[-empyre-] Feminism Confronts Audio Technology

Fri Jul 4 01:11:41 EST 2014

Hi everyone, 

As far as I'm concerned, two awesome things happened in the 70s: 

--Irigaray started publishing things

--Eliane Radigue started using ARPs

Parallel, in my mind, with a third awesome thing (much maligned as "essentialist"): 

--American biocentric ecofeminism

For some reason these events seem deeply connected to me. Radigue is my favorite composer and remains the only one to whom I've written a fan letter (she replied, awesomely). I've never heard a live performance but if you have okay speakers and turn them up quite loud, you will be swathed in very low frequency discords that produce shimmering interference patterns all the way up and beyond the human audio range. Irigaray is someone whose thought I realized I was channeling unconsciously so I decided to be much more explicit about her. 

Talking the aliens like that on Close Encounters (which deploys an ARP) would have been fantastic. 

There is a lot of very interesting work coming out of Mills these days as ever (where Radigue has taught) and in particular the work of Suzy Poling (Pod Blotz) and Holly Herndon stands out for me but there is so much else. Both of them are on SoundCloud and Herndon is on iTunes and everywhere. Hopefully we are doing a Dark Ecology album. 

I've been reading all these posts with pleasure. Thank you Doug Kahn for giving us a phrase, "Earth magnitude," which I now use (greatly acknowledged) all the time. Marcus you were so spot on about the "horror" aspect of some speculative realism. I now introduce all that with a picture of McCulkin's Home Alone face!

Yours, Tim

Timothy Morton
Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English
Rice University

http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 30, 2014, at 4:07 PM, Stephanie Strickland <stephanie.strickland at gm.slc.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> of interest, perhaps, to a future discussion, the poet
> Anne Carson's essay, "The Gender of Sound," in her collection
> Glass, Irony and God
> 
> 
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> Stephanie 
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> On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 4:47 AM, Caroline Park <carepark at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> thank you, lyn, for bringing up the topic of space in these conversations.  the study of specifically gendered spaces is new to me, and i greatly appreciate having my brain be nudged forward in this direction.  i of course have no answers to the questions you bring up -- i'm sure i will continue to slowly gather my thoughts in this area.
> 
> as for the idea / question of sound being seen as gendered, my initial thoughts were that yes, sound is perceived as gendered if it comes from a visible body in space, and/or if the source is known.  but even if the source is known, and not seen in space, does the source carry gender; to what extent can or does gender carry from invisible to visible sound source in space?  and in thinking about silence as sound or source, it seems with silence we begin to migrate into the sociocultural, as it feeds between and within gender, race, and sexuality.
> 
> i also agree that the "blank white box" is not the best / only solution -- in this reality these blank white boxes exist perhaps exclusively in high-art institutions, and our reality as human beings is not abstract enough that we can strip away context (of space, of humans) entirely.  very glad to now know of christina kubisch's consecutio temporum: how she explores these existing sites seems much transparent and true to its history / ecosystem.  still so much to mull on regarding sound, space, and light, with regard to the last few questions that lyn has posed here ... i am excited to think about these for a good while.
> 
> speaking of light, i might give a connecting nudge back to asha's bringing up of the minimum/abstract as more a form of feminist, cultural, and queer expression in another thread ... but the week is done!  quick thank you to everyone -- much to think about, and the semi-real-time nature of the past week was too fast for my mind to process all that has been said.  thank you monisola, rachel, lyn, and asha, for the conversation, and to renate and tim, for having us at -empyre-.  i have no doubt these discussions will continue!  thank you.
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 3:59 PM, Lyn Goeringer <lyn.goeringer at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I want to step back a bit and enter into the concept of space in this discussion. A lot of our focus so far has been on performance and instruments, but I'd like to consider the spaces and sites of sound art for a moment in this. Rather than making any statements, I will probably wind up asking more questions than posing solutions or answers for. 
> 
> If we consider space and the presence of a body in space a gendered body, and we cannot be in a space without being an object in that space, it makes sense to me that we would then have a gendered experience of that space.  Some have even suggested that spaces themselves are gendered (Lynda Johnson, Robyn Longhurst and many, many others), I am left with a few questions about how/what kinds of spaces are being built that push boundaries or explore feminist and/or queer ideas and identities.  In essence, the final question becomes: can a sound be seen as gendered, and if so, how does that sound reflect/resound in the spaces that it is then re/presented in?  
> 
> I could see an argument that the 'blank white box' is the ideal for changeable expressions of gender, of a slate to start from scratch in, but I am not convinced that it is the best solution or only solution.  To that end, I am thinking of the klanglicht works of Christina Kubisch (such as her consecutio temporum), where she often uses vapor lamps to reveal the hidden flaws and changes over time within existing sites, often combining them with soundscapes and musical compositions.  Could, in fact, this allow for a deeper exploration of the gendering of space and site through the use of sound and light? How can/does the use of the medium, of sound itself, reveal the sites we are in to be gendered, to be representative of any representative state of body? And, if it can, how can we subvert this to create and transform a space/site into a place where we can create an awareness of the existing structures, and then create alternative locations to fit our own needs and means?
> 
> I look forward to any thoughts you may have on these very open ended questions. 
> 
> Lyn
> 
> Lyn.Goeringer at gmail.com
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