Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit KREIS RHYTHMUS RITUAL

Thank you. Good morning. The first time we will be in the Kreis, Rhythmus und Ritual. The next one will be the result. We will see five films,

which have to do with these three concepts. Ultraviolet or ultraviolet Dario Schwarzstein aus Buenos Aires, Marte und Leder, Maximo Ciambella aus Buenos Aires, Cola-Flaschen, Mena El Chazli, Cairo, Webstuhl, Nguyen Trinti, Hanoi, und Etiketten anbringen, Daniel Ulazia, Mexico City. Von den drei Begriffen ist Rhythmus sicher derjenige, the most obvious thing has not only with this, but with the whole project. If you sit here now and look at this one day, it's a little bit of a title.

that the English title actually only is to the purpose of the single shot, while the German title also also is to have a attitude to work, also a positive or negative attitude. And I think this double meaning is a component, which plays in the category of rhythmus in the films a big role in the film. Because, as a cultural philosophy of a Dauerbrenner, is the rhythmus always, one is in the one's mind,

the subject to conformity, in the gleichs what people bring to organize themselves against the Vorgabe. The rhythm has these two characteristics, or there are these two characteristics and he has mostly been out of two Einteilings of time. Very seldom is the rhythm, one only principle of the time, is the rhythm is two together forms of time. and often is often a relationship that is often entitled to something that is

something that is given to something that is given to something that is with very different attitudes. So the rhythm in these films can be seen as a indicator of intention. Also the rhythm is something that is accentuated and an intention of the person working to bring but also as the same as the opposite. The rhythm is something that indicates the person with their thoughts in the way that can be with their thoughts and can be. Because the rhythm is the way that the work is going to be. The rhythm is a generator of the Gleichzeit and of Differenz, of the Besser and of the Verzöger. Man kann eigentlich die drei Kategorien, die Henri Lefebvre in seinem Buch zur Rhythmusanalyse entwickelt hat,

die drei sozusagen im Alltagsleben, aus dem Alltagsleben entwickelten Unterkategorien von Rhythmen, nämlich die Polyrhythmie, die Eurythmie und die Arhythmie, also die Multiplizierung von rhythmischen Verhalten in der Polyrhythmie, that's how to go in a rhythm, in a rhythm, in a rhythm, and the attempt to get out of the rhythm, in a rhythm, all three categories are, and that can be seen in the films, both positive as negative, both the under-warning, both the under-warning, both the under-warning, both the as the way of the Encomments. Without further ado,

we will now see these films. In the end of the day, I will then the panel's members and then the representation of Aisha Hamid and Coach Oeshon and then we can discuss. The End

Thank you. so

I'm going to make a lot of the ingredients. I'm going to make a lot of the ingredients. I'm going to make a lot of the ingredients. I'm going to make a lot of the ingredients. I'm going to make a lot of the ingredients. Thank you.

The winner of the ultraviolet Asom to the front, within the 1, the 9 Abierto 10, abierto 11 Descontinates the first test Va dominando the action of the 9 Entabla the 10 Más atrás, Gana Terreno 8 Abierto 11 Más atrás, Desempeñan 2 Los competitors, they pass by 1000m Lucha Vanguardia, por dentro 9 Abierto 10 Cabisa, cabisa El 11 A medio cuerpo por dentro queda el 8. Más atrás se desempeña por el centro de la pista el 5. El 12. Más abierto viene el terreno el 4. Van a dejar atrás la señal de los 800 metros. Se mantiene la lucha en la vanguardia. El 9. El 10. Abierto el 4. Cabeza a cabeza. Cerca al 12. En línea con el 11.

Por dentro se viene desempeñando en busca de los puestos de vanguardia el 3. Y los competidores van a hacer el ingreso a la recta final. Lo están haciendo en estos instantes como puntero. and on the exterior of the pitch, the 4 is going to be the end of the lucha, the 12 is going to be carried out by the side of the pitch, the 2 is going to be carried out by the side of the pitch, the 10 is going to be more open, the 9 is going to be the end of the line, the 350 meters for the disc, the 4 is going to be the end of the lucha, the 12 is going to be the end of the pitch, the 9 is going to be the end of the pitch, the 250 meters for the disc, the 9 is going to be the end of the pitch, the 9 is going to be the end of the pitch, the 12 is going to be the end of the pitch, 6, 100m finales, 9, tira ventaja sobre el 2, que mire por dentro, carga rápidamente el 7, pocos metros, 9, con ventaja sobre el 2, el 7, el 6, y cruzar Rúdico.

Garo el tuyo. Suelta el principiante. Oh The

I'm going to go ahead and do it. I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more

I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to make a little bit more I'm going to go.

I'm not a bad guy. The End

So, So

Thank you. I will now introduce the two Vortrags.

I am not the whole Schrift and sonstigen Leistungen to show up, because they all have these informative papers. Aisha Hamid is a painter, author and teacher, and the student of the study for Kunst and history at the Goldsmiths in London. She will talk about rhythms in the relationship between human and machine rhythms, and who are both in the way, but also in the way, they come together together. Kurt Schoeschun is actually not a new one in Berlin,

he also learned in Goldsmiths Audio, Oral and Visual Culture, and Otto Zarecher Bücher, as a artist as a member of the Otto List Group. We had before two days in London in London in a different way, about Harons work to discuss. And he will talk about the work of the voice and the foot in this film and also talk about the work of the voice and the voice of this film. Please, Kocu.

Thank you. Okay, we'll begin. Thanks to Dietrich for opening this panel. Thanks to Antia for inviting me. Thanks to everybody who took part in this morning's presentations. Thanks to, of course, the staff at Hakeve for making this entire project possible.

Welcome to our panel, Circle Rhythm Ritual. My presentation is called The Work of the Voice and the Work of the Foot. What I'm going to do is to try to think with certain moments from the second video that we saw, Ultraviolet, the video with the horse race. So, let's begin. For those of you who were here yesterday, you'll remember Thomas Elsasser situating labor in a single shot as a counter project. He said that it was a project that was a counter to the generalized condition of the outsourcing of labor.

