these various signals (VIVO "Signal 7 Noise" 2008)
Signal & Noise. Signal. Noise. Fluctuations of electromagnetic passage, information, code, sound waves, loud, static, busy, repetitive, stuff in the background, a presence on stage, minimal, compelling… Look! and listen.
VIVO presented its 9th annual festival of interdisciplinary media April 17-19. The Thursday night Live performances showcased “Pneumonia” (Daniel Lercher, Vinzenz Schwab, Richard Bruzek), “Inflection” (Kent Tankred and Wenche Sundsrud Tankred) , “Ghost Taco” (Devon McKellar) and Play of Frog’s “Dialogue”. It was an evening rich with auditory stimuli and visual intrigue, an event where bowls of earplugs sat at the admission table, and an experience that placed listening at the fore.
The respect of listening is schooled. We learn to listen for information, connection, innuendo, story and emotion. We learn to pay attention, and of course we learn to coast – to surf on sound in that quixotic sprawl of daydreams brought on by boring lectures. But despite the ability to hear, it is the visual realm that governs most of us. Visual culture dominates. In the visual arts, sound is used but also forgotten. As artists, we are taught how to see, but it is a rare artist that also knows – with criticality and joy – how to listen. So then how should we approach sound art? With what tools can one engage a sound performance in a forum and community that revolves around aesthetic, material and conceptual concerns expressed via visual strategies?
The first VIVO performance achieved visual-auditory symbiosis. There was no divide between stage and seating area, and the entire room gelled with attentiveness. The trio Pneumonia, from Austria, brought quiet, considered, plotting espionage to mind. Each performer sat enclosed in a clear plastic bag, gazing into the mysteries of his sample-rich laptop, reading literary quotes in several languages, and sometimes smoking. Between and through their triangulated pods, a quarter inch audio tape smoothly looped, physically connecting and recording the independent personas. It was cinematic. Hypnotizing. The audience sat and lay on the floor, many with their eyes closed. We were collectively travelling on our own sonar escapade. The artists were bricoleurs: sampling, weaving, responding to the limbo of a narrative voice detached from its story. They allowed us into a non-linear portal that let sound become. It was as real as the imaginations it propelled, and never did I question why.
Did Pneumonia do something much sound art doesn’t? Could they be wooing the audience with literary technique embedded amongst all those samples? The durational experience of their work seemed applicable to past present or future worlds – a noir-scape – and it transgressed the idea of narrative without making one wonder how, or what for, or for how much longer.
Like a good reading, Pneumonia presented the opportunity for entrancement; for that slack-eyed condition of imagining. Don McKay and Dennis Lee are Canadian poets who have written of their encounters with words: through sound, rhythm, cadence and voice. McKay writes, “Poets are notorious for dawdling, idling, lollygagging, woolgathering--the outward manifestations of that condition of listening into which they have retreated, taking language with them.” Lee describes a tumultuous, thrumming, meditative quality he’s called “cadence” that he can access when writing. The words are not heard, so much as felt. He says, “the words have to accord with that energy [cadence] or I can’t make a poem at all.”(3) Meaning derives from how the voice (any voice of a poem) embodies the world.(Lee 52) Listening becomes intuitively phenomenological.
So here are poets explaining how sound operates in writing, transfixing the listener and resonating as an emotionally physical force. The sound coming off the page seems to create a space for the reader to enter, while at the same time erasing the space between reader and text.
Kent and Wenche Tankred performed at a conventional remove from their viewers, with fans and handheld electric egg beaters. Although these machines emitted their respective noises in real time, which were then stretched, bent, repeated and toyed with by the artists, they did not sound independently. Instead, a chorus of drones became one track by which the audience was invited to partake of an experience. The music, according to the Tankreds, was not designed with idea or meaning other than to provide a physical experience of sound. In this, it was successful. Sound was projected as a tactile sensation, and the immediate experiential connection was to flight in a prop plane. Industrial immersion. Throbbing rhythms enveloped one’s entire being, and in the lowest registers almost forced a visceral, nauseated reaction. The sound wanted to consume the space; listeners became secondary to the act of the Tankreds.
Gilles Deleuze posits the fold as a way of conceptualizing space and things: the relationship of outside and inside becoming continual, flowing, indistinguishable from one another, and existing across a multiplicity of levels. Is this the ideal listening experience? Sound that enfolds, encompasses, blends its surroundings into subjects and distinguishes meeting points. It seems that the aurally abstract will still let me go somewhere. The depth of the Tankred’s sound was such that it could have operated as a Fold. However, as an individual conditioned to looking, I couldn’t hear the many levels across which the work should have arched. The banal mechanics on stage seemed to operate at the barrage frequency of construction equipment because of how the fans were mixed. My ability to recognize and appreciate common sounds was hampered by an artistic manipulation, whose very intent was, I believe, to provide new interstices.
Why does sound seem physical, and image conceptual? Does sound always seem true, in the sense that we identify it as coming from a source point and therefore it is the source? A drum is its sound. But surely a pencil is its line? Perhaps because sound is always the voice of its maker, while a representative image is always an idea, not the object it depicts. Sound is ephemeral, yet genuine. A fan, a voice, the snap of a Zippo. If I think of sound art as the practice of ontology, then I must come into understanding.
But then I encounter the question of authenticity in performance.
Ghost Taco is a performer, a performance and a performative presence. Devon McKellar mics her cunt – coquettishly donning elbow length gold gloves before inserting the condom-clad pick-up – and strips. The body sounds made knowable by the mic are modulated by various dials and sliders on a mixer, and McKellar’s motions are acted to the level of the sound. The ghost taco speaks, and screams. Apparently. This is an art-wrought strip tease; a young woman masturbating and in the end climaxing for the audience when she is naked except for one glove and a delicate length of white cable. Cock rock feedback? Oh yeah, that must be a hot mic for all it’s slender brevity.
But what was real, here? The soft exclamation when the mic cable accidentally pulled out of the mixer, due to some overindulgent movement, was genuine dismay. An accident. The amplified sound was, although modulated, certainly coming from within the human body. The problem was, the ghost taco wasn’t responding to the dynamic and pleasurable thrustings of the mic. This was a performance that served the audience’s desire for voyeurism while trying to service the innermost voice of female sexuality. Sound was at best a supporting entity that Second Wave Feminist theory sought to employ.
Listening to these various signals, these many noises, was a lesson in not-knowing. The meaning was enclosed and opened by each performance. The timed nature of the works permitted finite exposure, and yet the experiences reverberated. From what the artists say, comprehension is in the body. The listener has access to all that she brings, and all that she hears, just by having patience and willingness. That seems too easy, though. If visual artists and other members of the visual community are to dialogue in a meaningful way about sound, there must be a reason. I don’t want to be drowned by noise, but I will entertain a loop of change that lets me be re-schooled in listening. Understanding how to listen to noise will signal a new place for sound and interdisciplinary art. When people can listen fearlessly, we may all better know ourselves in the world.
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