A black wind,
A swarm
Of micro-particles
Self-replicating
Pure evil and animal clash
Superimposed to the blind insistence
Of the machines
Pure surface
Of no density
Plastic
A shrill sound
Unfolded like a body
Unleashing the bodies of water
Spilling over from Pollocks drippings and Cages’ pours
we are wet, noisy and performative
coming from many disciplinary and media backgrounds
working at the interstices of many more.
Though what washes over them are tendencies
larger than both Pollock and Cage
yes, rage
To even acknowledge the complex outpour of water and fluidity, presumes
a previous dry, rigid, inactive, and silent period
A time where scarcity of sounds made from water existed.
This historical incident is not as insignificant as you may think
actual water fluidity became implicated in the dissolution of objects
it became a signal
our phone call
our alarm
our chants of urgency
not just from a artistic standpoint but a gushing political one
with the potential to metabolize into the heart beat of our actions.
The need for water became a state more saturated and fluid than the state itself.
A notion that should be characterized as The Point at which flowered from the liquidity of paint
and spilled the materials and techniques of the following decades; today.
The divine water
the art
invokes
provokes
an ecological self-consciousness, including the nature of the body, where materials and techniques
themselves become political.
We control the currents with each stroke taken in this body of water. To fully digest meaning of
cause and effect one must question human-centered politics, especially in the midst of America’s
current political and environmental chaos.
A time
of eroding structure
of evaporating ethics
of polarizing politics
makes a timely case for listening as a form of activism.
a case
and a chance!
perhaps the last one
to grapple with our past recordings
rip through the ripples of time
and recognize the tsunami-like wake,
for there wont be anyone left to attend our own.
Let’s stop.
Let’s review.
Just as the phonograph was not necessary to record its own impact, a new hearing was recorded
prior to its invention in 1877. In 1868 — twas not the first, but one of the most profound moments
in aural history— the bang occurred with Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, though
the novel did not create a big noise at the time. The pivotal scene, chant II, stanza 8, describes
the birth of hearing. The narrator, and main protagonist, informs the audience that he has been
deaf since birth until confronted with a truly horrific scene of an anthropomorphic creature, “that
one who calls himself the Creator!” sitting on a throne of shit and coal cloaked in hospital
sheets. (kahn)
A decaying trunk of a man was held in his hand and was successively lifted up from his eyes to
his nose, and then slowly to his mouth where one may guess what he did with it. All while he
bathed his feet in the pool of boiling blood where his throne was positioned. His amphibian-like
creations swam amongst him in that toxic juice, which whom he also devoured with no regard
for their pleas. He, it, simply took pleasure in the sight of his own creations’ suffering. The deaf
man left stunned still unable to hear chewing, crunching nor screaming, though his body began
to wretch and curl in front of the full horror of what he saw:
At last, my heaving bosom being unable to expel the life-giving air speedily enough, my lips opened and i cried out…
a cry so heart-rending that I myself heard it! The obstacle in my ears snapped abruptly, the eardrum cracked beneath
the shock of that mass of noisy air expelled from within me so violently, and a new phenomenon took place within that
organ condemned by nature. I had heard a sound! A fifth sense was born in me! (Lautréamont)
The scream created his hearing. The voice and his hearing were linked for the first time, thereby
completing the circularity of utterance and audition; something that the hearing world takes for
granted. The power of the heard scream instantaneously allowed the man who has been deaf
since birth to become more empathetic to the present situation and constitute his own identity
wherein created a social space which recuperated a new-born self-consciousness.
Lautréamont’s text is a bit too fugitive for an emblematic function in regards to Listening as Activism.
Hopefully, most of the global population does not and will never have to witness such
surreal violence in order to hear another’s scream, which is what is being implemented in this
kinetic installation; the metabolization of another person’s voice and personal concerns.
Through sound waves, sounds of waves, and waves themselves the erosion of our postwar
abandon affluence, suburban sprawl, and petroleum economy — in the paving of landscape, car
culture, oil spills, electricity generation, pesticides, toxic waste, and global warming — which
sent society into a religious transfixion waiting for nuclear peril can commence.
Wet and willing human participants are vital components to usher this erosion of affluence.
One’s hands become the conductor needed to complete the auditive and visual circuit; furthering
the long-standing association with sound and water from just observational acoustics to a
symbiotic relationship. Without the interaction the piece rests in an inactive state:
( “Off,” a video prompt to activate )
When activated the silence evaporates. A surround sound composition embodying a recording
of the following poem plays accompanying the new projection:
The fetus of biopolitics is a cannonball of textual reference
It is how ``modern Western societies [have taken] on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a
species'', and how as a result ``the basic biological features of the human species [have become]
the object of a political strategy.’'
how we live in micro spaces
cellularly
how we live in macro spaces
nationally
SHOULD BE THE SAME.
What governs us
should be as clear as the water that passes through us.
This fabricated osmosis we create for our children to live on and by cannot be tainted.
Though the ideals that presently trump us
like led in our baby bottles
are re-spawning and re-vitalizing
the crippled fetuses of fascism
grabbing at the womb
forcing death into the world with each birth
(“On,” a video of floating bodies expanding to and from a fetal position)
The active and inactive videos operate by a micro computer, Arduino Uno, sending numeric values
of differing resistance levels to another program, Processing3. From there the values are
converted into the two output “states.” With just a few adjustments to the code, the media heard
and seen can easily be changed. For the piece is a tool; fluid and receptive to a multitude of different
voices and political expressions, to be implemented as a format of expression.
“Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows. “I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund.”
— Anti Oedipus, Delouse & Guattari