And it was a project that could be understood in terms of the resourcing of labor. And I want to think in terms of that resourcing of labor in terms of a resounding of labor. I want to think in terms of the the kind of sono and phono material dimension of questions of circularity, questions of rhythm and questions of rituality which we see embodied and enacted throughout these short clips we see them in the ball of yarn that's been made by the woman in Hanoi, we see it in the pulse of the weaving machine. We see it in the swing of the arms of the men throwing the coke

crates to each other. We see it in the men stooping to drink mate, stooping, hunching into the straw, the kind of ceremonial passage of the bottle of mate. In these we see something like continual rituals that make sense of the habituation and the repetition of work. But what I want to do is to return to that image, the images that are in ultraviolet, and then begin to think in terms of the question of process that we can see there. So could I have the lights dimmed, and could we show ultraviolet once more?

please the the the the the the the the the the the the the

The last one is going to be the 9th, in the table, the 10th, more in the 8th, the 8th, the 11th, the 11th, the 1th, the 12th, the 12th, the 4th, the 4th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 12th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 12th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8th, the 8 4 cabeza a cabeza cerca el 12 en línea con el 11 por dentro se viene desempeñando en busca de los puestos vanguardia el 3 y los competidores van a hacer el ingreso a la recta final lo están haciendo en estos instantes como puntero y por el lado exterior de la pista va dominando el 4 el entabla lucha el 12 viene cargando por el lado interior de la pista el 2 abierto se viene desempeñando el 10 más abierto en línea este con el 9

Faltando 350 metros para el disco Sigue la lucha de la vanguardia 4 y 12, 12 y 4 Cerca al 2, abierto, viene descontado Terreno 9 250 metros para el disco Domina por el lado exterior de la pista 9, estira ventaja sobre el 2 Taracenlo de creación por el 12 Abierto el 4, larga, atropellado el 6 100 metros finales 9, estira ventaja sobre el 2 Que viene por dentro Carga rápidamente el 7 Pocos metros, 9 Con ventaja sobre el 2, el 7, el 6 Y cruza el único What makes ultraviolet so immediately compelling and so satisfying to watch is its virtuosic

synchronization of multiple times, multiple speeds within a very short overall frame. So we immediately feel on our pulses, if not see with our eyes, the variation between the slowness of the camera movement, the camera movement that has to pause before the race begins, the speed of the voice and the speed of the horses which are both out of frame and which appear not in the frame of the window but in screen and from another perspective than we expect. So we immediately gain a sense of the multiple times

the multiple perspectives and the multiple positions within a very short time. We immediately understand the relation between the position of the giant ultraviolet window, between the overhead screen, between the position of the monitor, between the role that the binoculars play in the hands of the commentator. We immediately understand the way in which the camera has to find a position between the slowness of the speed of the horse race and the speed of the voice. The camera has to sit in between these two speeds. The camera has to find its own tempo. The film has to time itself before the horse race starts

and it has to end after the horse race ends. The film has to register a distinction between the almost languid, almost aristocratic, almost effete gestures of the commentator and the virile, aggressively demonstrative voice of the commentator. We understand a kind of vocalic virtuosity of the commentator. We understand the use of off-screen space to create the surprising appearance of the monitors and of the close-up. We understand all of these things. And if we concentrate for a moment on this question

of the vocalic virtuosity of the commentator, of the work of the voice that links between the microphone, the binoculars, the windows, and the monitors, if we think of the voice as a kind of industrialization of a certain kind of time-keeping function. And if we hold on to that notion, then the pleasure of this film is of keeping all of these forces in balance, keeping them all in play in an extremely elegant manner. And we can appreciate how elegant, how precisely Dario Schwarzenegger

manages to keep all these forces in play when we compare Ultraviolet to an earlier film, a Hollywood film, which also takes the notion of the horse race as a kind of, as a direct allegory for labor and for economy and for work. and so if we hold Ultraviolet in mind while we watch this clip then it becomes clear so can we play, can we dim the lights and can we play a clip from They Shoot Horses Don't They People are the ultimate spectacle

And now, now you're going to see it. Yowza the Derby! One couple and only one will waltz out of here over broken bodies and broken dreams carrying the grand prize of 1,500 silver dollars. And believe me, these wonderful kids deserve your cheers because each one of them is fighting down pain, exhaustion, weariness, struggling to keep going, battling to win. And isn't that the American way? You bet it is. What I mean is, if you think about it, cattle ain't got it much worse than us. She ain't pregnant. I'm Nelson Eddy.

So what's healthier than having a kid? Number 78 is in... We've got a poor judge over there. Good. What are you gonna do, put us in cages and let him throw peanuts at us? The boy from 67 is down. He's definitely down. Look at us. We're all like this now. Get your leg out of movement. Dirty. Swollen feet. No sleep. Get your leg out of movement. What do you want? Help me. Six. Seven. Shut up, God damn it. I'm heading up. Come on. Hang on, baby. He's on. Kiss me, kiss me. Oh. Jesus! I ain't quitting. Get off me!

Get off me! No! Help me. One, four, three, two, one! Okay, thank you. So we appreciate the formation of the implied circle of ultraviolet. We understand that the horses are traveling a circle, a circle that appears and disappears intermittently throughout the very short time frame of ultraviolet. In comparison here, and they shoot horses, don't they,

The race, the circle, is clearly a circle of fatality, a circle of exhaustion, a circle of death, a melodramatic choreography in which humans function as horses who are ridden by the economy that plays them like the game to which they are forced to submit. And the melodrama of the circle of death to which humans submit only sets into relief the relative calmness of ultraviolet, so that, by contrast, the virtuosic commentary of the horse commentator becomes paradoxically restrained in comparison to the shot cuts

and high impact of the trailer for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, in which exhaustion as a spectacle depends on something like the choreography of the hobbled feet, the human as the impaired animal, whose hobbled gait and hobbled stance indicates and suggests a demand to keep up, not so much a rat race as a horse race, instantiated as the terminal fable for capitalism. All of this hammered home with the exacting an infuriating melodrama of Hollywood. And so we could say that

we could say that ultraviolet is something like a fable of a certain kind of virtuosity. The Italian theorist Paolo Verno says the fundamental model of virtuosity is the activity of the speaker. Every utterance is a virtuosic performance. He says, today virtuosity not only characterizes the culture industry, but the totality of contemporary social production. And so what we see in Ultraviolet is a certain kind of work, which nonetheless shows off and has a certain theatrical surplus,

a certain theatrical pride in its virtuosity. Instead of exhausting itself in its communicative interaction, there is a surplus which is triumphantly reclaimed at the end. And so if we can hold on to that performative, gestural display of virtuosity that we see, not so much in they shoot horses, don't they, but in ultraviolet, we could play that off against an earlier moment of an even more hysterical virtuosity in which we see the voice acting as a kind of incarnated rhythm of capitalism. So could we play How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck

from Werner Herzog from 1976? Chloe, turn the lights down, please. How did you learn to speak so fast? Well, when I first learned, I think I used to go to auction sales with my dad. And we had one great auctioneer selling in our part of the country there.

