And for today's lecture, Eleni Icroniado. And Eleni is a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art and member of the art collective Audint, with Steve Goodman and Toby Hayes, who are both also guest lecturers on this course. She has co-edited the volume Unsound Undead from Eponomec 2019 and produced a series of exhibitions under the same title, funded by the Arts Council of England in 2018-20. Currently, she's working on a fully funded project by the Human Data Interaction EPSRC Network,
investigating machine learning in art, music, and the cultural industries. She is a founder and co-editor of the Media Philosophy series on Roman and Littlefield International and author of the monograph The Rhythmic Event, Art, Media and the Sonic, which came out on MIT Press in 2014. And I've been reading that book and I really liked it. It was very inspirational. So today, Leni Iconiano will get a lecture titled On the Other Side of Sound. The concept of unsound is key across all her work in the sonic. under various terms from sonic fiction to figurative voices and more recently polyphonic
intelligence. In this talk Eleni Econiato will attempt to sketch out her approach to the unsound and voice. There will be sound examples so you might consider using headphones as always to get the best sound. After Eleni's lecture we will have a discussion based on student presentations of 10 minutes each. And today we have Irini, Lina, Sharon, Luca and Agata. Yussi was supposed to present also but she cannot be present today so I'll read out her questions aloud. Then we have some responders of five minutes each. And Jua, James and Jara. So we
are quite a lot of people on today so let's try to keep it a bit compact and not take too much time in order to also have time to do some discussion and what to eleni kuniado hello thank you jacob for the introduction hi everyone it's nice to see you some of you and your names hello wherever you are I am as always I have to start with some preemptions one is Jacob I don't know you might have to to stop me then because seems like
time might be tight and I'm not sure how long is it's always difficult within our lecture so I can do the shorter version and or the longer version see how it goes the other thing is that I was telling Jacob a minute ago that my throat is going so I apologize in advance so I don't have to apologize with every cough during the lecture I apologize in advance for that I'm sure it's gonna it's gonna go off because when I read when I'm reading constantly. It's even worse. But here we are. I can share my screen. I have a presentation, so I can share my screen with you all and see if you can see this. Yes, great.
Okay, let's go. I want to start from the middle, or rather near the end, something of a nonlinear way into my connection with sound and sound. I added another word to the title, I sent Jacob the title on the other side of sound, but as I was writing it I thought it really is on the other side of voice. voice, but voice and sound are not entirely different in this approach and definitely very much connected. So lately I've been thinking about the human fascination with the development of automated speech and voice recognition technology and some of its philosophical,
political and aesthetic implications. Initially I thought this fascination perhaps has a precedent that goes back to Thomas Edison's phonograph invention in 1877, including his ambition to capture and preserve the voices of the dead in what he called the library of voices. I followed the trail from Edison's creepy female sounding talking dolls, his little monsters as he called them and maybe you can hear them
It's not perfect, it's not perfect, it's not perfect, it's a way to put it down. It's perfect, it's a terrible stare, I am happy watching well. I've got the eyes of the eyes of the dark, and the dark, and the blue stars. The sound is pretty bad in them, but they're kind of antiques. I think some of them are the Museum of Detroit. And they sounded that horrible, I think, to begin with. So then to the VODER, the first human speech synthesizer by Bell Telephone Labs made in 1936, harboring yet more female voice ghosts via Helen Harper,
who trained more than 20 female operators to use it. See if I can play this clip. There are 10 filter circuits in the motor, and combined with the two energy sources, they give a total of 20 separate components to be used in building up speech sounds. But now let's have Mr. Garrett and Ms. Harper actually show us what the motor can do with these 20 separate sounds. Well, we've heard the voter make a word, and by combining words, of course, we get a sentence.
For example, Helen, will you have the voter say, She saw me. She saw me. That sounded awfully flat. How about a little expression? Say the sentence in answer to these questions. Who saw you? She saw me. Whom did she say? She saw me. Well, did she see you or hear you? She told me. sure whether it's going to be a tenor or a bass and the voter being still a comparatively young
man also has his moments of uncertainty let's hear him recite mary had a little lamb What happened? It's not my best friend. I didn't believe that you were a great friend. What's your good friend? Gosh, Porter, you sounded awfully dismal. Snap out of it. Let's hear you laugh. Okay. A minute ago, I said the voter was still a comparatively young man. But that last laugh of his makes me wonder whether I might not have been wrong. Do you really feel as old as you sound? sounds. I certainly feel sorry for you. Now perhaps you noticed there was a peculiar quality in that voice you've not heard before. That was the vibrato. We noticed a little while ago that
a vowel sustained without inflection didn't sound human. It sounded this way. Now if we put vibrato into that same tone we get this ah and that as you've noticed is really a singing tone yes for it can not only talk but he can sing test your voice for us voters well if you're quite recovered from your mood of depression of a few minutes ago suppose you sing a song for us will you yes absolutely well how about au lang syne I'm okay. She's over the game, her feet, forgot, and made her so blind.
She's over the game, her feet, forgot, and made her so blind. I'm sure that if I sang that song, I wouldn't sound as good as the voter. Ms. Harper, I've been wondering whether our listeners realize how many motions you have to make in the production of a single word. Can you give us some idea? Well, for example, in producing the word concentration on the voter, I have to form 13 different sounds in succession, make five up and down movements of the wrist bar, and vary the position of the foot pedal from three to five times according to what expression I want the voter to give the word. And, of course, all this must be done with exactly correct timing.
About how long did it take you to become an expert in operating the voter? It took me about a year of constant practice. This is about the average time required in most cases. How many girls are there who can operate the voter? The company tried out about 320 girls, and out of this number, 28 girls finally became expert operators. Well, that seems like a very small number. Just why is that? I can answer that, Dr. Carwell, by saying that in operating the voter, a girl needs a peculiar combination of particular talents, which is not too common. Mr. Garrett, does the voter speak any foreign language? Oh, yes. The voter can talk practically any language that its operator can talk. Well, suppose we try a little French on the voter. Can he say, parlez-vous par-sé?
I do not. Spendidly does. Merci, merci. You see, Doctor, the voter can do practically anything that can be done with a human voice. Well, that certainly covers a lot of ground, Mr. Garrett. I know people who can imitate animals. Can the voter do that, too? Oh, pretty well. For instance, here's voter's imitation of a cow. And here's a pig. Have you given the voter any real education yet? Just what do you mean by that, Dr. Caldwell? Well, for example, does he know his alphabet? I'll let you judge that for yourself. A-E-E-E-F-G-H.
Well, that certainly proves voters' versatility. And now I'd like to ask just what to see for the voter, Mr. Garrett. How can it be practically applied? Well, Dr. Caldwell, we don't anticipate any commercial use for the voters. It was built for an educational exhibit for the New York World's Fair and San Francisco Exposition. However, it is a byproduct of developments that we are going on and doing in the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Will you please make the voters say for our Eastern listeners, good evening radio audience. Okay, it was a bit of a long clip, but it's such a gem. I thought that it was so many things in it that relate to my talk, so I played it all.
Equally fascinating is the Euphonia, Joseph Faber's fabulous talking machine from the Victorian era, with its ability to stimulate human speech. A complex device controlled by 17 levers, a bellows and a telegraphic line. This machine was adorned with a movable replica of a human face which was able to faithfully replicate the sounds of human speech. Separate levers controlled the movements of the tongue, lips, jaw and vocal cords. People remarked that they could even feel the breath of the euphonia emanating from the India rubber lips set into a stony-eyed mask of a female face. Her ghostly voice and vacant stare
left many spectators scared, says a quote. The more you look, the more you find intriguing linkages between female-sounding voices, machines, and ghosts. Today, the production of the voice has been successfully outsourced to complex technological and computational processes. Companies like Lybert and Baidu use AI to create realistic artificial voices for a variety of purposes, including the possibility of conjuring up from the afterlife your favorite pop star on demand via voice cloning. The largely female voice digital assistants inside our homes are descendants of the first recorded and synthesized voices operating telephones, making announcements, warning you to mind the gap.
Females as servers, females as machines, machines as servers, servers of clients or users. This opens up many interesting questions for me. More than the obvious gendering of technology, which has been effectively argued by feminist and queer theory of late, I want to focus on what it means to rethink the voice in the 21st century, and in particular by this kinship between females, machines and ghosts. or the other world of unsound, let's say. Some questions that might arise, if the use of the voice has primarily been associated with the act of speech, and thus as evidence of our differentiation from other animals and from machines,
what happens when technological entities start to speak? More than constituting a form of intelligence, according to our current definitions, Does the perfect reproduction of human speech by advanced algorithms point to an inhumaness and alieness implicit in both voice and intelligence? How might we test commonplace notions of agency, subjectivity and knowledge production and acquire new understandings about what it is to be other and therefore what it is to be human through the voice? A key question underlying all this is where does the voice come from? The larynx is not a conceptually satisfying answer, following the trail that I've laid out.
