MxAvr

A search for modern queer identity within ancient transformation.

You walk along the shoreline with the nymph, Canis. Thundering hooves echo closer up from the tide and Canis, surviving the violence, begins to breathe. Once breathing, once transformed, he begins to speak as Caeneus. Poet and artist Avren Keating has created a poetic soundscape that presents the futility and desire of searching for a modern gender identity within ancient mythology. The three tracks inhabit past, present, poetry and music and allow us to momentarily glimpse a forgotten character.

1) Ernest, Marcella, Nez, Rachael, Davis, Dawn D., and Adams, Rochelle “Geh Gii Ch'adzaa”. "Sounding Out! Podcast #40: Linguicide, Indigenous Community and the Search for Lost Sounds." Audio blog post. Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog. Ed. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Aaron Trammell, and Liana Silva. N.p., 26 Mar. 2015. Web.

Rachel Nez: “The bottom line is that we're really trying to work towards the various different ways to keep their language alive, whether it be, I believe this is the method they use, by Total Physical Response, much like Rochelle was saying, how we are listeners of the language, and we understand the language. But actually outputting it, like she was saying, is something that I've run across in a lot of tribes. We are hearers but not speakers” (00:15:52- 00:16:20).

literally moving the body to the sounds of the words to learn it. there’s more retention

2) Middlebrook, Jeb. "Prison Music: Containment, Escape, and the Sound of America." Web log post. Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog. Ed. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Aaron Trammell, and Liana Silva. N.p., 22 Aug. 2011. Web.

“In this example of prison music, one hears sounds that confound the work that is being performed. The music makes the work illogical. It sounds like the work is not productive, at least not for the bodies performing it. This is destructive, or more precisely deconstructive, physical and sonic work: breaking down (song) structures, bodies, minds in the process. It is a sonic protest against imprisonment, even as prison labor is being performed. This is the sound of prison music, simultaneous containment and escape, and helps explain why prison (music) is so popular in the United States. Prison is a necessary function of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism– a necessary warehousing of surplus (bodies) for exploitation or elimination. Prison music is a documentation of this process. Listening to, and perhaps playing, prison music is our attempt to hear ourselves survive within these dehumanizing systems.”

3) Is there TPR-Storytelling involved when listening to/dancing to music?

1) Mismar, Omar. “The Trumpet Blows Speech.” 

"Contradiction mutes the work; its oppositional logic encourages one to ask, ‘Was the work effective?’ This haunting question of efficacy is pertinent because “political art”of this kind, antagonistic in its stance, is already implicated in conflict, and naturally in the expectation and debate around conflict resolution. The question emanates from a place of yearning for resolution, for an 'effectiveness' that stops the Israeli attack and its violence, and equally from the guilt of the seeming indulgence of art while a city is under attack. But this question also exacerbates an aesthetics/politics binary and perpetuates a narrow understanding of the potential of this work” (Mismar, 5)

2) Kerbaj, Mazen, and Israeli Air Force, perfs. STARRY NIGHT (excerpt). Mazen Kerbaj. Rec. July 2006. Mazen Kerbaj, 2006. MP3.

(Moment at 03:16, the silence just before the bombs.)

3) Is it possible to disengage from the Platonic false dichotomy of aesthetics/politics through art? Or is this dichotomy forever imposed on artists that work in kinship with politics?

My interest in the class has shifted away from the ethics of sound editing and toward how people and ideas are represented with sound. I’ve gone from the practical considerations of trying to get my trans poetry podcast off the ground, and moved into abstract considerations. I want to experiment with sound in ways that are intriguing but also listenable. With this class I’ve found a deeper and more immediate purpose for sound. I want to move away from my inclination to make as little noise as possible—categorizing my own vocalizations as noise, yes, that internalized judgement is there—and instead focus on alternative modes of creating art that represents being with sound-color. I want to depict emotion, breath, movement, and interconnectivity. I want to sketch poetic gestural moments with sound.

At the beginning of the semester I was primarily concerned with the ethics of editing and interviewing. Thanks to the Nia King visit, I found a link on her blog to where she discusses the anti-oppressive research methods she learned while attending Mills, “In feminist methodology in particular, there was a strong emphasis on ‘ethics of care’ and reciprocity, the idea that you don’t just open up emotional wounds for your research participants without at least trying to close them, and you don’t take their stories without trying to give them something in return. Don’t assume being written about by you is enough of an honor to count as ‘compensation.’” (King, 2013). I have been thinking about this quote quite a bit in relation to the podcast I’m working on for my fellowship, and it has helped me greatly in figuring out the emotional exchange that often happens in interviewing marginalized people. King’s discussion of the quote has helped ground me more in the nurturing aspect of being an interviewer and allowed me to move forward into more artistic territory.