And he used to intrigue me how he used to be able to hold the attention of two, three, four, five hundred people at a sale. And that's when I thought that's what I'd like to be someday. So I listened to him and I practiced one, one, one, and two, two, two, and then one, two, three. and eventually you learn I'm bit one go to say to here to at to do one and you go on like that and then you practice with your tongue twisters you the big black bug bit a big brown bear another tongue twister how much would would chuck chuck for what chuck could chuck what how much would would chuck chuck so and after that you get into the numbers and and you eventually build up speed, you build up a rhythm,

and it takes a lot of practice, a lot of talking. You have to love to talk. Do you have another example of a tongue twister? That's my favorite. Yeah, the chuck chuck. Yeah. Can you do it in slow motion? I don't think I can. Well, how much wood would a wood chuck chuck, if a wood chuck could chuck wood? If a wood chuck could chuck, could chuck wood, how much wood would a wood chuck chuck? And when in fast motion, it's how much wood would wood chuck chuck, wood chuck chuck wood, wood chuck chuck wood, wood chuck chuck wood, wood chuck chuck wood, how much wood would wood chuck chuck. There's a little rhythm to it that comes in when you build a speed up. So, in the traditions of American auctioneering,

where the auctioneer acts as a vocalist, they are engaged in a chant in which the projected movement of capitalism sets the rhythm. Numbers set the rhythm of time. As recently as 1990, the pace of tobacco auctioneering was set to accommodate selling 400 to 600 piles of tobacco per hour, each sold in 6 to 10 seconds. If we do the maths, It becomes clear that auctioneering is something like an index of capitalism vocalized as money. So in the Herzog film, I'm not going to repeat the name because I can't,

the speed is something like a parodic anticipation of the era of financialization that we live through now, in which financial quantification, which is dimensions definitively beyond human accessibility. And as if in response to that, we need to hear contemporary sonic forms as an attempt to instantiate a kind of temporal signatures that resist and betray an awareness of the new extremes of capitalism and how they are instantiated as rhythmicity,

as ritual, and as circularity. And one way to do this is to listen to so-called trap music. Trap music, mostly generated in the last decade from Atlanta, is mostly traced back to a group called the Dungeon Family, close to the circle around the great group Outkast. Trap music is both a verb for selling drugs and is the location where drugs are sold. Trap music therefore instantiates a specific mode of labor within hip-hop. It is not necessarily understood as political

because it does not operate through the conventional political frames of activism. of moralizing, or of prescribing policy. But to not recognize the political import of certain kinds of rap is a refusal or a failure to listen and to imagine the reality that certain kinds of rap indicate all too well. So if we hold in mind the woodchuck clip and then listen to this composition called Karate Chop by the rapper Future from last year, then we'll begin to get a sense of what I mean. Okay, can we play... Can we dim the lights first, and then can we play Karate Chop, please? Thank you. You know,

they're just a real nigga shit, you're a real nigga story, you know what I'm saying? He's built himself so rich. Like a bunch of narcotics Pull up in that new robbery Living like gin got it Chopping bricks like karate Drink a bunch of cold beans Serving to the dope fiends Blowing money stay clean Micah, Jason, Billy Jean Got a Panamera, round a young nigga dick Got a young bitch pullin' up in a V Smoke a lot of Chris and I have a lot of sex Had to be the grind or rain on my chick

Bitch a nigga get money, nigga get bad Hold up, no, no, run it, nigga sell a lot of crack You can give a nigga line or the bullshit on I can whip a mother, ride it with it, love it, don't want love 50,000 on your watch, young nigga shp I'ma make a spade, all the silver powder, sir Keep a young nigga working down the boss of K I'ma take a phone call, boss of Eric King Ice like a bunch of narcotics Pull up in a new robbery Living like Jun got it Chopping grease like karate So trap music functions as a subsection of hip-hop

in which the notion of street money, gained through hustling and dealing, has enabled a form that develops and develops outside and away from the dictates of the music industry. a music that thrives regionally before it becomes global. And in this sense, it exists as a music that exists outside the label system but exists in a precarious position. It is connected to street money and still subject to precisely the violence and imprisonment that its producers are seeking to leave behind. And these notions can be indicated in the specific kinds of vocal ingenuity that can be heard in the sound.

So Future's rap is at once showy and muted. His cadences are tailored to the particulars of each beat. And each beat is in a duet with a cadence which is both slurred and skillful. as if light reflects off the jewels of his speech. And even when his delivery is at its most energetic, there is a sort of emotional deadness, a numbness that is central to his voice, as if he is taking refuge inside a light show, as if the flamboyance of his vocalisation overwhelms the listener while concealing a certain kind of hurt.

And to not hear this inside of the cadence, to not hear this inside of the beat which trades places with the voice, is to miss the specific incantation and the specific vocalization of contemporary political subjectivation. if we hold on to future's emceeing and then we can start to hear that in relation to an earlier moment which we can visualise in terms of a kind of visual beat patterning so I want to play now I think I have a couple more clips

I want to play a clip by Gene Kelly from the film Summer Stock from 1960. Okay. Oh, uh, Artie. Yeah, Joe? Let everything go. I'll close up. Oh, okay. Good night, Joe. Good night. BIRDS CHIRP

. I'm going to go.

I'm going to go. The End

The End I'm sorry.

Thank you. I'm sorry.

So in tap dancing, the work of the foot is the work of the beat, expresses a certain gait, a certain sonotemporal signature, a certain euphoria of the kinetic body that summons the orchestra and the camera, musique concrète and orchestration, into something like an enchanted, almost utopian duet. For the brief duration of the stage, Gene Kelly is enamored and enraptured

because he can summon and bend and command time. time stretches, time expands, time takes on a cineplastic dimension at the hands and more specifically at the feet of Gene Kelly. It is as if he incarnates an ensemble of articulations. He is a bodily intelligence. The choreography of gestures as a vocabulary of film which we've heard of as an expression of hands here takes on an expressive unity. And from 1950 to look forward to the several moments we've understood throughout is to

understand the work of the foot as the movement of dancers and as the force and pressure of dance and of movement within a circle. A circle understood as both a space of containment, a space of defence, and a space of the circuit of capital. And so the final example which we'll elaborate on this question of the circle as a space of containment, a space of the circuit, a time of circulation, is by the pioneer footwork R.P. Boo. It's a track called No Return. Okay, can you please play the track No Return? And he never came out.