Not surprisingly, the search leads back to the Greeks, like every other problem in the West. Heidegger has already been through this virus fascination with the larynx. his fascination with Aristotle and his analysis of the statement zoon lovon ehon. This has historically been translated as man the rational animal the speaking animal although there are varied interpretations and criticisms about this but for our purposes it works. As Adriana Cavarero notes for me in Greek and vox in Latin denote a large spectrum of sound phenomena with either animate
or inanimate sources but mostly we define voice as human because of its necessary connection to speech from the Greeks onwards and the privileging of the latter connection thus voice is logos or logos in English. Deleuze and Guattari called the preoccupation with speech language as humankind's fundamental neurosis, the will to interpret or what they call the interpretosis of the priest. The interpretative priest, the seer, is one of despot gods bureaucrats. A new aspect of deception arises, the deception of the priest. Interpretation is carried to infinity and never encounters anything to interpret that is not already itself an interpretation. And Derrida
has pondered about the implications of logocentrism as a thesis regarding the animal, the animal deprived of logos, deprived of the can have the logos. The equation of logocentrism with patriarchy is of course inevitable. Voice without speech is not to be trusted, it is irrational. The Greeks warn of the dangers of illogical voices preventing man from truth and and rational harmony. They're usually equated to animal, non-human and female sounds. As Ann Carson writes, madness and witchery are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts.
Consider how many female celebrities of classical mythology, literature and cult make themselves objectionable by the way they use their voice. For example, there is the heart chilling groan of the Gorgon. There are the Furies whose high pitched and horrendous voices are compared by Eskylos to howling dogs or sounds of people being tortured in hell. There is the deadly voice of the sirens and the dangerous ventriloquism of Helen and the incredible babbling of Cassandra and the fearsome hullabaloo of Artemis as she charges through the woods. There is the seductive discourse of Aphrodite, which is so concrete an aspect of her power that she can wear it on her belt as a physical object or lend it to other women.
There is the old woman of Elefsinian legend Iamvi, who shrieks and throws her skirt up over her head to expose her genitalia. There is the haunting garrality of the nymph Echo, daughter of Iamvi in Athenian legend, who is described by Sophocles as the girl with no door on her mouth. no door on her mouth. Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death, tells us Anne Carson. This is a good example of all of that. The scold's bridal. A scold was defined as rude, a rude woman, a shrew,
and this iron cage was used by a local magistrate as a punishment to women for speaking out against authority, nagging, gossiping, or lying. It was designed to cause public humiliation and great discomfort and pain to the wearer, worn for several hours in order to prevent them from eating, drinking and most importantly talking. A metal bit that went into the mouth to hold down the tongue recalls a horse bridle used to enable the rider to exercise control over the animal. The custom developed in Scotland in the 1500s and quickly spread to other European countries. Women accused of witchcraft were also victims of the device
in order to prevent them from chanting and casting spells. It was used as a punishment until the early 1800s and only abolished from the British Penal Code in 1967. Female, animal and non-human voices mimicked, controlled, trained, silenced. Initially, I wrote two short pieces, one on the lament and another on the siren song for the book Unsound Undead. Briefly in this text, I approached the female voice in its capacity to channel the alien and open up a door to the otherworldly.
I looked at the lamenter and the siren song as creating acoustic passages between different orders of the real. enabling encounters between seemingly incompatible realms. Though words may be spoken in these examples, i.e. their voice is connected to speech, the significance for my work is in the gaps where speech is either lost or becomes irrelevant. As, quote, their voice devolves into inarticulacy, inarticulacy. A moan, a cry, vocal expressions, at once seductive and dangerous, the animality inscribed even in their hybrid appearance. Although Cavarero here speaks
of the siren's song, the same applies to the lamenter, whose voice becomes more dangerous as it veers off the semantic realm, not yet or no longer dominated by reason. The Lament has had different lives. It's been presented and performed in places such as the ICA, Fabrica and Brighton, Tate Modern, in collaboration with different people, here with Caroline Schnurrer in this photo, using heat sensors, loop pedals, auto-tune, Nableton, text-to-speech software, speech software and various other things, combination of live and pre-recorded sound. It has become an audio piece for the radio
for Wising Polyphonic Festival, an improvised performance at Chivon Davies' studio, and next month, a short film for Teatro Mundi. Each time we aimed to construct a space between installation and performance for a collectivity of human and non-human lamenters. Often the idea was to detach mourning from its traditional association with death, extrapolating it to its quotidian state, appropriate for our times of universal sorrow. Other iterations have materialized through
This event I curated for the ICA entitled Her Voice, an evening of live performance, sound, film and discussion. An audio installation for the Barbican called It Sings and an audio essay entitled Code Omega for Nottingham Contemporary. Both of those with my collaborator Savas Metaxas. Another outcome was a short animated film with Katerina Fanasopoulou, a segment of which I played earlier. in the presentation. And finally, a video for Teatro Mundi launched next month. If we have time later, I might show some of the film, but let's see how we do for time. Both in the lament and siren song,
the state of the voice as tonorous emission that reverberates, sorry, sounds, repeats, stutters, is not yet connected to the word, for Cavarero, and this was a quote from her, reflects Horkheimer and Adorno's voice as bodily enjoyment that opposes the self's rationality by inducing it to melt back into the bliss of its prehistory. This voice that comes from and leads back to the abyss, beyond language, unhinged from rationality, has preoccupied my thought. So far in the in recent years, mostly from an artistic angle,
although I'm writing a chapter for for a forthcoming book on some of these ideas. In the coming in the following months. It was I was drawn to it for its connection to death, musicality, other worldliness, female sounding voices as holders of a different type of knowledge, collective, joyous in its irrationality, forming choruses and occupying worlds in which there is no meaning other than sound, unsound. Through these choruses the singular voice emerges as an outdated and invalid philosophical category in dire need of being replaced by its plural counterpart. Not only because they are many, but because of their strangeness and capacity to exist without a
subject, therefore to escape. Not taking language as in any sense foundational. In process philosophy, for example, Carsten tell us, an escape is never really passive. It is a creative and joyful act of collectively inventing more livable modes of existence. Not purely human, animal or machine, voices existing interchangeably and indeterminately as assemblage, made of human, non-human and more than human forces. A chorus, many voices as opposed to the one, collective yet not the same, led me to this notion of polyphony.
A concept borrowed by music and which literally means multiple voices, after Mikhail Bakhtin refers to an interaction with many simultaneous voices, unmerged into a single perspective and unsubordinated to the voice of the author. It is a principle suggesting that instead of a single objective world, there is a plurality of consciousness, each of consciousness is, each with its own world. Although there are many perspectives, these don't remain fixed. Voices may change or swap, and there is no reason to assume the conversation stops at the limit of the interhuman. drawing on Dostoevsky's novel novels that Bakhtin says in our opinion create a completely new type
of artistic thinking that we provisionally call polyphonic the case is made for the world as we experience it in its multi-voicedness polyphony or heteroglossia is the notion that a multitude of different voices resides within each voice. And I quote from the preface to the book I shared with you as part of the prep material. It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousness is, one that cannot in principle be fitted into the bounds of a single consciousness,
one that is, so to speak, by its very nature, full of event potential, and is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses. Polyphony is about an unlimited openness of the voice to develop into unpredictable futures. As Bakhtin says, nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world. The ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken. Everything is still in the future and will always be in the future. I've also been working on in recent years on this notion of fugitivity.
