kantian position in terms of the primacy of the subject ... is gooood. In an article on Object-Related theory he writes about Heidegger and Whitehead and the crossovers between their thinking re this 'hermeneutic model'.
Gertrude Stein who had read Whitehead and met with him, says he was the only other genius in the world. (besides Picasso and herself.) Stein had met with Whitehead just before and during the writing of Two: Gertrude Stein and her brother, that I'm basing my PhD research on. I'm thinking now Stein might be more influenced by Whitehead than I was originally thinking. In Two: Stein talks of sound as being an event almost of other sounding itself in multiples. It is a continual (becoming) being that... that well, that just is.
‘Sound is coming out of her. Sound has been coming out of her. Sound can come out of her.
Sound coming out of her is coming out of her and she has not been hearing not been hearing the sound that has been coming out of her. Sound has come out of her and she is listening and sound can come out of her.
Sound comes out of her. Sound coming out of her is expressing that thing, is saying something. Sound coming out of her is expressing something, is saying anything. Sound coming out of her is expressing everything, is saying everything. Sound is coming out of her. Sound has been coming out of her. Some sound comes out of her. Sound comes out of her.
If sound comes out of her it is a sound that expresses that thing expresses sound coming out of her. Sound does come out of her. Sound coming out of her does express this thing does express sound coming out of her.
Sound coming out of her comes out of her and is expressing sound coming out of her. Expressing sound coming out of her is something sound coming out of her is doing. Sound coming out of her is something. Sound is coming out of her.
Sound is coming out of her and that sound has been the sound that has been expressing that that sound is coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is something that has that meaning that has the meaning that that sound is coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is something that the sound coming out of her is not explaining. Sound coming out of her is something that the sound coming out of her is not suggesting. Sound coming out of her is something that is not relating to her having been one having had sound coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is something expressing that thing expressing that sound is coming out of her …’
Gertrude Stein, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother(p.8-9)
This, I think, is a new object for philosophy...
An article in Frieze magazine re the ’Speculative Realism and Speculative Materialism’ conference in Bristol last year outlines some interesting positions in relation to sound. I quote...
'Speculative realism has certainly revivified philosophy, inspiring a fervour of concept-production far beyond the traditional (but now largely moribund) academic spaces with which philosophy is usually associated: in the para-academic journal Collapse, for example, as well as in an efflorescence of blogs such as Speculative Heresy, Accursed Share, Planomenology and Naught Thought. The original Goldsmiths event brought together four philosophers – Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux – who were united by an antipathy towards the dominant consensus in continental philosophy.
Is ’realism’ the right term? And what is the relationship between ‘realism’ and ‘materialism? Materialism is a label which is almost universally claimed by a continental philosophy which also prides itself on its hostility to realism. Harman (one of the speakers) (good interview here) wanted to reverse this valuation, holding on to realism while rejecting materialism. The tendency in materialism, Harman claimed, is always to dissolve specific objects, reducing them either to smaller physical entities or, as in the case of Grant’s philosophy, seeing them as ephemeral products of an underlying monist hyper-nature. Brassier, by contrast, pointed out that in the philosophy of someone like Slavoj Žižek the material seems to connote only a blockage, the point where thought fails – by this definition, the material cannot be thought. The problem was to return to matter without assuming a pre-established harmony between our conceptual apparatus and the world. Brassier also questioned the equation of materialism with practice: why is praxis material?'
What does this thinking do for my work on sound?...
"Program" System of Digital Art:"BOOM! Fast and Frozen Permutation" ? Taiwan-Australia New Media Art Exhibition by Yu-Chuan Tseng Yu-Chuan Tseng reports on Taiwan-Australia New Media Art Exhibition from the perspective: "An important element of digital computer technology ... has digital art features of aesthetic concepts and behavioral structure....'program' is an important factor in constructing the work."
Games: The Art of Making, Bending, and Breaking Rules by Andrew Yashar Ames "In interactive art, the observer and the work are constructed by rules that can be bent or broken, but cannot be absent." Andrew Y. Ames examines "Game-based art... [with] implied and explicit rules that artists expose and exploit for aesthetic and ideological purposes."
The Miracles of Feedback by Mario van Horrik "This paper deals with my fascination for acoustic feedback... I want to express my doubts, theories, and questions, as well as our motives and enthusiasm for using this medium." Sound artist Mario van Horrik explains his involvement over two decades with acoustic feedback experiments.
Hz vs Church by Novi_sad Sound artist/composer Novi_sad's project "'Hz vs Church' aims to use Churches (or other big sized public buildings) as post loudspeakers in order to create, unfold and play live various sounds which appear in the 'aural surface' by using and manipulating in real time different kinds of frequencies."
We are not alone by Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico "Network and information technologies, with a mutagen leap, directly connect the mind of the human being to hyper-contents and to hyper- contexts, creating perspectives that are totally new." Iaconesi/ Persico on their projects which emerge as one of the possibilities/ directions network technology brings forward.
Intimate Transactions: Close Encounters of Another Kind by Tony Fry "Crucially, the interactive intent of the work was to create a means to reflect upon a particular kind of experience ? the experience of our being relationally connected as a collective body." Writer/ theorist Tony Fry on Keith Armstrong(creative director)'s "Intimate Transactions," and its link to Ecosophy.
[NET ART]
Pollen Soup by Pierre Proske
Sharedscapes - Points of View on Landscapes by Gr?goire Zab?
Cityscpes by Myron Turner
Passivitate Imunitass (Activista) by Poderiu
88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (To Be Played with the Left Hand) by David Clark
Hz is an on-line journal published by the non-profit art organization Fylkingen in Stockholm. Established in 1933, Fylkingen is the oldest forum for experimental music and intermedia art in Sweden. Throughout its history Fylkingen has been known to be a driving force in the Swedish art scene to introduce and promote yet-to-be-established art forms, the examples of which include Bartok, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Electro-Acoustic Music as well as Stelarc in recent years. Our members are leading composers, musicians, dancers, performance artists and visual artists in Sweden. For more information on Fylkingen, please visit http://www.hz-journal.org/n4/hultberg.html.
... this blog continues to be a bag of tricks ... l originally started it to share sound art links but it has been revamped and is now focusing on language. Like the 'unsound' it still ranges from spoken and sung cacophonies, links to writers such as Stein but now many others, my furiously fitful notion of sounded language and its scores, and hybrid or experimental writing, especially with a flarffy twist. It previously worked for me as a research space for my PhD so posts before April 2023 will reflect that. Just to be clear 'unsound' for me is no way a value judgment ... majena mafe
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