Never came a funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny funny And he never came out

Motherfucker See me running the floor And he never came out People said his brain was infected by demons Motherfucker See me running the floor And he never came out, he'll said his brain was infected by devils. This motherfucker, see me burning the flow. And he never came out, he'll said his brain was infected by devils. Maybe that was the problem. I got it! This motherfucker, see me burning the flow. This motherfucker, see me burning the flow. And he never came out, he'll said his brain was infected by devils. This motherfucker, see me burning the flow. And he never came out, he'll said his brain was infected by devils. See me burn in the flow And he never came out People said his brain was infected by devils Maybe that was the problem

Ah yeah yeah Motherfucker See me burn in the flow Maybe that was the problem Ah yeah yeah Motherfucker See me burn in the flow Maybe that was the problem Ah yeah yeah Motherfucker See me burn in the flow Maybe that was the problem Ah yeah yeah Motherfucker See me burning the flow Motherfucker Motherfucker See me burning the flow Motherfucker See me burning the flow Motherfucker See me burning the flow Motherfucker See me burning the flow

Motherfucker I didn't tell you to stop. Actually. So what you hear in No Return is the movement of dances. And what is heard in footwork is the force and pressure of the movement of dances within the circle. What is the circle? The circle that we've seen repeated from the circle of the horse race, to the circle of the human horse race to the partial circle of the swing of the arms of the Egyptian coat bottle carriers to the sphere of the yarn that the Vietnamese woman makes.

In this case, the circle is where the battle takes place. What is the battle? The battle is where the force and the pressure of the movement of dancers are exerted upon the producers. The movement of dancers generates the overproduction of rhythmic differentiation. Rhythmic differentiation is what sets the conditions for the battle within the circle. And what we hear within footwork is the furious combination of bass, of squeal, of stuckness, and a vocality as a phonomaterial imprint of the dancer's movement. What we hear in footwork is something like gifts translated and transformed into sound. We hear footwork as the furious experiment in rhythmic differentiation which is held in a circle,

but which spills over to generate the pressure for another circle. To put it another way, footwork is about the manufacturing of feel. feel manufactured through the intensification of degrees of differentiation between dancers and producers as they animate the production of degrees of differentiation across each other. And footwork is about all of this as it generates and holds in circles. And what you hear in footwork is the overabundance of feel as it spills over the edge into more circles. What you feel is a feel that cannot be held, but which holds and which takes hold.

It is a music made with and for circles. And therefore, it is in a certain sense dimensional. That's to say, the intensification of the rates of rhythmic differentiation as animated by an encounter between dancers and producers within sounds and between sounds is as much about space as it is about sound. To put it another way, the battle is about the production of territory from within the confines of the circle. And what we hear in footwork is an infinite expansion from inside what is deemed to be a restricted territory. An infinite expansion from inside

what is deemed to be a restricted territory. And here I'm drawing on the writing of Danvere Bra to whose ideas and whose thinking I'm very much indebted. And so footwork status as a music of the circle is not only about maintaining a condition for a battle, it is not only about understanding a specific form of music the circle, and I would argue all of the circles that we've looked at needs to be understood or can also be understood as located within a territory a territory which is itself thought to be encircled by a city the circle within footwork operates under the forces and pressures

of the racist logics of police power, of population movement control, and of urban geography that combine to designate an area as black. And a circle is not limited by these conditions. Footwork that is produced in the battle from inside the confines of this circle, a circle which is itself confined within a zone, which is itself confined within a city, incessantly produces populations and spaces that explode those confines while simultaneously holding that circle together. Footwork is about the manufacturing of tech life.

Tech life is the name of the crew to which RP Boo belongs. It's about the manufacturing of tech life within a circle. The force of the dancers' movements, the drive of the sensory field of perception generates an ever-expanding space, which can be filled infinitely with the feel that connotes and constitutes the phonosocial materiality of footwork. And this means that this music can be found embedded within what might be called the hyper-ghetto. and this means that what we might call tech life or what we might call tech city and what we might call the relation between humans and machines

which is a notion in which rhythm mediates the relation between the city and technology between technology and life is buried deep within the containers that house waste material footwork stays there within the circle and it overflows it. It overflows what it is supposed to contain. And this activity, which always holds, which always operates at such an intensity, desediments the ground of the distinction between there and here. Thank you. Thank you.

Maybe I should have gone first, Kojo. That's a bit of a difficult act to follow. So, like everyone else, I'd really like to thank the organizers. And I think because this is a conference and an exhibition that's on labor, I think that that point bears reiterating to thank this crack team. I also really want to thank the panel that came before,

because without knowing they're providing a certain amount of terminology that I'm going to appropriate. And, yeah, I think I'm just going to start. So, as a point of entry, I want to start with the video weaving that was made in Hanoi. That was the first video that we saw. So what do we see? There's a loom in motion. The screen is divided horizontally. The machine, a complex architecture of joists and metal and metal that is Benjamin's dream materials of the 19th century, is in motion. It's a beautiful, rusty, old machine, and it moves in a most elegant and pleasing way.

It makes a sound. It looks like it's from another time, maybe even Benjamin's time. Behind it, slowly revealed, is the weaver, a woman who collects from this loom a tapey lace that she ravels into a ball. She is dressed in pink and white from head to toe. It's a great outfit. But her dexterity and her role as captain of this loom is somehow not what the eye is directed to. What we are guided to look at instead are the exquisite joists and curves of the loom that dances almost of its own volition, and in fact continues to do so after she bows off stage.

So what we see is a reversal, where the machine somehow is the agent endowed with life, dancing around, doing its thing. The woman, in spite of her skill and cinematic quality, literally is behind the machine. It's a Granvillean image, if there ever was one, where the commodities come to life, and takes center stage. Or from another point of view, she is behind the machine, as Franco Barardi states in After the Future, his history of the end of the future. And he says, Futurism exalted the machine as an external object, visible in the city landscape, but now the machine is inside us.