One thing I have done well in the class is engage with the homework assignments. I feel very committed to understanding the assignments, oftentimes exploring the associated links on the Sounding Out! page to get a better understanding of the homework topic. If there is one practice I’ve honed in class, it is the practice of whole embodied listening. I highly doubt that I would’ve come to my current interest in poetic soundscape without hearing, feeling, and pondering my classmates’ conversations about the weekly readings, specifically the conversations around the Fred Moten piece on trauma and affect, as well as “The Soundtracker” podcast’s dichotomy between the natural and unnatural sound environment.

Moving forward in class, I would like to experiment with the more liminal modes of self-expression through affect and soundscape. Outside of our class assignments, I’ve listened to some of the “Radio Radio” archive on PennSound, a series that interviews folks in the experimental radio world. Many of the episodes play with voice and background are kind of similar to each other. They sound like the ambient distortion of a David Lynch movie, or use echoes to create unease in the listener. Personally, I felt that “Radio Radio” was being avant-garde for art’s sake. Instead, I’m interested in researching if soundscapes can even hold affect in a way conversations do. I would like to read more about how soundscapes blur the line between music and poetry. I’m also interested in how much affect influences poetry, since poetry is created within the sound and breath of the poet and the ear of reader—not wholly in the projective verse conception of breath, ear, and heart, but more so in the hard to articulate and immediate empathy one taps into when reading and writing poetry.

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Works Cited

1)  Pettman, Dominic. "The Screech Within Speech." Sounding Out!. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, 16 July 2015. Web.

-- “And yet, as we have seen, there is no simple hierarchy here, where the human occasionally – in times of great distress – finds themselves, by this logic, reduced to being ‘an animal.’ We might call this the vox mundi – the voice of the world—in which, like the shadowy depths of the ocean, there is a swath of sound shared by human and animal. The creaturely voice can be sweet, like the nightingale. Or it can be harsh, like the traumatized cockatoo or the green-eyed professor-clown. “

2) Mapchan, Deborah. "Body." Keywords in Sound. Ed. David Novack and Matt Sakakeeny. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. 33-42. Print.

--”If the twentieth-century legal body was defined largely by its effects—what it performed in the world, whether intentionally or unintentionally (rights, sovereignty, ownership)—the body in the twenty-first century is a body defined by its affects, its materialities of feeling” (39). 

3) Is there a way to understand the affective impact of animals on humans? Are all non-human noises considered affect?

1)  Waldron, Emma Leigh. "Mediated Sexuality in ASMR Videos." Sounding Out! J. Stoever, 2015. Web. 03 Mar. 2016.

--“While the sexuality of this resonance is implied by the (problematically) gendered performances of ASMRtists such as Olivia Kissper, I suggest, somewhat provocatively, that ASMR is not just like sex, but is sex.

As “sex” is increasingly acknowledged as referring to a wide range of activities outside of penetrative, heterosexual, genital intercourse, it seems inevitable that its bounds will continue to expand, blur, and reconstitute themselves. Sexuality, therefore, should not be defined by the concrete gestures that constitute “sex” in a given time and place.”

2) IlseTheWaterdrops. “[Media & ASMR] NPR 'This American Life' broadcast about ASMR US radio.” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 31 Mar. 2013. Web. 03 Mar. 2016.

--Andrea Seigel: ”The smutty responses are very frustrating to the Whisperers. And, take my word for it, there is nothing sexual about the feeling itself because it’s actually the opposite of arousal. The starbursts produce a thorough calm that is almost stoner-like” (00:11:37).

3) How much of the debate about ASMR’s possible eroticism is tied up in trying to navigate what’s socially respectable (ie: avoiding the label of “fetish”) and how much is it really is grounded in the fact that it’s not sexual for the listener at all?

I'm interested in pursuing what we discussed during your office hours, how voices are erased from archive, trying to find echoes of queer voices, what it even meant to be queer in the middle ages. I have been thinking of creating experimental monologues for each of the saints or mythic people/creatures that resonate with me. Another idea was to create soundscapes based off of either my own poems, or the poems of others. I don't want to just read the entire poem, I'd rather try and create the soundscape based on the imagery and emotions in the piece. I might read a couple of the words that could guide the piece along, but the pieces won't be word-heavy. I would like the pieces to exist in that strange borderland between music and atmosphere. 

1) Ehrick, Christine. "Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies." Sounding Out!. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, 2015. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.  

“Conceptualizing the voice as a sonic expression of the gendered body requires revisiting both the tendency of feminist scholars to equate “women’s voice” with writing or discourse...Thinking about voice in terms of vocal gender brings us to the complex relationship between voice and body. The concept of disembodiment conveys the sometimes uncanny effect of hearing (especially female) voices without an immediately discernible source. It also underscores the destabilizing effect of these unseen female voices liberated thus from patriarchy’s specular regime. Yet to refer to voices from an unseen source as “disembodied” is to suggest that the voice is somehow separate from the body, a problematic formulation.

Simply: if the voice is not the body, what is it?”

2) Reed, Brian. "#19 - Show, Don't Tell." Interview by Rob Rosenthal. Audio blog post. HowSound. PRX, 4 Apr. 2012. Web.

