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Hi Junting and all
Thanks for inviting me into this fascinating discussion. I’d like to
provide a bit of background to my thinking and work with noise —
from the 90s to present day.
(Sorry the formatting seems to have gone a bit dirty… no sooner
spoken of than enacted!)
Noise first appealed to me as a dirty antidote to ‘modern’
aesthetics of clean, bright, white, mono-cultural future and all the
ecological and political problems that has evoked. In the sound world
that included the early digital promises of ‘clean’ sound.
Historically cleanliness has been a way to distinguish the clean,
white, proper, and quiet bourgeois self from the dirty, messy noisy,
carnally excessive, sexually out of control working class and
colonials (great book about this was Peter Stallybrass and Allon
White, _The Politics and Poetics of Transgression_ l986). I liked
how this history complicated the pleasures and political effects of
"clean" sound. Perhaps someone might comment too on the cultural
specificity of this take on dirt and noise – a Chinese friend of
mine in Australia pointed out to me that where she came from noise is
a sign of happiness and prosperity.
One of the things I got interested in to listen differently, in a more
messy and polyphonic way, was alchemy – a practice of knowing and
doing. Looking into the seven gates of the alchemical process, I
really responded to putrefaction: putrefaction and fermentation. The
moment of putrefaction is bodily. All your senses are assaulted. This
is a moment resonant with Julia Scher’s “dirty data” (1995
_Danger Dirty Data
_https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/54044338?q&versionId=67005692 ) The
alchemist smells decomposition, hears the noise of the dung beetle,
recalling the stench and noise of the transformative process within
ourselves. Putrefaction undoes the clean and proper, noiseless
bourgeois subject’s body.
It is during the _nigredo_ of alchemy, which might occur at any gate,
that you come most thoroughly and noisily unstuck. A moment of deepest
despair so familiar and resonant for most artists. You are plunged
into something awful, but essential. There is a raucous cacophony of
pain/noise -- beetles, ravens, green lions -- human/inhuman
caterwauling that echoes, redoubles and exceeds the noise of Michel
Serres in his most multiple unpredictable turbulent moment. The
_nigredo_ is an intensity of matter/ing, of meaning/meaninglessness,
of noise and information, an intensity so great and terrible that
there is nothing left but to do the Work. (I made a radio work with
Alchemy, _Separation Anxiety_, for ABC in Australia and New American
Radio in the US – that was a long time ago but this discussion has
made me think about it again now.)
I hadn’t thought about dirt much lately til recently working with
the ultimate decomposers/composers -- worms -- and attuning to a noisy
collaborative voice together. https://workingworms.net/
https://vimeo.com/247735081
In another register, recently as I’ve been thinking about voice and
new materialism I’ve been noticing the voice of nausea – which
recalls the opening points for this month about noise and nausea. In
_Voicetracks_ I wrote about Kathy High’s wonderful video work
_Domestic Vigilancia _from_ Everyday Problems of the living_ -- the
voice of her vomiting cat that gave me so much to think about. Since
he alerted my senses and thinking to the vomiting voice, I’m hearing
it all over the media. Does anyone have any ideas on why so many films
have scenes of nausea and vomiting lately? It’s like vomit has
replaced sex as the required transgressive gesture. The gut speaks…
all the best
Norie
www.out-of-sync.com [1]
https://workingworms.net/
On 19 Mar 2018, at 1:51 PM, Junting Huang <jh2...@cornell.edu>
wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thanks to Eleonora, Wenhua, and Joo Yun for your posts! I’m sorry
about the slow pace in the second week, but please feel free to
follow up on their posts anytime. The annual meeting of Society for
Cinema and Media Studies ended today in Toronto, and we are back in
week 3. I am excited to introduce the guests for this week. They are
Nicholas Knouf, Norie Neumark, Ryan Jordan, Sarah Simpson, and
Gianluca Pulsoni.
————————
Nicholas Knouf
Nicholas Knouf is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies
at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. He is a media scholar and
artist researching noise, interferences, boundaries, and limits in
media technologies and communication.
His recent book, How Noise Matters to Finance (University of
Minnesota Press, 2016), traced how the concept of “noise” in the
sonic and informatic domains of finance mutated throughout the late
20th century into the 21st. His current research project,
tentatively entitled At the Limits of Understanding, listens to how
we have tried to communicate with both ghosts and aliens.
His current artistic research explores the re-presentation of
signals from the cosmos. Projects in this vein include they
transmitted continuously / but our times rarely aligned / and their
signals dissipated in the æther (2018-present), a 20 channel sound
art installation with speakers made from handmade abaca paper and
piezo electric elements, with sounds collected from satellite
transmissions; PIECES FOR PERFORMER(S) AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENTITIES
(2017-present), event scores laser etched into handmade translucent
abaca paper; and, On your wrist is the universe (2017-present),
generative poetry about satellites and the cosmos for your
smartwatch.
Norie Neumark
Norie Neumark is a sound/media artist and theorist. Her radiophonic
works have been commissioned and broadcast in Australia (ABC) and in
the US. Her collaborative art practice with Maria Miranda
(www.out-of-sync.com [1]) has been commissioned and exhibited
nationally and internationally. Her sound studies research is
currently focused on voice and the new materialist turn. Her latest
writing on voice is Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the
Arts (MIT Press, 2017). She is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at
VCA and Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and the
founding editor of Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts.
http://unlikely.net.au
Ryan Jordan
Ryan Jordan creates powerful audio-visual performance experiences
explicitly attempting to access portals into the psychedelic reality
matrix. These are explored through experiments in Possession Trance,
retro-death-telegraphy, hylozoistic neural computation and derelict
electronics. Recent projects include engram_extraction, a
hypothetical experiment into extracting and recording the
biophysical and/or biochemical imprints of events on memory; and
several failed attempts at breeding basilisks, mythical reptiles
with a lethal gaze or breath, hatched by a serpent from a cock's
egg. He disseminates these experiments via his noise=noise / nnnnn
platform for live events and workshops currently based in Ipswich
UK, and via a PhD thesis being completed at the School Of Creative
Media in Hong Kong.
http://ryanjordan.org/
http://nnnnn.org.uk/
Sarah Simpson
Sarah Simpson holds as Master's Degree in the History of Art from
University College London and a Bachelor's Degree in both Art
History and Archaeology from Cornell University. Originally from
Binghamton, NY, she currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Sarah has
held a range of positions in the art world including Curatorial
Assistant, Gallery Manager, and, most recently, Publicist. She's
worked in The Whitney Museum of American Art, BRIC, Didier Aaron,
and Blue Medium. Sarah has a personal blog, as well, where she
writes about exhibitions and theoretical concepts that strike her
interest, such as museum gift shops (which are absolutely
fascinating): https://ecloart.wordpress.com/
Gianluca Pulsoni
Gianluca Pulsoni is a Ph.D. student in the Romance Studies
Department of Cornell University (Italian section). He holds an MA
in Cultural Anthropology from the University La Sapienza in Rome,
Italy, with a thesis on Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's cinema and
exhibitions. He is a contributing writer to the Italian newspaper,
Il Manifesto -- its cultural pages and weekly, Alias. Also, he has
experience working with digital companies and publishing houses in
Italy as editor and translator.
all the best
Junting
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Links:
------
[1] http://www.out-of-sync.com
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