[-empyre-] body noise as (non)sense

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

"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?"

I agree with you, Caitlin, I think Christof is struggling with the same
thing.

Murat


On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 2:03 PM, Caitlin Woolsey <caitlin.woolsey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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: https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/chopin_
> henri/Chopin-Henri_Vibrespace.mp3
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> What about the impulse to interpret noise, to understand it in relation to
> human experience/analysis/effects (as Murat identified)?
>
> 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?
>
>
>
>
> Caitlin Woolsey
> Yale University
> PhD candidate in History of Art
> www.caitlinwoolsey.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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