We are no longer obsessed with the external machine. Instead, the info machine now intersects with the social nervous system. The bio machine interacts with the genetic becoming of the human organism. In the mechanical era, the machine stood in front of the body and changed human behavior, enhancing their potency without changing their physical structure. The assembly line, for instance, although improving and increasing the productive power of laborers, did not modify their physical organism nor introduce mutations inside their cognitive ability. Now the machine is no more in front of the body, but inside it. Bodies and minds, therefore, cannot express and relate anymore

without the technical support of the bio-machine. Oh, my hands are shaking. You know, I was wondering, you know, I've been here for three days now, I was wondering what it would be like to be on this platform here, and it's actually a lot more relaxed than I thought it would be, just as a note. But, so Bifo points out that Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto was published in 1909, the same year that Henry Ford initiated the first assembly line in Detroit. This is no coincidence, nor, he states, Is it a coincidence that the most fiery proponents of futurism were in the agrarian economies of Italy and Russia? The machine stood in front of the laborer,

paving the way to an industrial future. As we all might already know, Bifo says that we are in a different time now. The machine is not in front of us. It is inside of us and makes us anxious and depressed. Our souls are on the factory floor. The machine is not outside of us, it is in us. We are sped up from the inside out at the pace of an accelerated capitalism. Okay, but what if we stopped for a second and questioned the polarity of this distinction, the machine in front of us as opposed to the machine inside of us? What if, instead, we blurred this distinction between the machine being inside or in front of the laborer, or we found a threshold where the ambivalence of both modes of the bodily and the machinic coincided?

Through these videos that we saw at the beginning of this session, I want to consider two possible thresholds where the machine and the body meet in uneasy contretemps, in the gesture, whose endpoint is the skin, and in the voice, whose endpoint is singing. Through these two thresholds, the gesture and the voice, I want to look at these videos anew. Not in any sort of celebratory way, but as is. to think about the role of embodiment and the machine that straddle what Thomas Alsasser so eloquently evoked in his keynote, and that is the knife-edged constitution of labor as hovering between a recognition of its dignity and its inevitable dehumanization.

So what I'm thinking about in relation with the liminality of the gesture in the very specific context of its relation to the machine and the labor process, where the gesture is only intelligible in its mediating role with the machine. So in Cola bottles that was shot in Cairo, we see two laborers on screen tossing packages of Coke bottles in a chain from one to the other, and then to another person who's off screen. At first glance, this sequin of gestures could be considered to be almost machinic in its synchronicity. And yet, what destabilizes this most dramatically is the stumble, is the glitch, when the man closest to the camera moves too quickly and in his fumbling recovery throws a crate to the side.

He also pauses and he makes strange nods. The fumble does not throw him off, however, but maybe it throws us off as a viewer. This glitch also calls attention to the machine-like nature of the tossing, but also the subjectivity of those making the gestures. The breaks in rhythm makes us aware of the rhythm itself. Or in Ultraviolet that was shot in Buenos Aires, we hear what Kojo has characterized as the industrialization of the voice. Of the horse racing announcer, its sped-up quality just inside the threshold of intelligibility. He sounds excited. But consider his voice in contrast with how he carries his body. His voice is fast, but his body is slow.

He moves, he picks up his binoculars, almost absentmindedly, and points them to the screen, rather to the scene outside. He's operating at two temporal registers, where his slow, relaxed gestures give us a glimpse of how habituated he is, how his attention can be there and elsewhere. And attention to gesture might also take us to that of the camera person who is necessarily off-screen. When the camera is controlled and does not call attention to the gesture of the camera person, as it is in ultraviolet, the camera person hovers as being both present and absent. When the camera is hand-held, as it is in cola bottles or in mate and leather,

Its contingency parachutes us into the time and space of action. So I want to consider how, at its limit, the gesture and the relationship to the machine takes us to the skin through an example that takes us a little bit away from the films for a few minutes, and that is to sort of talk about a history of fingerprints and the gestures and machines that produce them, and finally, their destruction. Hopefully this makes sense. So, in 1858, William Herschel, the chief magistrate of the Khugli district in Jangyipur, was finalizing a contract with Rajadhar Konai to produce some guting, that is a binding material to build light roads. When Konai was about

to sign the contract, Herschel was inspired to ask Konai to make a stamp of his hand on the contract. Herschel had no thought of the actual imprint or or what the imprint would tell about him. Rather, it was a gesture of implicating Conay's hand and by extension his body into the contract by pulling his hand to the sheet of paper. Said Herschel, quote, I was only wishing to frighten Conay out of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter, unquote. So in a way, he wanted to frighten Conay into honoring the contract by marking him and using the mark as a contract. Okay, I'm going to try and travel a little bit into the future. So consider an afterlife of this gesture, and that is the collecting of biometric information

at a national or international scale. In India, this is a quote-unquote voluntary system that's launched at a massive scale to create a national ID for a population with a very high literacy rate and low income levels so that alternate forms of ID, that is passports or driver's license, are not as common. So a description of this photograph that you see in front of you by Getty Images says, an Indian villager is helped by an official to put her hand on the slap pad for the recording of fingerprints during the data collection process for a pilot project of the unique identification authority of India in the village of Chalur, some 145 kilometers northwest of Bangalore on April 22, 2010.

This identification authority has been created as an attached office under the Planning Commission. Its role is to develop and implement the necessary institutional, technical, and legal infrastructure to issue these identity numbers to Indian residents. And then it goes on and on and sort of talks about how great this is. But I don't think it is that great. I think there's a kind of this repetition of, you can imagine thousands and thousands of hands on the stamp, on the scanner, collecting these fingerprints. Well, what happens with these fingerprints? Well, I want to consider another collection of fingerprints, and that is by the EuroDAC, which is the European database that collects fingerprints of illegalized migrants entering the European Union.

