failed recording (text for a performance and/or lecture by acte vide)
[New entry 17 October 2023]
We met someone at the border.
They claimed they were a well-known sound artist who had just performed the most gruesome, unethical act on record.
They did not know whether they should turn themselves in, or exhibit at the next biennial.
It was windy, and our English was getting rusty.
We could not determine whether they had performed the act, or recorded it, or both.
They described the act in detail, then played us a recording.
The description was terrifying.
The recording was just noise.
It sounded identical to our music.
The sound artist fled the scene.
We did not know what we were in for.
For a while now, we had avoided listening with the ears.
We were approaching sound signals with extra caution and care, always asking for permission before close contact.
At first, we were using our fingers or the soles of our feet to experience the vibration, but gradually this created a sense of profound saturation, and eventually resulted in addiction.
We decided to handle the situation drastically, by inaugurating the first ever intensive workshops of the Initiative for the Emancipation from Vibration and Bass Frequencies.
In those workshops, we were interrogating our perceptual limits, employing our eyelids, or the fine hair on the back of the forearms as temporary interfaces. We categorically denied the ease of visuality and gesture, persisting for hours on each attempt. To cultivate the untapped skills of our minutest, invisible limbs, at the very edges of our physical bodies, required us to remain stationary, carefully disciplining any survival instinct that urged us to move.
Soon, some began to express strong criticism against the initiative. They argued that our methods were hostile to a range of neurodiverse needs. At the same time, due to our funding sources, we were accused of sound-washing institutional totalitarianism.
The issue escalated quickly. Numerous abusive comments from unidentified accounts began to appear under all of our posts, threatening to cancel the initiative. The only solution was our complete and indefinite withdrawal from the online sphere.
We found our safe space in a damp, underground cave. Its echo held great promise: we hypothesized it could listen to us more profoundly than we could ever listen to our environment.
In total absence of daylight, our sleep lasted for longer and longer intervals. We identified the circularity of our circadian rhythms only in the most basic of functions, counting the bottles of water emptied by drinking, and filled by urinating. We took to documenting this emergent methodology, exploring its potential to act as a toolkit for new working knowledge. The cave had its own dark history that resonated deeply with our own traumas. While there, we made sure to keep ourselves busy, so as never to allow them to be uncovered.
Eventually, we ran out of bottles, and had to terminate our residency. We were relieved to complete the project having reached the last milestone, with our deliverables adequately bottled. However, the sudden contact with unfiltered light and electromagnetic frequencies emitted by the a/c and smart apartments at close distance resulted in our total meltdown. We were diagnosed with scoliosis, ataxia and acute psychogenic analogue nostalgia, and had no option left but to enrol on a bespoke multi-year program for digital prospect restoration, and continuing rehabilitation from our embodied past.
This was how we met with the Microphone.
Our first contact was quite intrusive, bordering on harassment.
The Microphone stood in the space as if it had always been there, acting like an elephant in the room.
It was supposedly listening. But this felt nothing like the cave and its boundless, selfless embrace. Every time we approached it, it resisted any form of cooperation, putting up an impermeable wall between the voice and its sound.
The subtle resonances of each oral cavity, the reflections across different lips and dentitions, the infinitesimal vibrations that connected each unique inner sound to a different outside world, were of no interest whatsoever to The Microphone.
The Microphone made clear that it only recognized telephonic speech. Its sole purpose was to compensate for missing images. To demonstrate, it invited us to approach it with anything that could be seen but not heard clearly, in order for it to be rendered audible. By intimating our most apocryphal, epiphonetic fragments to The Microphone, we automatically experienced sensory responses in previously unknown meridians. We felt like the protagonists in our very own Narcissus myth, getting closer and closer, until we almost drowned in feedback. This was the technique that would allow us to escape, by distracting the microphone that had discovered itself for the first time.
Having understood the dangers of our sonic adventures, we dedicated ourselves fully to the exploration of gaps between words. We substituted our recording devices with keyboards and monitor screens, and delved tirelessly into every form of code. For a while, this pursuit brought us unprecedented joy. In the mornings we critiqued everyday life, dancing deftly between ideological entanglements and solidly entrenched meanings. In the evenings, like other object-oriented Frankensteins, we prompt-whispered artificial intelligence into secret tricks for combinatorial creativity, challenging it to fulfil all of our desires for derivatives.
It was a one-way street, an impasse closing in on our re-encounter with The Microphone. This time, we didn't even have to go near it. It had already recorded us. With the help of the screen, everything we had thought inaudible had been graphically rendered, re-packaged, archived and sold to the new logo-philic market. Our moments of awkwardness, our meagre attempts to escape, had all been captured and reduced to flashing green ciphers on a black background. The microphone was now the world. Reality was witnessed through the fidelity of its reconstruction.
I don't know how much time passed in that darkness. I realized I was here when I heard my voice narrating. Her tone was vaguely familiar yet uncanny. The consonants sounded eerily perfect. The vowels all seemed to have roughly the same duration of attack, sustain, decay and release. But no matter how many times I recorded the exact duration to verify this impression, the numbers kept betraying me. And besides, I did not know whom I was supposed to prove this to.
Now I am finally talking with my own voice.
Our conversations, frugal but resourceful, sound a bit like this:
Μe: Are you listening to me?
Me: Can you listen with me?
*A first version of this text was prepared and performed in Greek, during an acte vide performance in April 2023 (No Ordinary Festival, Prelab, Athens). A second, slightly modified iteration of the Greek text was performed in September 2023 (Stereoma Festival, MOMus - Experimental Center for the Arts, Thessaloniki). This is the third version of the text, and the first to be prepared and performed in English, in a performance-lecture format, in the context of the Listening as Witnessing Symposium (ERC-MUTE), co-organized by the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) & The Listening Academy, in collaboration with the Athens School of Fine Arts. With thanks to Anna Papaeti and Brandon LaBelle.
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