In relation to fugitive voices, as you may have seen in the chapter I sent you specific dissonance dissonances and also through an elective course I was running at the RCA called fugitive voices. voices, which this term I mentioned to Jacob earlier, runs as a series of online conversations with invited artists and theories. I follow Fred Morton's understanding of the concept as sonically inflicted. Morton draws on the poet and novelist, Nathaniel Mackey's discussion of the saxophonist Amiri Baraka, whose playing slides away from the proposed, goes off the track, moves against the grain from what has been specifically laid down. As Moten discusses with Saidiya Hartman,
fugitivity is about reducing certain imposed narratives, excuse me, of becoming a subject with specific social trajectory through a divergence, a wandering, waywardness as Hartman calls it in this book, Wayward Lives, that I also sent you. Morton and Hartman discussed that fugitivity in their book, The Undercommons, carries within it deep tensions and contradictions, such as the impossible domesticity of the one who is confined to serve inside the house, but can never be domesticated. This is a modality of escape that requires staying put, says Morton. this sonic fugitive thinking is necessarily a double move running from the mainstream the
dominant and the imposed is simultaneously running from away from oneself quote escape from some notion of freedom of having achieved this moment escape from a single being a body owning other bodies or things fugitivity is that which the refugee carries with her. As Hartman tells us, refuge does not imply actual movement to a safety away from the forces of threat and death, but instead a making within that context. Hartman's fugitive wayward lives engender a polyvocal, nuanced, elastic language of blackness. She calls for the nurturing of a radical imagination that dares think of other narratives
written from nowhere. That's what she says in her book. As the other text I shared with you shows from that book, Hartman devises a chorus through which the everyday anarchy of ordinary black girls resists the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor. Hartman works with unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus, quote, marvel at their capacity to inhabit every woman's grief, she writes. As in the other
collective joyous but tragic choruses we've encountered, the story exceeds the words for Hartman. She says the chorus bears all of it for us. And that reminds me of Anne Carson, who also writes that we sacrifice actors to, we sacrifice it to the action. She says to act out our grief, that the tragic chorus is there for us to act out our grief without us having to sacrifice ourselves or our kin having to die. Instead the chorus dies for us. It is made up of many voices, not the one voice of the tragic hero or great man, but one in which all the
modalities play a part, she says, a headless group of collective action where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense propel transformation. The chorus is an incubator of possibility, an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise, Hartman tells us, the collective movement points toward what awaits us, what has yet come into view, what they anticipate. Voices from the future once again. I want to push up this idea of bringing together Bakhtin in conversation with Black radical feminism such as Saidiya Hartman and Denise Ferrer da Silva's ideas to explore how a chorus
of artificial human and other voices might allow for the activation and emergence of alternative narratives. The proposition is that collectives of females, non-normative and artificial vocalities are entangled in non-human history, contesting prescribed futures and opening sites of possibility. Polyphonic intelligence, as what I've called it, opens the way for a radical rethinking of the potential of female sounding voices together in restless movement, quoting Hartman, transgressing their traditional role as server. So polyphonic intelligence is the project I'm currently doing, is not finished yet,
an HDI funded art project that combines traditional sonic practices with machine learning. It was initially meant to be an installation activated by human and algorithmic entities as a live event. Due to COVID, with all the galleries and art spaces closing, you had to change to something else. We put out a call for professional lamenters, artists, singers, musicians, performers from around the world to take part by contributing laments remotely from their homes. I sent them a portable recording device through the post, complete with disinfectant wipes in the box, and they posted it back, or they posted it through to each other, and sometimes directly back to me, and sometimes to the next lamenter, although way back to me.
helping to build a very diverse sonic database. Laments were taken here in their wider definition as expressions of grief and could be written or improvised by the performer themselves or by others, or taken from existing texts that express grief in the form of prose or a philosophical thesis or a song, etc., including non-linguistic and non-human sounds. in sounds. Contributions involved a mix of reading, spoken word, utterance, scream, animal sound, and the vocal database was used for the artificial generation of a new voice that was not there before. The generated audio is mostly noisy, but you can tell that there is something trying to
We're currently, if I lower this down and I speak over it, can you hear me? Yeah. We're currently trying to extend the sample for five minutes to some hours. There are a few possible outcomes and I'm interested in achieving this original goal of creating a chorus made of human and non-human lamenters performing together. So watch this space. I'll send you more when it's done if you want to check it out. The chorus is a device whose purpose is to draw attention to intelligence as a polyphonic spectrum that can move beyond traditional binary oppositions.
Maybe I'll stop it. You've got an idea. I'm sorry. The chorus is a device whose purpose is to draw attention to intelligence as a polyphonic spectrum. It can move beyond traditional binary oppositions, human, machine, natural, cultural, male, female, and so on, through algorithmic sound analysis and production, away from comfortable assumptions of a human machine equivalence or commonplace anxieties of machine superiority. Our research engages with a critical point that the imminent perfect reproduction of human speech by advanced algorithms challenges our limiting definitions of both human and machine intelligence. and as I said earlier in the presentation of voice.
To find new ways of composing, creating a new sound, a new voice, and a new aesthetic. Polyphonic intelligence is an idea that keeps nudging me. More and more layers reveal themselves to me in relation to this other dimension of sound and of voice, this other world of unsound. Ultimately, it is a step in the same plateau as I have explored elsewhere. Such as in the book that Jacob mentioned earlier, which starts with this quote. After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality is there from Brian Oblivion from Videodrome, the film. Ultimately, it is a step in the same plateau, as I said,
where I take for granted that the sonic is a broader vibrational continuum of which perceptible sound is only a subset. This other side of sound or voice nurtures a third dimension in which the real and the fictional, speculative, radical, imaginary bleed into one another. And I could finish there. Or, as you can see, or I could go on. What do you say, Jacob? Well, we still have 20 minutes. So if you have. Oh, I can carry on. Okay, great. I'm going to stop sharing for a minute so I can bring,
So I can bring up the rest of my text. Okay, so now you have no visuals and you just have me. Is that okay? I can't see you if you're nodding, but I'm hoping that's okay. Okay, so in the book, my way of exploring this other dimension was by bringing together actual sonic events, spatial temporal anomalies, and time travel through various examples of digital sound art.
My method, my approach to sound, was relating to this idea of concept engineering. I approached the sonic event as capable of affording us a glimpse into the unknown. And the text I shared with you, one of the texts I shared with you, my text for parallax, if you had a chance, if anyone had a chance to read it, unfolds these ideas a bit more. Affording us a glimpse into unknown, so the sonic event is capable of affording us a glimpse into unknown, indeterminate, alien time. Drawing mostly on digital sonic experiments, bridging architectural practices with interactive installation and technoscientific experiment,
scientific experiment and using them as vehicles for thinking about this proposition, i.e. the close affinity between digital sound art and the virtual, I speculated about other dimensions of perception that are not necessarily sensorial or even human. Having started from the European and North American avant-garde point, excuse me in sound, Cage, I.e. Cage, Zinakis, Tudor and so on. But also futurism, early experiments in computer art in Germany, NYC, LA, cybernetic serendipity in the UK, the famous exhibition, etc. And the Western philosophical and scientific anxieties that enabled them.
And then the realization that white middle class heterosexual, i.e. dominant anxieties about art, technology and the future do not account for any other type of subjectivity. and that, for example, Afro-diasporic subjects already live the estrangement and alienation that science fiction and the futurists envision. Influenced by thinkers such as Kojo Eshin, who says that thinking through and with sound and music gives you an insight into the temporal signature of your era, and his adventures on sound, art and Afrofuturism, especially his 1998 book, More Brilliant Than the Sun. Also by work from artists such as the Black Audio Film Collective and their seminal 1996 film,
Monofrofuturism, The Last Angel of History. Actually, I could share my screen again and show you some of that, I think, if that's okay, since we do have time. Okay, one sec. Trying to do something. Sorry if you've lost me for a minute. Okay, if we put this there. and this here and share my screen again
okay all right thanks for your patience improvising all the way okay improvising with a structure though Let it be known. Okay. If I share this again, you can see it. Yep. Okay. Co-jo-ession. No, that doesn't work. Maybe I'll show it like this, but you can still see it. Okay. And do I have...
I thought I heard it a bit. Has anyone seen history? Have people seen? Maybe you can give a thumbs up or something. Have people seen that? What is the consensus, Jacob, if you can see? No? So I didn't hear what you were asking, actually. Okay. Can you hear me okay?
There was a glitch again for me. I'm the only one. Okay, in the chat, at least two says yes. Another one finds it better. Okay. Sound is glitchy. Okay, let me, is that better now? I heard that. Ah, so it's better now. Yeah. All right, I'm just going to carry on because I'm trying to do too much and connecting a second screen and so on. I think the system is not so sophisticated. so I'm just I'm just going to carry if you can hear me now then then I can yeah you can hear me okay so I'm just going to carry on reading a little bit more rather than showing stuff and
then maybe maybe we can see some stuff if we have time in the end okay great so but I think some people in the chat say that they have seen the last angel of history and maybe are aware of Afrofuturism and Kojo Eshen and his book and so on. Afrofuturism, a break from the stereotypes of black music culture that tied to the primitive as opposed to the technological. A philosophical and aesthetic movement examining the effects of the African diaspora through technoculture and science fiction. So, drawing on after the book and through connections with Kojo Eshin's work, my approach to sound and unsound and so on, I started looking more into sonic fiction, which Kojo Eshin, of course, writes about in this book that I mentioned.
In turn, sonic fiction can be understood as the convergence of the organization of sound with a fictional system whose fragments gesture towards but fall short of the satisfactions of a narrative, according to Kojo Eshin. That which channels the alien unknown and sometimes all devouring unseen that lies beyond but has something significant to say about this world. It is what it is to me. An unconventional research method whose aim is to radicalize the speculative ghost in sound culture. involves mobilizing new levels of possibility space, invites concept manufacture, spawns new languages and demonstrates, as Eschen puts it, an extreme indifference towards the human.