The records of these fingerprints are used to send migrants back to their first country of entry in order to be deported. One of the biggest deterrents for illegalized migrants in the European Union is the requirement that they seek asylum in the first European Union country they have entered and have been fingerprinted in. And the threat of being deported back there is so unacceptable to many migrants that it became a common practice for them to try to erase their own fingerprints by drinking chemicals and by burning the skin off their fingertips. So consider from this point of view the response and resistance to this database on the part of the migrant who destroys their fingerprints in order to evade this detection. This is a still from Sylvain Georges' documentary film, Qu'ils se repose en

revolte, that records this act. It's an image of the hands of a migrant who has attempted to burn his fingerprints off so he can avoid identification. His hands then carry the imprint of the law and of his own journey. This act is painful and the trace it leaves is difficult to look at. And this is a Sisyphean task as fingerprints always grow back. But what is relevant in this instance to the distinction that I have traced at the beginning of this between the machine in front of the body and the machine inside the body is the way in which this gesture is only intelligible as a response to the urodach, as a response the machinic collection of this biometric data. The gesture of erasing the fingerprints and the trace it leaves

is only painful and debilitating in the life of the migrant outside of this apparatus. The second side of liminality that I want to look at is that of the voice. We've already considered the fast voice of the horse-racing commentator and his slow gestures. But there are other voices too. There's the terrible, absolutely horrendous pop music that you hear happening in mate and leather. There's the azan or the call to prayer in the coke bottles. There's the singing of the loom in the weaving. These are all sounds that all the workers hear together. These voices, like the industrialized voice of the horse racing commentator,

operate on the threshold of intelligibility, but here not on account of their speed, but on account of their dispersion across the space. So there's a collective listening, perhaps distractedly so. With the azan, the call to prayer in Cairo, it signals dusk, it signals the end of the working day. It is a collective experience shared to pace the day. It is also part of the massive sound pollution that permeates the city of Cairo. You will never hear the azan in isolation of other sounds in the city. And then, yes, the yucky Top 40 music that paces the working day of the workers in matin leather. It paces the day, and it paces their gestures,

it paces their cutting of leather, it paces the passing of the vial of mata, the performance of another collective ritual. These are the shared sounds that form the collective experience of working, that pace the day and pace the gestures of work that I want to push further and radically to one of the first moments of the dehumanization of labor under modernity, that is the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic and the putting of these enslaved people to work on plantations. There's another set of sonics that comes out of the shared experience of dehumanization of labor that has its birth in the hold of the slave ship that Fred Moten, in his book on the undercommons that he wrote with Stefano Harney, describes as haptic.

And he says, never being on the right side of the Atlantic is an unsettled feeling, the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others. To have been shipped is to have been moved by others, with others. In the hold, another kind of feeling became common. This form of feeling was not collective, not given to decision, not adhering or reattaching to settlement, nation, state, territory or historical story. Nor was it repossessed by the group which could not now feel as one, reunified in time and space. No, when Black Shadow sings, are you feeling the feeling? He's asking about

about something else. He's asking about a way of feeling through others, a feeling for feeling others, feeling you. This is modernity's insurgent feel, its inherited caress, its skin talk, tongue touch, breath speed, hand laugh. This is the feel we might call hapticality. Hapticality, the touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here. Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you, to feel them feeling you. This feel of the ship is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem.

Or perhaps we could say these are now recomposed in the wake of the ship. Refuse these things, we first refuse them, in the contained, amongst the contained, lying together in the ship, the boxcar, the prison, the hostel. Skin against epidermalization, sense is touching. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space, for no other space, though refuse sentiment, history and home, we feel for each other. soul music is a medium of this interiority on the skin Fred Moten is such a great writer I had to put that in its entirety so feeling the feeling is a point of entry to understand the incomprehensible

how music and voice become vehicles of this haptic experience of being on board a slave ship this is before a sense of collectivity can be formed before a language articulated can be formed contra the state It's a state of a something else that arises viscerally beyond language's intelligibility. Its radicality plays out sonically, but also, as he states, at the level of skin, in the pharmaconic surface that is created in the unnameable experience in the hold, but also in the sense of touch that becomes the beginning of what Moten calls an insurgency. This experience is synesthetic. It pulls together the sense of touch together with the sense of song. So skin and voice are the sites of contestation and agency.

They are literally at the border between techne and the body, and its hapticality comes into being in the machine of the hold. Its afterlife, Moten States, comes into the continued experience of slavery on plantations and in prisons. Its song continues in the form of work songs, songs on the chain gang. These are the soundtracks to work. It paces the gestures of indentured work in the afterlife of the hold. According to Bruce Jackson in his book Wake Up Dead Man, the large plantations in the U.S. South are based on West African agricultural models, and with one major difference, that the black slaves used work songs in the plantations exactly as they'd used them before they'd been taken prisoner and sold into slavery. The difference

was this. In Africa, the songs were used to time body movements and to give poetic voice to things of interest because people wanted to do their work that way. But in the plantations, there is the added component of survival. If a man was singled out as working too slowly, he would often be brutally punished. The songs kept everyone together so no one could be singled out as working more slowly than everyone else. Work songs helped African-American prisoners survive the grueling work demanded of them. So I want to turn now to an actual recording of a song on the chain gang in a documentary that was made by Pete Seeger. So he's sort of the protagonist and he's sort of the

hero of this film, problematically or not, and I will come back to that later. But I'll tell you a little bit about this film and then we will watch a clip of it. So Pete Seeger and Tosche Seeger and their son Daniel and the folklorist Bruce Jackson, who I just mentioned, they went to a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966. And they produced this document that you're going to see in a second of inmates of the Ellis unit. So this is a part of a larger process of folklorists, mostly from the North, becoming very fascinated by what they saw as a dying form, a dying musical form. So all the kind of anthropological colonialism that you can associate with this became the sort of impetus to record these songs and the gestures that went with them.

So we have this archive ambivalently, as it were. So if you can play the clip now. Let your number rain Oh, well, the first cut, crackin' let ya, YUM O'RAIN! You better watch your mind, kimberlet ya, YUM O'RAIN! You better watch your mind, kimberlet ya, YUM O'RAIN! Oh, there won't be no more, jackin' let ya, YUM O'RAIN! Oh, there won't be no more, jackin' let ya. I remember when I first came in prison, man, the boss would let me cut the wood. He asked me, he said, you ever cut any wood? I said, I've never cut any wood in my life.

He said, you put that axe down. He said, it cuts wood here. I said, you stand right there, and I'll show you how they cut wood. He holler over old chimes. He said, old chimes must sing, son. He'd be singing the lead on the Let the Hammer Ring. A variety of verses. And everybody be in chorus with him. Let the hammer ring. And all axes be dropping. And when the timbers on the ground, I mean 300 axes dropping with him. All in on there. That's something to hear. I've never seen nothing like that in my life.

Unlike many prisons in the north where men often spend most of their days sitting around in cells, the inmates work in Texas prisons. In the old days, work in the field sometimes amounted to a death sentence by degree. The guards were brutal, the days lasted from dawn to dark, the work pace was vicious. But Texas now has the most progressive of the southern prison systems, and those old days have gone. Even so, some of the Negro inmates maintain a tradition that developed then to help a man survive, the prison work song. We died on hunting on the register.