-”Reed: ’I emptied out my pockets, uh, and took off my shoes...and rigged up my Marantz and my kit up as high as I could to make sure it didn't get wet, cause I was on this remote island and didn't know anywhere to get replacement cables (chuckles) if I needed them, and uh, just started--started going. Started walking into the water.’

Rosenthal: ‘And what does that do for the listener?’

Reed: ‘I mean, if you think of the listener’s ear as being like the microphone, you know, or like the microphone is the listener’s window into the story you’re telling and into the moments you’re sharing...then my hope is that the listener gets to walk out there with you.’”

3) Is it possible to change a gendered soundscape through the radio principle of “show don’t tell?”

1) King, Nia. “#artlife DIY or don’t?” niaking.tumblr.com  Tumblr, 5 July 2015. Web. Accessed 19 February 2016.

- “However, there’s another voice in my head besides the one that says, “DIY! Punk rock! Hardcore!” It’s the voice that says “Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to do everything yourself?” and “Your work is good, people should be giving you money to do it. Institutions should be giving you money to do it. You should be getting offered book deals. So-and-so has a book deal.” Maybe this is the little devil on my shoulder talking, but sometimes she can be very convincing.”

2) King, Nia. “Nia interview”  https://www.patreon.com/posts/nia-interview-731447 Patreon, 22 July 2014.  Web. Accessed 19 February 2016

-“...but, overall, a part of the reason that you're at a disadvantage as a queer woman of color is that you're queer, and of color, and a woman, but the other reason is that people who have privilege often don't let the fact that they don't know what they're talking about stop them from talking...[or[ the fact that they don't know what they're doing stop them from doing stuff. And I think that as a queer woman of color, and I'm really just speaking about myself here, I think we often have all this self-doubt that prevents us from doing stuff. And doing stuff is how you learn and how you get exposure. So, overcoming fear of failure is really important if you want to become successful as an artist...you have to have faith that you will get second chances if you fuck up."

3) How do we overcome this fear of failure and self-doubt when it has been so ingrained in us? How do we stay true to an artistic vision when it is overwhelmingly difficult to achieve? How do you approach other artists to interview when you’re feeling this self-doubt about yourself and this project (asking for a friend)?

Week 3: Reading/Listening Notes

1)  Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print.

- “My goal is to suggest how affect, including the affects associated with trauma, serves as the foundation for the formation of public cultures” (Cvetkovich, 10).

2) jdavidm. "John Cage about silence". Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 14 July 2007. Web. 12 February 2016

- "Sometimes people expect listening to be more than listening. And so sometimes they speak of inner listening, um, or the meaning of sound...when I talk about music...it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn't mean anything--that is not inner, that is just outer. And they say--these people who understand that finally say--'You mean its just sounds?' Thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds just as they are” (Cage, 00:01:48-02:40).

3) How do we find affective elements in personal and public memory? Can silence have a power through its affect?

Week 2: Reading/Listening Notes

1) Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U.P. Minnesota, 2003. Print. “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream”

- “Similarly, the truth about the value of the commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not from outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value—that is not intrinsic—that Marx assigns it” (Moten, 13).

2)  PRI Public Radio International. “Ira Glass on Storytelling, part 4 of 4.″ Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 18 August 2009. Web.

- “And, of course, everything is going to be more compelling—it’s just like one of the laws of broadcasting—everything will be more compelling the more you just talk like a human being…The more you are your own self the better off you are” (Glass, 00:28).

3) How can we create a platform the oppressed through podcasting or radio, a form that is fairly rigid in structure and mainly white? Where is there room for improvisation?

4) Fred Moten’s text was dense in theoretical concepts, that mainly went over my head, but from what I could discern Moten articulates black resistance to both capitalism and slavery exists before, and is left out of, Karl Marx’s theories on capitalism. What Marx labels the “commodity,” reacts through a mutli-sensory radical action, as in Aunt Hester’s objection to violence through her screams, to not only envision a freedom she does not have, but also a freedom that she and her ancestors used to have. Improvisation in black performance is a radical assertion of spirit and is “the critique of value, of private property, of the sign” (12). Moten traces the echoes of this improvisation through the sounds of jazz and other traditionally black art forms.

1) Serres, Michel. "Genesis." Sound. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. N. pag. Print.

-”The silence of the sea is mere appearance. Background noise may well be the ground of our being. It may be that our being is not at rest, it may be that it is not in motion, it may be that our being is disturbed” (Serres, 93-94).

2) Hempton, Gordon. "The Soundtracker." Interview. Audio blog post. Generation Anthropocene. Ed. Mike Osborne and Leslie Chang. Stanford University, 15 Sept. 2015. Web.

-”The earth is music. So many of us, including myself, don’t hear nature as music much anymore because it’s been so impacted by noise pollution. I define noise as basically any human caused noise intrusion...I do not count to human voice so long as it’s not chattering away as noise pollution” (Hempton, 10:34-10:59).

3) With a loss of hearing natural noise, does that mean we have lost an integral component of humanity?