Musicians, philosophers, artists and writers who engage with the realm of sonic fiction elicit the extremely experimental undercurrents of sonic investigation so that their work does not only reflect a sonic reality but produces it. This approach which bestows a power onto the text, the artwork, the music, or other entity, to leak into the real, to leak into the real, and to germinate it with affective worlds that might otherwise run parallel to it. Influential tools such as Afro-diasporic futurism, audio-virology, and more widely a concern for the complexities of rhythm might offer new means, excuse me or weapons for decolonizing disorienting and dissentering mainstream
western history theory and practice and proposing alternative realities through the audience group a research cell and art platform active since 2009 maybe steve already talked about it toby i'm sure we'll talk about even more so i won't bore you But you know that we did this book, Sound and Sound, which Jacob mentions in his abstract to the blurb to these seminars, where we looked further into these zones of unsound, audio-related phenomena in the wider vibrational spectrum, capable of offering insights into the unknown aspects of perception. um the term refers not only to what humans cannot hear but also to non-cognitive inhuman
phenomena connected to the unknown such as some of those that i already looked elsewhere before in my research like the hum hyperrhythmia and auditory hallucinations um i'm gonna jump a little bit further because i think there's like eight minutes left so i'm just I might skip a little bit ahead from the book and audit and say something about, I'm trying to choose from all the texts that I've brought together,
what is more, more, more, most interesting and relevant at this stage. Yeah, so I think, I think with, I think where I am, so after this book, through the book, I know it was a bit of an irregular way into it from the future, the present to the past, but that's intentional. The current project of polyphonic intelligence and looking to extend that further into its other dimensions, brings a lot of these things, I think, the idea of fugitivity, the idea of polyphony, polyvocality,
and the idea of irrationality, you know, the problematized, I guess it has a lot to do with this, with non normative vocalities that I mentioned before and kind of non human histories. What's been excluded from the archive, from the mainstream record, but what, whose ripples affect and challenge, and challenge the center. challenge the centre. I'm interested in how these kind of alternative, you know, activating these alternative narratives through the multiple automated musical, interpretive, channelling, unlocatable and machinic emissions of the voice can disturb these narratives of power.
To quote Philip Brophy, in its voiding of soloistic function, the voice expands its field of apparition, welcomes its others and maintains its post-human composition. In conclusion, a voice can assume almost any shape, sculpted both by human body and technology, but reducible to neither. In singing, in keening, in transitioning, in deep learning, in revivifying the dead, a voice cannot be said to belong to a body. It is never perfect or real. It is corrected, perfected, manipulated. it passes through a chain of software effects. It is an effect without a cause. A voice is not natural or authentic. It speaks through another's body, unhoused and ventriloquist.
And actually, I looked into various other examples, forgive me for all the coughing, of art of ventriloquizing, including using methods of you know drag queen techniques um but also other types of ventriloquy that i'm interested in um and i'm saying a voice is not that natural thing it speaks through another's body unhoused and ventriloquist it makes alliances across the killing divisions of nature, culture and technology, and of organism, language and machine, unveiling the incompleteness of knowledge.
A voice is a break, augmenting the alienness and inhumaneness of the other, and thus of the human as a category. And maybe if you want, as a finale, if you're still with me, I can try and show you the film. Is that okay? Even if it goes a minute or two over? Okay, great. Okay, bear with me one sec to bring it up. Amazingly, my voice has lasted. Who would have thought? Okay, if now I share my screen, hopefully it will be okay. Let's see. Can you see this?
Is that on purpose? So when I mute myself, there's no sound? That shouldn't be the case. OK, yeah. Um. um it worked until you uh muted just until i muted myself okay that's fine i i just won't mute myself but um yeah i just want to mute myself okay so play from there is this okay
Thank you. The sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the sound of the
I think it's a very difficult thing to do with the other. That's it. Over to you guys. Thank you so much, Eleni. Take a short break. Like, say, six minutes.
So, ten past. Good. Then see you back in six minutes and then we go for the presentations and discussion. Great. See you then. See you. See you. Thank you.
Good. So people are returning from this short break. There's been a lot of cheering in the chat about the video. So if there was a link you could share or anything. No, I'm afraid this isn't. I think Hara is saying something about it being at the No, that's probably the way I confused you by introducing it. And there's another film that is going to be launched for Theatrum Mundi, which is a kind of a performance, an improvised performance film. But this film was produced for the Audient exhibition we did at Arbeit Gallery last year in May 2019.
and it shows at festivals and it shows it shows when commissioned so someone needs to someone needs to ask for it to appear it's not available freely online although there is a two minute trailer I can send to people and share with you if you want to see it and I'd be very happy to let you know when it's good sometimes over the summer it was streaming um like so many other things for free um so yeah i'm more i'm more than happy to show it too otherwise the students should commission you not the students no never the students the art world the art world should commission it
for the world in itself. Good. So now we come to the student presentations. 10 minutes each, we have Irini, Lina, Sharon, Luca, and Nagata. And after that, we have Njue, James, and Shara. Also, Yuzi, as mentioned, should have been presenting, but is not present. I'll read out her question that she sent me. But let's take it in that order. So if we start with Irini. IRINI BASUDA- OK. I have a small keynote, nothing special, just for you to see something other than myself.
So screen. Okay. So going through the readings and the sound pieces that Eleni shared with us, I gathered some of the main threads that are interwoven with this sonic thinking, writing and sound making. And the first thread that I wanted to refer to is that of fugitivity. In specific dissonances one can find many words and descriptions of the act of fugitivity, not the state, but the act of fugitivity.
So quoting some of these, being a fugitive stands for being in a constant movement, running, being separate from settling, resisting categorization, experiencing invisibility, dispossession, homelessness, it also stands for queerness. Fugitive voices and fugitive sounds carry all these characteristics which actually derive from the violence of centuries of oppression and centuries of instrumentalization of the body, both human and unhuman, and centuries of producing docile bodies and I must admit that myself being a dance artist I struggle separating
voice and sound a voice and body a lot so these fugitive voices slash bodies are voices that resist and protest and live outside of traditional training and conditioning So again, quoting the authors quoting Fred Morton, open quote, study must itself become fugitive, evading the categories, structures, institutions, and orders of the state, end quote. And this is something, study becoming fugitive, that both specific dissonances and a sonic theory unsuitable for human consumption strongly suggest.
And in the latter, Sonic Fiction, the second thread I wanted to refer to, is brought forward as an alternative to traditional sound studies. Sonic Fiction is emerging in the spaces in between the actual and the possible in the what if spaces that welcome questions like, open quote, is this real or invented? Has it happened or is it about to happen?" End quote. Sonic fiction embraces the unknown, the unsound, even the inaccessible to our senses. And thinking through fiction, listening through fiction, making sound through fiction,
is suggested to be a current equivalent to thinking the truth. as fiction reveals realities and possibilities that might be beyond the narrow human perception. And then the third thread I wanted to refer to is that of the chorus. The chorus, the way we encounter it in Wayward Life's beautiful experiments, as the headless group that acts collectively. And it is, I think, interesting to refer to the ancient Greek chorus in Greek tragedies, where the chorus was coming as an intermission, as the interlude of the play between the main acts of the tragedy.
And it was coming to express the collective agreement or disagreement to the main character's actions. And also the fugitives that we talked about earlier could also be seen as a chorus, I think, since they are numerous, they are the many, but still remain vulnerable to the power of the one. The chorus is also a feminist expression. In the case of the Lamenters, the female chorus, the unison of the black-dressed old women, vocalize and embody death, the unsound.
And therefore they are emerging within a sonic fiction because they are emerging in between the earthly and the unearthly, the actual and the possible. And interestingly enough, while I was reading and thinking about these concepts, I couldn't help myself by focusing on the buzz of a fly that was disturbing me. It is a particular fly that has been in my house since Wednesday, I think. And despite my efforts to drive it out, it is still here. And, you know, constantly moving, someone could stay restless, unsettled, in a constant escape from my hands choreography.
And the fly seems to have all the attributes of the fugitive. And, you know, being in a lockdown with the fly I tend to see the fly as the fugitive and so this fly and actually her buzz, her sound is challenging me on a personal level because it is challenging my western male anthropocentric impulse to actually kill it. I haven't done, I haven't killed it so far but at the same time haven't I? Thinking of the buzz, isn't it something that it is already dead to my ears?
Isn't it something that I know from experience that even if I don't kill her, someone else will, someone, yeah, unethical enough will do it for me. So isn't it almost like listening to the buzz and at the same time listening to the ensemble, the silence after the fly's death. And this way the fly is not only fugitive but it's also becoming a lamenter, a female voice, because fly in Greek is also a female noun. So I was thinking of the fly as a female vocalizing death. So yes, my final thought and I guess question is whether
these fugitive voices are also lamenting voices, mourning voices, and if it is always death of some sort that these voices are escaping from and at the same time augmenting. Yes, that's all. Thank you so much, Sireni. Maybe Elinne, you want a quick response to that? No, I think I want to hear, I want to, I want to go on if that's okay and then come back and have, is that okay? Is that how? Totally, I was just if there was something immediately. Good, then we go to Lina. If she's there.
