<div dir="ltr">"<span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px">That is, to generate a whole lot of language/<i>description around the locus of the noise that resists being fixed</i>? Perhaps this is where Christof's proposal of noise as a hyphenating agent might productively come in?"</span><div><br></div><div>I agree with you, Caitlin, I think Christof is struggling with the same thing.</div><div><br></div><div>Murat<br><br style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 2:03 PM, Caitlin Woolsey <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:caitlin.woolsey@gmail.com" target="_blank">caitlin.woolsey@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div dir="ltr">In his writings, Henri Chopin correlates the particular modernity of the period after World War II with an operative assumption of plurality. He sets this plurality (semantic, sonic, visual) against expression (artistic or otherwise) as meaning. His work, I think, is not so much against language as such as it is resistant to conceptions of meaning per se. You can listen to a number of his sound works, which he called “audio-poèmes,” on Ubuweb: <a href="https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/chopin_henri/Chopin-Henri_Vibrespace.mp3" target="_blank">https://ubusound.<wbr>memoryoftheworld.org/chopin_<wbr>henri/Chopin-Henri_Vibrespace.<wbr>mp3</a><br><br>In "Vibrespace" from 1963, the artist constructs a sonic atmosphere that engulfs the listener with rhythmic electronic pulses, rising bubbles, soft clicks and hisses. The bodily trace remains: we hear the huff of the artist’s intake of breath, and can identify the wet clack of his lips. Yet machinic-sounding elements and natural evocations of wind and water are juxtaposed with the vocalic remnants. In this particular audio-poem, the listener experiences a sense of containment. Is it as if we have been transported into a subterranean or underwater space, dark and enclosed, and the auditory trajectory of this piece reflects back to us the interplay between organic noises, the constructed soundspace in which we find ourselves (like a submarine), and the protestations of our own senses that may not find this kind of “poem” particularly pleasurable.<br><br>What is the poetics or “sense” of a work like "Vibrespace," which is composed of the voice—but a voice that does not ostensibly speak as voice? What about the sonic envelope it creates, which is evocative even as it is impossible to fully locate? Chopin pursued what he called “mobile signs”—positioned against the concrete (albeit metaphorical) stance “in the beginning was the Word.” And yet I wonder: is a sound poem like Vibrespace in fact closer to the biblical formulation, in which expression—the Word, meaning—is made flesh, instantiated in the materiality of the human body. Might its “nonsense” voice—scrambled and layered and distended through the artist’s interventions and the tape recorder; and also constructed through recording non-vocal bodily vibrations—convey meanings insofar as it is created from and elicits a kind of embodied, haptic materiality?<div><br></div><div><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:small;font-style:normal;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:400;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial;float:none;display:inline">What about the impulse to interpret noise, to understand it in relation to human experience/analysis/effects (as Murat identified)? </span><br><br>And how do we talk about noise and sound work like "Vibrespace" that seems to both elude and invite the impulse to describe or analyze or locate? I grapple with this problem as someone who is trying to write about sound works. Is there any way to describe them that doesn't mediate, compromise, mislead? That is, to generate a whole lot of language/description around the locus of the noise that resists being fixed? Perhaps this is where Christof's proposal of noise as a hyphenating agent might productively come in?<br><br><br><br><br>Caitlin Woolsey<br>Yale University<br>PhD candidate in History of Art<br><a href="http://www.caitlinwoolsey.com" target="_blank">www.caitlinwoolsey.com</a><br><br></div></div>
<br>______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.<wbr>edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.<wbr>edu</a><br></blockquote></div><br></div>