It was a little one morning. I heard them shooting in the colony. Well, we're really good. Lord have mercy. We found a sound in the old brazen. Frickly Bounce It takes a number one time for it's down the line.

I got it neat all over you can down the line. I got it neat all over you can down the line. Oh, my daddy was a bully. I can't down the line. It takes a number one time for a strong blue light. I got a timber ring and you can strong blue light. I got a timber ring and you can strong blue light. Big timber in the light on you can strong blue light. It takes a number one time for a strong blue light.

Oh, won't you come along, buddy, we can come alive. Oh, won't you come along, buddy, we can come alive. Come along, oh, it's a wonder we can come alive. It takes the number one time to come alive. Oh, could you can't hold, buddy, we can come alive. Well that fool do can't hold me weak and down the line Well that fool do can't hold me weak and down the line It takes a number on down the line

Better watch my hair for my weak and down the line Oh, watch my hammer, we can pound the line. Watch my hammer, my ring, and I knew we could pound the line. It takes the number one time for a time. Yeah! Woo! If you top down timber, you can pound the line. If you pop that timber, you can follow the line. Let the timber get in, oh, you can follow the line. It takes a number one down, the follow line.

Won't you help me holler, we can follow the line. Won't you help me holler, we can follow the line. Let me holler in the light of weakness on the light. It takes a number of time on the light. Oh, look like a demon, weakest on the light. Oh, look like a demon. Come on. Let the hell go. Can I have the lights again? So, circle rhythm ritual, right? In its most dehumanized form.

So it's pretty awful to hear Pete Seeger talk about how great these new prisons were. But the presence of the prison guard mounted on his horse, looking down on them, undermines that voiceover. And under the watchful eye of the guard and the camera and Seeger's, I'd say, somewhat condescending voiceover, something else happens in the afterlife of the hold. Another kind of syncopation of movement that gets the overseer's job done, but also collects from below in the rhythm and in the singing a powerful voice, a powerful force that moves this indentured labor in another direction. When he wrote about this recording, Bruce Jackson, who went along with Pete Seeger, said,

quote, a day or two after we finished the filming and Pete, Tashi and Dan had gone back to New York, a convict I'd been seeing for several years but who had never talked to me stopped me in the Ellis corridor and said, how come you never recorded me singing any of them river songs? River songs is what they called them because nearly all the Texas prisons in those days were in the rich bottom land along the Brazos and the Trinity rivers. They were the 19th century plantations hiding in the 20th century. I never knew you had any, I said. Well, I never knew you knew Pete Seeger, he said. When he said that line to me, I was really tickled by it because I was certain that until Pete had got there up in the gymnasium a few nights earlier, he'd never heard of Pete Seeger and his long neck

five-string banjo and a 12-string guitar, and neither had most of the men incarcerated or working in that penitentiary. I told the story a lot of times over the years and always thought that when I told it, how amusing that guy said, how amusing it was that that guy said that thing about Pete, about whom he knew nothing before the concert in the gymnasium. But now I've come to realize that there's something far more important and substantial in what that man said to me in the Ellis Corridor. There was something we shared, so he and I weren't as total strangers to one another after all. Singing songs about things that really matter and thinking about these things, which leave them, which leave us, however many hours later, with some kind of feeling, some kind of knowledge

that transcends the moment entirely. A feeling and knowledge about the things that bond rather than the things that rend. About what it means to be human rather than what it means to be brutal. About how we must and can get on together by conspiring in the best and most basic sense of the word that is breathing together. And then he goes on and sort of talks about how Pete Seeger was a genius and he made this all happen. So the protagonist is not the work song. The protagonist is Pete Seeger. But I think in here there's some kind of resonance between what Fred Moten was talking about. So I want to stop here at the intersection of gesture and voice that is behind the machine, that contains the machine, that is co-opted by those, like those making documentaries like this,

who try to speak for those who are dehumanized by labor. and those who make also slightly dangerous and wishy-washy statements about how progressive one state prison can be over another. But in spite of this kind of co-optation and speaking for, there's also a stubborn remainder, a haptic feeling the feeling that plays out in uneasy juxtaposition and in syncopation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

rich presentations. We didn't expect this, but the time has already progressed quite a lot. So I think we should maybe immediately ask if there are already some questions from the audience. Are there any? Yes, there is one. Can you get a microphone? Hold on a second. Thank you. Ayesha, I'd like to attempt to defend the honor of Pete Seeger just a little bit. Sure. Accusations of carpetbagging and condescension. I know that the position of white people liking black music tends to bring almost inevitably accusations of false consciousness.

It's sort of hard to get out of that. But as far as I understand it, his project in the South was a continuation of Alan Lomax's in the 40s and his visits to the Southern prisons. And those were, at least in comparison to Lomax's father, anything but condescending. I'd like to know where you see the condescension and the colonialism here. Well, I think the first statement that he says about the sort of improved conditions of this prison, I mean, it's essentially chain gang work that's sort of being recapitulated. so I think that that voice from the outside it needs some kind of mediation it needs some kind of self-consciousness but do you really sense approval of what he's seeing in that voice I mean there is I think historical fact in the improvement

from say the 20s which were much more brutal but I hear nothing of approval of the Texas chain gang system in that voice over Sorry, I didn't hear that. I heard nothing of approval of the Texas chain gang system in that voiceover. But of the prison facility, I mean there is something about the prison facilities sort of having, I mean I guess I'm coming from the position that this form of work and this form of incarceration is just inherently problematic. I think he would agree with you wholeheartedly. One has also, I think, to think about what audience he's making this for and when it was made and you know the negative message is there it's perhaps subtle but it's definitely there also in the camera work I mean if you look up at the guard

on his horse that's not a friendly person if you look at the guard on his horse that is not a friendly person not in this film I don't see approval but well I mean the point that I also kind of want to sort of highlight is the sort of the sort of slippage that we heard on the first night, I think it was the first night, it's been a lot of presentations, about the dangers of speaking for and speaking to, right? And so I think that in a sense, the kind of en masse sort of display of labor as opposed to individualized voices and the kind of sources that I've read that are really sort of about the agency of this person coming from the outside. I mean, I don't want to target Pete Seeger in any kind of way, but there is a kind of voice from the outside

that kind of resonates with a kind of strain of an anthropological kind of incursion, right? And I think that that's the point I want to make. More questions? Here's one. You get a microphone from me. Kodua, I'd like to ask you a question. I'm not going to directly address your central argument but I wanted to trouble the, or not trouble, maybe complicate the notion of the industrialization of the voice by asking you if you think there's a relationship between the industrialization of the voice that you tracked, the throwing of the voice, and the

industrialization of vision that is quite clear in the clip that you decided to show where it's ostensibly about a voice, but in fact you said that the camera has to find its own tempo, but I was wondering what camera are you referring to? Because there were at least three cameras going on. He was, the broadcaster was looking at cameras, and then he took binoculars to look at a camera. So we weren't sure what particular camera he was looking at. You were addressing it as one camera. So I'm wondering if the proliferation of visual techniques is somehow related to the industrialization of the proliferation of vocal techniques perhaps or the throwing of the voice, the different voices that are actually taking place in that broadcast.