Well, she doesn't seem to be in the list. Okay. Then we can come to Sharon. Hi. Okay, so I'm very new to the whole new center seminars and I was really sort of initially at a loss as to what to present today. But if you'll indulge me, I'd like to show a work of mine from a few years ago that I think resonates with a lot of the concepts that were explored in the reading material given by Eleni. So just a bit of a preamble, the
The work is a sonic sculpture that engages with a form of forensic listening to a sonic artefact. And in this case, the artefact is a seashell, specifically the very symbolic conch. And emerging from this shell is a narrative soundscape comprised of field recordings, feedback loops, and a chorus that consists of my own voice and that of a digital surrogate at various stages of machine learning. And the main impetus behind the sculpture, which I made in 2017 was after I read a text by A.L. Weizmann describing forenses in Roman times as similar to prosopopeia.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Maybe the Greek speakers can correct me there. But it's a speech act in which an abstract thing is personified or where objects, cities, rivers or states are brought to life as a form of evidence by the power of an oral demonstration and then these objects were then tried, convicted and sometimes sentenced. So my provocation in showing the work now is I guess in relation to the readings and it's kind of more related to Hartman's Critical Fabulation which I've only just recently started that is more relational or material what would that archive look like
um so the piece i'm going to show is called at the threshold um my internet just went am i back Okay. And so you're the first people to see it in this iteration, which is an interactive stereo WebGL project. So I'm going to run it through my browser and would recommend putting headphones on if you have them handy. But as a side note, the original version of the work is is an ambisonic sound object that was created in the Unity game engine. So it exists as like a standalone piece of software that you have to download and install,
but the processing was too heavy to show that over this connection. So, and then also I've mostly been performing this live over the years. the years. So this is kind of my attempt at, I guess, making it a bit more accessible. So I'll share my screen now. The work lasts, it's about seven minutes, so you can take it easy for the next while. Hopefully it'll run smoothly. So I'll just share my screen.
An acoustical object of geometry. A primitive sculpture. A primal trumpet. A symbol of speech. Let him be chief. A symbol of hearing. Of authority. A delicate and powerful thing. Outside in, inside out, a mobius curve, a void of inner and outer, a virtual cavity, a suit of armour.
Life diffuses through the surface, a subsurface scattering, a vortex of ellipses and embryonic whirls, inner hollows and passageways, continuous coiling canals, labyrinthine structures, an alcove, a cave, an acoustic anomaly. Its interior creates resonances, a sound imprisoned. What do you expect to hear when you hold a seashell to your ear? For it to sing? To speak?
I've read of an 18th century poet who believed that the memory of the The natural world is hell within the curves of a shell. A book in natural form that tells of the great waters of the first and last deluge. Searching for traces by virtue of listening.
Sonic traces of ancestral hearing, of an authoritarian sounding. A succession through space and time. Listening to a sonorous archipelago. Washed up. on shore. I hope that showed okay.
All right, good. That was it. Thank you so much. Good. Thank you. Then let's say go to Luca. Yeah, let me share my screen. Mine is very brief and preliminary and also visually unimpressive compared to the last ones. Something that struck me in this text, that it was not so much the main focus, but it was approach in the text and I don't think it was the most interesting part, I think the conceptual part and the theoretical part was way more interesting for me at least, but I wanted to
focus on these issues from the artist's perspective in a very practical sense of materials and techniques and which is somewhat reducive but I don't know, it was very short. So I, and for me, it was a very interesting position to be located at, let's say as an artist on these topics. So I'll just read the text. The words are just remember. So, okay. In the first text, a sonic theory is suitable for human consumption. When discussing a writer's ability to come up with what would really happen or true fictions, the author writes that it is not a matter of forcing reality to feed certain linguistic structures, but rather of elements of writing and practice
that are only retrospective in the student's theory, history or reality, tap into an inexpressible real. In the other texts, specific dissonances, the authors ask what will be involved in creating within the context of dispossession and fugitivity as a line of flight from normative impositions amplifying noise and disorder to produce disturbances and ruptures. Later, artist Samson Young's question of how to compose without reproducing power structures inherent in traditional music and sonic knowledge, suggests formulating a new silence and a new resonance, with dissonance as a site of practice. This was pointing to an artistic position that, from the artist's perspective, would be more of an unsound artist rather than a sound artist.
Someone whose materials at the time of making would not be not yet sound, but something that has been barely audible to date, silence, noise and sound. And whose methods, techniques and goals would perhaps also be radically different. Methods for working in this position are sketching the stacks, sound fiction, waywardness and others, polyphony can be added there. But they remain open to new and multiple possibilities that can realize the redistribution of who and what can hear and be heard. hood. Sorry. Yeah, it's just that it's very, very short. But basically think about this, to me, it strikes it as a bit of difference from, let's say, traditional sound artists or sound art position of in relation to materials and making and practice. Maybe not, maybe
this distinction is not very useful, but I was just speculating maybe. You can say that every creation is future-oriented either way, but I thought this was a bit of a shift from the traditional position of a sound artist to maybe an unsound artist. So yeah, that's it. Thank you. Thank you, Luca. Good questions. The last of the presenters would be Agatha. Hi. So I've just brought some reflections about our reading material that I really enjoyed reading. So, in the reading material we learn how through the fugitive and cross-cultural potential of sound art and deep listening,
we can try to detour Western approaches to time, sound and history. Looking for the unknowing and digging into the multitude of cultural perspectives are crucial to have a chance to hear other voices. Through different lives of sound that often are connected with space and memory, we can better understand past, present and future. The text's specific dissonances, a geopolitics of frequency written by Al-Star Cameron and Eleni Kanyadu, reflects on the conditions of temporality and futurity, as well as the necessity of constant redefinition of those conditions regarding the unheard voices. I quote, it is a matter of measuring the precise thresholds of audibility through which past
and present conditions and experiences of dispossession and invisibility might be heard and alternatives to the dominant culture be given voice. The text highlights the significance of including different localities starting from the peripheries process of approaching cultural vibration of sound. To better grasp the fugitive characteristic of the sound, we should approach it through unlearning and unknowing. And there is another quote. Fugitive thinking that attaches itself to the refuge of the collective mass is dedicated to unknowing and unlearning, to disturbing the silence and professionalism of the rational subject and to making it dark. The Lenny's text, a sonic theory unsuitable for human consumption,
reflects on counterfactual and counterfictional thinking in the sonic fiction and theory fiction. Things that we do not take as granted can bring us the new understandings and help with our learning processes. Exploring the hidden dimension between what we cannot accept as a fact and the fiction is meaningful. According to the theory of fiction, our common scientific facts also have fictive potential. I would like to compare the theory of fiction and the famous phrase of chaos magic, nothing is true, everything is permitted. I think we can find some similarities between these two fields of thoughts. Whereas the writing of Sadia Hartman, the course opens the way
opens the way and also the first chapter of Mikhail Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky's polyphonic novel and its treatment in critical literature shows us a perspective where the sound emerges into voice. In the context of presented writings, it is essential to imply into the listening practices a sense of empathy. All presented writings encourage us to stay open for the new experiences, even when we might think those experiences are impossible. And also they encourage us to direct this kind of openness to the other. Nettris Gas Kings in Techno-Bernacular Creativity and Innovation across the African diaspora and Global South wrote that technologies are not
not mere tools that we use, but active forces in the world. And this is something that we can reflect on thinking about sound as technology and about strategies to subvert it, starting from the basic instruments that are our vocal chords. Sound is the common and powerful tool that can be used in an unprofessional and intuitive way for the personal and socio-political empowerment. Net Risk Gaskins wrote also, African-American artists combine or subvert existing knowledge systems in order to invent new ways of using, creating and performing with technology. This one helps enable practitioners to reclaim different levels of technological agency.
There are particular ideas that I find very interesting among the readings. One of the ideas concerns the Martiniquean philosopher, Edouard Glissant, claimed the right to opacity, making it dark and opaque, is situated somewhere in the fugitive vibration in between fact and fiction, and it can wider our perspective. I also would like to quote the text, this transparency of Claire Burchell, explaining what hides behind the transparency. The promise that light will dissipate ignorance, irrationality, abuses of power, inequality and crisis
has been predominantly co-opted and repurposed in the 21st century by framings that seek to rationalize and optimize commerce and labor, promote free market flows out of capital, normalize forms of governmentality that outsource oversight to citizens while subjecting them to mass surveillance, confuse the social economic value of open data and prioritize professional popular culture and social media that offer empty empowerment over real agency. In my opinion in the text of Sajija Hartman, we also hear a claim for the right to be not understood or not to be translated.
In the meaning, please don't explain my words with your words and don't try to analyze every syllable. I quote, the song lines, the riotous refrains, the street corner compositions are hard to explain or reduce to one thing. Like a maternal song that makes you and marks you, yet is untranslatable. Another idea that I find interesting is filling the community inside the circle. This motif appears in Chorus Opens the Way and in Wayward Lives, beautiful experiments. We understand the energy of geometry subcutaneously.
The circle has a strong association with rituals. It has mediational powers. It isolates from the outside, protects but also provides a safe bridge. Hartmann writes, This story is told from inside the circle. I think it's very alluring to be part of, to be part or to create circular communities and engage in the group through the circle. Almost as it would be easier to feel, lament, communicate through the emanation of this geometrical shape in the group, through the group. I also would like to focus on the expression The tyranny of ocularocentrism, used by Eleni in her text.
I'm not arguing the dominant and privileged position of the vision while we experience the world, but I think that when we say that we live in the tyranny of ocularocentrism, the word tyranny will only excuse our laziness to discover reality or unreality with other senses. we have many tools and capacities to explore different worlds, for example through sound. And as a short anecdote, I would like to refer to my recent coronavirus experience. I didn't have almost any symptoms, but I've lost my smell. And after five days of not smelling, I realized that I react synesthetic to my environment and that I imagine different smells.
In fact, it was very intense and beautiful experience. For a week, I wasn't focused on my sight, but on the smell. And if only we put a little effort, we could use more our senses. In short conclusion, we can or should improvise in sound as well in thinking about the sound to, as Bell Hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress, creatively invent ways to cross borders. Okay, this will be the presentation. Thank you so much, Agasa. We have three responders, Njue, James, and Chara. So let's start with Njue.
Thank you so much for your presentations. I've seen Afrofuturism being a lot. And I think one thing that Afrofuturism doesn't do is to know that maybe blackness as allochronic that is past, present and future are like lived all together simultaneously at the same time. Fokodo, he covered Dr. Otagon, Dr. Okta, Okta, the ecologist for female voices in hip-hop,
comparing the female voice in the album and how it's recorded through male voice, comparing it to maybe other female voices of chorus in recorded stuff that came out maybe in 1996, the year the album came out. Those Bahamadiya collage album, and also that's the same year the Fugies broke up with Lauren Hill taking a solo career. The voices of female in hip-hop are like kept in a distance somehow through dominating racism of misogyny and sexism.
I'm thinking how the female chorus in hip hop lingers and persist. It is recorded as a sonic art fact and maybe an alternative way of thinking or imagining can be termed as Afrofuturism if technology and I don't know, like, fugability, like, through Sadia Hartmann's suggestion in 87. And the female voice, like, somehow it finds a space in a journey towards an imperial future
or futures. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, Njui. We go to James. Hey, thank you for the really fascinating presentations, Eleni and everyone else. I've got some quite scattered thoughts to share, so if you excuse, they're probably not as lucid as some of the others. So I was just thinking about sort of the sort of social function, perhaps, of lamentation and how it exists perhaps in some cultures more obviously than others. and some there's absence in particular like the sort of divide between Protestant and Catholic
Europe where um yeah you have like very sort of um overt sort of um traditions to celebrate the dead and things and in Catholic Europe and then sort of absence of it in Protestant places um so I was kind of thinking about this in like um in the sort of like way that maybe someone like Bataille talked about the kind of the accursed share and the kind of like burning of like of energy and thinking about how like maybe there's this commonality between between like between like the expense of energy for the dead in lamentation and like literally like a Viking like funeral pyre so like in so in terms of like sacrificing like excess
um yeah excess sort of caloric energy there's some i don't know just thought uh random idea um so where what's the sort of social like what's missing when you don't like um like kind of um like sublimate this kind of like um energy for the dead is there is it sort of popping up somewhere else or so is there a repression happening um um so yeah i quite liked the lamentation discussion and yeah Sharon I really loved your piece and I was just wondering perhaps I noticed the phrase that popped up in it which was I was wondering with the sonorous archipelago was it like inspired by sort of Francois Bonnet and his work and then yeah like Agatha with when you're sort of talking
about ocular centrism um um it got me thinking also as well about like this idea of like the cartesian self and how um it's often like discussed as like your your sort of consciousness or your soul is sort of located behind the eyes but i was thinking about how that's like actually the same places between the ears but for some reason we kind of um in our discussion of the classic yeah Cartesian self it's um it's almost arbitrary that like it it's distinguished from like the sensory sort of um input of the whole body um by being here but um but that's like just as much behind behind the eyes as it is between the ears so yeah um yeah three very random thoughts but that's
what I thought. Thanks. Good James. And the last one, Chara. Hello from me. Thanks everyone for your contributions. I think that the presentations and of course the presentations that we've seen today, all of the made associations with personal readings of the readings we had to make. So somehow this helps me to bridge my thinking about sonic fiction and the ways it creates a method of both making history
and the ways it triggers the raptures of knowledge that we find in everything we research. So I will try to focus on making a point towards the way in which artworks and artistic experimentation can help us to do what sonic fiction attempts to do, to tell the untold that remains outside of theory. So I think I've seen it in the contributions we had today too, in everyone's contributions, and that was really fruitful, I think. And this is very, very challenging in the way it registers
the experience and the processes and whatever consists as a consciousness in certain moments of time. So it reminds me a little bit of Raymond Williams' structure of feeling, which is a concept related to the social experience and the processes that take part in this formation of the social experience of a population and the ways in which it reaches a level of consciousness in certain moments of time. So I believe that in that way, sonic fiction is a very fruitful
way to practice history or to research a temporality through critiquing what is at stake. and at the same time through practicing it. And I think I've seen it in everyone's contributions that may open up the dialogue about the dynamics of artworks and how operational are these dynamics to the ways in which we discuss about what remains undervalued in reality, what remains out of our consciousness, So yes, I think my comment lays there in the ways in which we can do research on temporality
in the real differently and the ways in which actual practice and sonic fiction is a very fruitful part into that. I can tell the untold. So I think that's my contribution. Thank you, Jara. Before I forget, I also should read out Jussi's questions. So she prepared for presenting on the text of sonic theory and suitable for human consumption today and sent me some of the questions that was coming to her mind. So they are, I'll just read them out. The article, in a nutshell, stresses
the non-anthropocentric quality and potential of the sonic realm. Elena Econiato specifically argues for a definition shift from sonic studies to sonic fiction, a concept that provides better understanding of the space in between the known, the real, and the unreal. I wonder if she could elaborate on how she puts this into practice, or in creating audio work when sound cannot be perceived by humans audibly. I find it difficult to grasp the idea of fiction. I get the theoretical part, but if sonic fiction is not interested in people, how is it going to go about?
It feels a bit existential to me. Its theorization is depending on writing, which is another anthropocentric realm. So that was her questions. I think we would like to invite Eleni to respond to some of the many questions. Yes, I'll try. Thank you so much for your presentations and your responses. They were brilliant, really, really interesting to hear. I'm really honored that you took the time to put these together and to think about these things. There's a lot, I'd rather we have some sort of conversation rather than me just spending the rest of the time
talking at you, but maybe just to pull some threads or just to address some of the things that were said in relation to death, for example, Irini started, mentioned, I think it was a question, is death always relevant to fugitivity? And I think the answer is yes. Death is relevant in all these examples and in all these ways of looking into the fugitive, not only from me, but also from Sadia Hartman, of course, and Fred Moten.
I'll begin with my take. What should I say about it? I mean, it's really in Black Study, and not Black Study is Black Study, which is different. Clearly, Hartman talks about the aftermath of slavery. So, of course, death is at the very beginning of fugitivity. It's, you know, the afterlife of slavery is kind of shadowed by death. Not only the death of slavery, the death of the fate of the slaves, which was death, but also the afterlife of it which is what happens to the blackness today so she talks of course you
know about the i mean very recently we've been we've been again through these examples you know premature death incarceration impoverishment no access to health education life chances and so on So death is always enveloping fugitivity. And I think for Hartman and for Moten, it's about making way within that context. And it's about, you know, death awaits you. And you know that, I mean, very clearly Hartman also says, like, I was always aware that as a black person, there's more chances of me dying actually, finding or meeting my death, accidentally meeting, accidentally meeting my death prematurely.
But also because of this dispossession and alienation and living with it, that ontology. But they're not Afro-pessimists. So the way out of it is through, they both talk about joy and tumultuousness. And they talk about these examples, you know, and loudness, and they talk about these examples of life finding a way out of death, moving towards and against death simultaneously, which I think is really, really interesting. You know, for Fred Moten, this is the only way of believing into this other world.
Believing the world means believing in this other world that is in this world, which you might be able to access. since you've not been given access into this world. And Afrofuturism also, someone else talked about it, relates to that, you know, to this finding a way out of no way approach and empowering narratives, different types of narratives, the rewriting of history, which is what sonic fiction is about. For me, it relates with the female condition very much in relation to the examples that I use.
The scolds bridle that I mentioned, the silencing of the female voice, the literal, it is a kind of death. So not to have a voice is also a kind of death. So there's literal death, there's metaphorical death, there's metaphysical death and silencing in many ways. But there's also, again, I'm interested in a more empowering way. And maybe I would position myself more closely to cyber feminism than feminism in relation to this access to death that women have always been known for.
in ancient and modern times, you know, witchcraft or the lamenters, lamenting is actually, was perceived as a genuine threat to the social order. And both in ancient Greece and in more modern times was outlawed. So in the city, in Athens, you could not lament. Lamenting had to take place outside the city because it was irrational. It was, it cannot be, you know, what the fear of what cannot be contained also it's kind of a dynamic relationship to death the special access to death that the lamenter has which i mentioned in my piece in the lament i don't know if you heard the audio piece and also in the text which comes from the text in the book and sound undead um is to do with this uh special access of the female voice with the to the to
this other world and whatever that may be whether it's the literal kind of afterlife and you know the the the other world after after you die which is supposed to grant the lament is supposed to grant special privileges access and and and in fact it's very important to sing the lamented to sing the dead um it's afterlife in order to make sure that they that they get there but they safely can get there so it kind of opens up this other dimension and voice literally opens up um this other dimension um and also to this other side of sound that we are trying to get to like i suppose with these seminars into which is also the other side of the of the real like what
what else is there outside immediate perception, which is, you know, and it has a lot to do with, so it has a lot to do with death. Anne Carson, I really like this quote that Anne Carson asks, she asks, why does tragedy exist? And then she answers, because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you're full of grief. so somebody mentioned uh i think a few of you mentioned it's so interesting in this context of of um of covid to talk about this black lives matter of course that i mentioned earlier and covid and this kind of um this uh this immediate you know grieving of our times in so many ways
this is this this this reality luckily this is coming after the u.s election this seminar because it would have been darker if it was before and definitely even more darker had there been different results to that election so I'm quite on a cheerful mood today I would be much more I would be grieving much more if it wasn't for this but you know we are full of grief we are full of rage clearly being fugitive being a minority coming from a perspective of the other means also that, means special relationship to death for good or for bad, means silence and also
means grief and it means being kind of, you know, sacrificed to this tragic order. Hartman says that, you know, the chorus lives it for you, they enact it for you, and Carthens is the same. And this is unwanted, of course, but the rationalist kind of Western culture all the way from this European favoring of logocentrism, logic, rationality, speech, that is afraid of and tries to suppress everything else that is not reflected or cannot be contained in it. I don't know if really that kind of answers a little bit what you said, but I was also trying to touch on some of the other questions.
Feel free to come in at any point. I really liked this UFO shell that we saw. I'm sorry, I forgot the name of the artist who made it and I don't know if I can see her. oh hi Sharon hi Sharon yes thank you for this that was um that was really brilliant I my unfortunately my headphones weren't working because of all this playing around with where the sound source comes from so uh I'm sure it was even that I really really like the sound it reminded me of it was this kind of otherworldly shell seashell reminded me of the the short story by JG Ballard and I was trying to google it and search it while it was showing
because I can't remember the title of it um is it for a million sands what was it what is it for a million sands for a million sons is it I don't think so it's a story where the with the protagonist finds a seashell um through a walk on the beach and puts it against his ear and can hear all the sounds that ever were. Do you know this story? I think it's either Vermilion Sounds or The Voices of Time, maybe. I think it's neither, but I'm going to find it. It's really relevant to my work, this story,
so I should remember the name. But it really, you know, it's kind of this holding of all of sound and its prehistory, which I think I'm interested also through what I'm saying about the voice and lamentation and so on. what exists outside the dominant records um you know that's why i draw in i draw on on on heart when i'm interested in her and how she treats the archive and the scraps of the archive and she's trying to um to give a different historical perspective and enable and and and and and enable us to listen to these anonymous voices that have been lost in time um so you know what's not been catalogued what's not been given um a proper place which is a lot
it's a lot that exists outside history right um so your piece really reminded me reminded me of this um i really liked what agatha said about technologies as active forces and how sound relates to that i liked uh all of your presentation was fantastic i want to i want to listen to it again but apparently now i have access to all the new center stuff and i can um thank you for that a lot of a lot of thought went into that i really appreciated it um and i liked what you said about don't try to translate me through hartman you know and it's it's precisely you know i touched on that as well this kind of fact um the domination of interpretation and of course a speech as a voice
as speech and language and therefore, you know, there's some kind of logical explanation and what Deleuze and Gotti criticise as this kind of continuous, you know, neurosis of humanity with interpretation. And of course, who is interpreted, whose voice is missing in relation to fugitivities is also very, very important. And that's why Hartman says, don't interpret me anymore you know the position that you hold as a minor subject or as an object because fred moten says that the history of uh of slavery is the of the history of black people is this proof that objects do can and do resist um and i i look at
females and machines in relation to each other and their connections with each other in that same vein as well. And I think that's where there is a connection between all these three threads. And therefore, you know, not wanting to be interpreted. The other piece that I wrote for Unsound and Dead was about the sirens and the siren song. And in that I also, I'm interested in this relationship you know the siren the siren song is is is um is deadly so odysseus and his ulysses as he's known and his men you block their ears or he doesn't block his ears he
actually wants access to this to this uh you know deadly song but without risking his death um so i'm also interested in this relationship between you know trying to contain death trying men, white rational subjects, trying to contain death or avoid it, and danger and falling, and women kind of facing it head on, you know, the lamenter is facing death head on, the siren is death, but death is also knowledge, the whole of knowledge in fact, says Homer, right, so to hear that song is to die, but it's also to access everything that ever was on this side of this, you know, the abyss, fall into the abyss, you die, but you get access to the beyond,
you know, which men won, which men in the story won risk. And I'm interested in this kind of death trap and delight of the, you know, of the, of the inhuman. And maybe one more thing before I going to invite you to also say some some things um what happens when you don't lament i think james is it james who said to us who asked that what happened yeah what happens when you if you're from a culture that doesn't lament uh where does this energy go um i think that's a really good and interesting question um through my project polyphonic intelligence one of the performers
who lamented, but was AGF, the poem producer, and she is German, and she said to me, Eleni, that was fascinating, because we don't lament, we're German, we don't lament, there's no, you know, it's a very rational addressing of death, you know, you die, you go over there with the rest of them, the living continue, you know, it's kind of very, very contained in a different way and it's considered hysterical and irrational and crazy and she said that chance that was given to her to do it that it was okay that was allowed um to do it um you may you know gave her another kind of um insight into ways because she's also an activist and she's well-known uh feminist um and
And she was lamenting about, you know, she laments all the time through her work differently, but now she's lamenting actually by improvising. And she said that this platform, being given this platform felt super empowering. But it's not about, the point is not about lamenting, I think, because going back to Anne Carson, going back to Zidia Hartman's idea of chorus, um it's about putting that onto you know it's about letting the chorus is about letting the tragic chorus is about letting the lamenters leave live live it out perform it enact it for you you kind of you know they frame it for you and it's a safe it's a safe way of grieving
in a way without having to experience it um so i'm interested in why those technologies and you know um because i was i was i was thinking about the outsourcing of lamenting of lamentation to technology and what would happen if you know a is such a precisely because it's such a heavily kind of ritualistic very very emotional human centric um thing and what happens when when you outsource it to to AI so I think you know you don't have to lament someone else will do it for you this is exactly the point it's also why I was interested in ventriloquism yeah
I don't know if anyone wants to come in at this I can talk and talk and talk but I think maybe someone else can come in I had a kind of a question on on the difference but if you if you know the difference surely you you know it better than me difference between lamenting and keening and and the perspectives on it and maybe you can elaborate a bit about it um i don't i mean this is the risk of writing so much and thinking so much about the lament you are then approached as the expert agf did the same like you're the expert tell me am i doing this right? Am I lamenting right in the right way? I think it's, you know, we had an Irish keener in the polyphonic intelligence project, and she was keening, and I think it's
just another expression of the same thing through another culture, which is given another name, but I think it's pretty, I can see that I understand it as the same thing. What's interesting about the Greek lament and I think that is probably the same in other cultures but I'm not sure um is that it also doesn't only have to do with human death or with the death of a human um and maybe that's why I was interested in its kind of um quotidian state you know and these kind of times of lamentation and through polyphonic intelligence like what would happen you know where do we place this like I said to James you know where do we where do we place and enacted in order to take off that energy and that burden.
And so you have lamenters in like funfares as entertainers, you have, you know, and they just sing, they're like singers, they're not only in the context of a funeral, or you have lamenting about lost love or lamenting about being occupied by another country and war and or immigration and all kinds of things. So I think I'm not sure. I mean, that's a good question, because I'm not thinking is keening only about death. I don't be a difference. I have to ask our Irish. Yeah, no, it's Irish. And what I kind of understood it, I've only encountered very briefly, is that you always keep for something else than so you invite the keeners to to keen for for for it could be a death or a bad situation or something.
yeah you want to cope with but someone else is keening for for you so you're not going into to that grief thing yourself through the keening but you invite the keeners in yeah yeah yeah and what exactly exactly and what's interesting is and i wrote about this in the in the piece of element is that although it's a professional context like you say where it's a paid relationship and you know they go and do do this wherever needed it's something more than this it's always something more than this um and to witness it is also super powerful and incredible because it you know it's not like uh even they might not know the dead person um at all and and yet the way they will
engage with their lives and the way they will talk about the way they will it is um is emotionally invested because it's considered as this special role that without it you know it's not going to go well um it's not it's not complete there's no completion so it's a it's it's a hugely important and that's why a lamenter cannot be interrupted and a woman's voice that cannot be interrupted it was such a rare thing still is probably but definitely back then it was such a rare thing hence they would veer off completely the death and talk about other things um because they had the chance to which i find interesting fully automated luxury keening yes absolutely exactly
does someone who haven't said anything uh sit and and and have some some comments or questions Sure, yes, actually I have a brief question for Eleni, drawing on things that also Irini mentioned in her presentation. I'm wondering what, if any, role the body and dance plays in the way you think about lamenting and grief, particularly what I think I was thinking of what Irini brought up about dance, but also in the Hartman excerpt you shared with us, she mentions the etymology of the chorus as being danced within an enclosure and I think also that the gendering of things like the sort of witch or haunting that you brought up also have maybe
physical counterparts like the gendering of like hysteria historically and that being a very like convulsive thing that has maybe auditory effects but also a strong physical component so maybe you could just tell us a little more about that. Did you want, I mean, Irini is the dancer and I'd very much like to hear from her because she engaged with this on a very personal level, which I thought was interesting and through her own practice. I don't know if Irini, you want to go first. I mean, what I'm thinking is that there is a very specific choreography in the process of lamentation, the body postures, the gestures, you know, lifting the arms towards the sky,
beating the head with the arms. And yes, there is a coordination and I think that this gives the ritual essence to the whole thing. Because this is something that they know by heart and they repeat it every time and they are coordinated without preparing anything. And they all act in the unison. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. I was, yeah, absolutely. I think, I mean, the body is so relevant because for Moten, the whole idea of this collective of collectivity
is precisely against the Kantian idea of a self that, you know, the individual of the, you know, this very Western idea of a unit. And Morten says it's so dangerous because it creates subjects that own other subjects, that own objects, that own things, you know, hence slavery can happen, that own other bodies, bodies that own other bodies, that own other things, our relationship to animals, our relationship to machines and so on becomes hugely problematic from that standpoint of the self and of the one body. And he says, I completely disregard the idea of myself, of me as a self, and can only ever engage with it as a sea of bodies, as flesh alongside.
And he's riffing of Horton Spiller as well in that regard. So the bodies is really important. Mark Fisher also talks about this idea of joys and bodies and joys, people writing about the club and raves and so on. I was thinking of Mark Fisher, who wrote also about raves becoming illegal and dance and club culture being demonized in this country, in Britain, because it's a euphoric practice of collective joy and therefore endangers the neoliberalist machine, you know, and its constant effort to block joy and to block euphoria. And Fred Morton says that, you know, there's the outlawing of bodies
getting together in one's black bodies, getting to too many black bodies, more than two, in fact, more than one. Yes, I think two and over and above in the States, up until very recent times because you know um it's much much later um post-slavery because when you get so many bodies in a space together then you really of course you know something might happen they might talk about the revolution they might talk about you know not not liking the the situation so there is a constant effort and i think dance very much relates to it but corporeality physicality very much related to categorize and block uh individualize um suppress silence and so on the body um and i'm interested in all these other practices that
resist that um you know like dance for example um the the the the improvisation i showed a quick slide that we did at Chibon Davies Studios recently was also with a dancer where we kind of, you know, I was interested in how a body laments without talking. So how does a dancer lament? Of course a dancer can also talk and or make sounds. But I was interested in the movement of this body in the space and this is the film that, or the performance where that's going to become an edited video for the Teatro Monde that I mentioned before. But the other thing about
this is that there is a kind of binary opposition between logocentrism and logocentric accounts, you know, going back to the kind of the criticism from the Greeks that the voice equals speech and so on, to voice studies, modern voice studies, and Adriana Cavarero, who I mentioned before, and the corporeal kind of privileging of the voice that, for example, Cavarero does. And I think that's where I veer off both, and I'm interested in something that is kind of maybe in between or beyond. Because there's also, I mean, first of all, we have been through this
before about binary oppositions being problematic, and mind and body being looked at separate entities. And we have problematized this for a long time now, this is not new, so I'm not planning on going back to it and kind of reinforcing it um but also because um the body is also considered to be you know like cabarrero looks at the voice as coming as a kind of essentially fleshy and coming from within that body and being rooted into it and i'm not interested in that because you know my question is where does it really come from where you have something like a lamentation where does this which which is you know any kind of oral ritual that reaches a point
where you don't know what the hell is going on really and where it's coming from and where it's completely alien and bizarre and strange and um it's left language behind but it's also left body behind altogether it feels like um you know and that's i was i was so i was interested in this relationship between machines and humans as in a voice that kind of goes from through different entities and even doesn't require any bodies you know I don't know if that kind of gives you something to work with you know kind of skeptical of any notion of pre-existing structure I guess is what I'm trying to say. We have five more questions so one or two short questions.
Maybe, I mean, maybe we should, maybe we should also address very quickly the question of the person who couldn't be here and send her a question. I will just post it in the chat. Questions in. I mean, there's too much to unpack there in five minutes, but I think there is a misunderstanding, effectively, of what leaving the human behind means. you know sonic fiction where Kojo Eshin says that sonic that's on a fiction leaves the human behind as a treacherous and dangerous category it's talking about the pre-existing definitions of the human that we have to abide by and we have to live by that of course are in place in order to
exclude some other entities and some other you know whether they're people or not from the category, you know, the subhuman. So, well, you know, as soon as you have a category like the human, you think about who doesn't kind of make it through, right? And women didn't make it through and black people didn't make it through, people of colour and, you know, machines and animals and so on. So I think this is why, this is where that separation lies and, you know, why it's not at all existential um because existential is also very dangerously human you know it's it it assumes that what i said before that there are pre-existing categories to which you either belong or are
excluded from and of course that's why we have to leave it completely behind it's not um a useful category unless you're clearly very obviously directly in it and it's for you. And fiction of course the relationship to fit for Kojo, you know in that book fiction is all the other stuff that is not included in the... again what is he doing? I mean I mean, he's living at a time back in the 90s when he writes it, where, you know, you read the NME and you read all this kind of British music press. And it's very homogenous and it's very much about white guys with their guitars and indie music and so on.
And, you know, it's the exclusion of black music or black music is soulful. And it's about and it's it's actually, you know, about nature. is again this this kind of you know artificial artificiality culture um technology being white things white male things and uh everything else like females black black people and so on being natural and in touch with some kind of you know earthly earthly thing and he's resisting that and he's looking at all the paraphernalia he's looking at the sleeve notes and the records he's um he you he's kind of zooming in and through the micro stories that are told and hence fiction comes in
and I think of course hyperstition and we don't have time to go into that comes you know sonic fiction is a subspecies as code nine says of hyperstition which is where reality where you you know, culture and cultural artifacts. And, you know, that's why I've quoted Videodrome there in Perception. You will call films, songs, music, dance, whatever else that is considered to be unreal, fictional, imaginary, bleeds through and into the real and affects it. Doesn't that also then in the end, like have that effect that the white dude with the guitar oasis or whatever, is a fiction in itself
and get recognized as that. Yeah. On a hopefully equal level. Precisely, precisely. But fiction has good connotations, mainly, in this approach in sonic fiction, precisely because it enables this other side of the real, right? It kind of allows that to emerge and it activates it. So it's the different, the alternative. Essentially, everything that I've talked about today and everything, I'm sure in these other seminars as well, it comes down to the same thing. What else is there? What are the other narratives? Probably, Jacob, that's why you were interested in this whole thing. What other realities, what other perceptions, what other stories can be told?
Yeah. maybe that's a good finale right there so yeah last sentence or should we just keep that good then I will thank you very very much for joining us today it has been really a pleasure a lot of thought material to digest for the next week thank you thank you so much It's been a pleasure. It's been really great for me to sit and think about all of these things in order to tell them to you. And it's really great to hear your thoughts. And thank you for making the effort for that. I really kind of want to be part of the rest of this series now.
I want to come back and see what else is going to happen. Thank you, Jacob, for inviting me. Thanks very much for putting this together. That's a really great thing. Yeah, thank you so much. It's my pleasure. And also the presenters and responders. That was also really good. Brilliant. Thank you all. Thanks very much. Thank you. Ciao. Thank you, guys. Bye. Take care.