Yeah, I mean, I was referring to Dario Schwarztain and I presume to him, his camera which has this kind of elegant way of mediating between the perspective out of the window, the perspectives on the monitors and this kind of hyperbolic temporality of the commentator. the way in which the camera seems to find the right speed of movement and the right way to somehow navigate in that kind of elliptoid motion.

That's what I was referring to, the way in which the camera finds its way between all these different kind of perceptual apparatuses and the way in which the voice then sits there inside of that and is something like is something like a you know a Virgil a kind of a kind of a guide a guide through that forest of images and does it all in a kind of extremely kind of elegant and elegant way such that it's only it's on subsequent viewing that you realise quite how much is going on

within that space. There is a relation between the kind of amplification and kind of hyperbole that the voice has to go, the training the voice has to go to keep up with the race and to be a voice for broadcasting and the relation between the screens. I wouldn't like to write a diagram for it, but there is some kind of amplification amplification that the voice has to go. It has to take up more space. It has to become more intensified each time.

It has to lean into the vowel sounds. It has to create its own cadence and its own pacing. It has to develop a kind of internal dynamic that sits inside of the cadence and the pacing and the tempo. And it's as if all of that is an attempt to do for the voice what cameras can do for vision. It's as if the voice has to develop these extra dimensions of range and intensity and cadence. And I hear in that elaboration, in that internal dynamic plasticity, I hear something like a calling.

I guess what my presentation tried to do was continue that. is kind of to speculatively hear that in other moments which are outside of the frame and have nothing to do with it specifically but can be made to speculatively answer back to what you hear. I was very intrigued by the kind of, you know, it's kind of like whatever the vocal equivalent of a cineplasticity is, you know, a kind of, like a kind of plasmatic voice, you know. So we used to, these terms, plasticity, we're used to thinking about them in terms of animation,

in terms of that kind of, you know, Eisenstein's capacity to see that kind of stretching and that kind of exuberance inside of a cartoon body. And I can hear some of that going on there inside of the voice. And part of my pleasure is to see that linked to Aisha's point about the elegance and the kind of the relaxedness of the gestures. And then in relation to this extremely controlled camera, Where I was going with, I mean, this is interesting, but I was trying to suggest that perhaps it's not one voice.

Perhaps it's one person speaking multiple voices. That's why it's going so fast. It's a call and response. One horse is going with the other horse. Like in an auction where the vocalizer is vocalizing the different people that are putting their hands up. So he's speaking for them. So it's a fragmentation of the voice. You're making it sound like it's one voice. I'm trying to suggest that like the visual imagery, which is fragmented, the voices, there's an echo of the vocal and the visual fragmentation taking place. Sure, yeah, no, I would accept that. I think, you know, the question of virtuosity is gesturing towards a question of a kind of enhanced, what you call a kind of multiplication, you know.

Because this is a voice for broadcasting. This is a voice that's projecting in the ear of the behearer. There is a mass audience who are both peering and watching the race of which we, in a sense, see the reverse. They see images without a voice. We see the back of a head with a voice that emerges from that reverse perspective. so we are in the kind of hidden reverse of that broadcast that kind of broadcasting dimension so yeah there is undoubtedly a dimension

of the mass voice I'm not sure if I would agree with you that it's I guess it's a question of multiplication it's a question of how we understand that multiplication there's another question over there Nora Orta I had a question based I mean just looking at the two readings and sort of your two presentations. So I found it interesting that you kind of moved from the voice in that image of ultraviolet as an incarnation of capitalism to the image of the auctioneer and how much wood could a woodchuck chuck. Moving to what was described as yucky music in the Yucky Pop Song.

Also, the sort of condemnation of Pete Seeger's film, and I have to agree with Peter Schwartz's comment there. But in contrast to sort of valorization of the song as a site, as a point of resistance when we don't have an image attached to it. So in the two instances, Codwell, where you played the recordings and we had the lights dimmed, but it wasn't really a film. So I guess the question that I would pose to both panelists is, Is there something then about the matching of the song with the image that is problematic?

And I'm sure, you know, Koduo, you disagree in your own work. You've done so much work precisely with sound and image combined, as has John Comfort as well. So just sort of to open that up to discussion. So both are here. Who wants it? Well, I can just jump in quickly with sort of responding to what you said about the yucky music. And I guess that was a bit of a loose response to, well, basically Top 40 Radio, which is, I think, the soundtrack to service industry labor.

So I guess that's where I'm kind of thinking about this rhythm of the songs. It's the same songs that play repeatedly within an hour. They're timed with commercials. Maybe it was my own haptic feeling, my own memory of hearing those songs and recognizing them. But also, it felt like in Mati and Leather, the Top 40 songs seemed at kind of an acute disjuncture from the labor that was being performed. and to me that felt like the time and rhythm of the labor restrictions imposed by capital, the time frames onto this workforce, and it's sort of being unworked through this passing of the cup of mata.

So I would say that in response. And I guess maybe, I just think it's very, I mean, I think, to maybe just revisit the issue of Pete Seeger's documentary, I think it's just, there's just this nice edge, right? This nice edge that I talked about at the beginning between the dignity of labor and its dehumanization. And I think, I mean, it's very difficult to sort of talk about like a form of working under plantation slavery that's being depicted and not having that referred to more explicitly. So maybe I'm erring on the side of being too judgmental, but I think that that history is so present, and yet the accounts that I've read of the making of this documentary is really about the cult of,

maybe it's sort of post-talk, like the kind of ways in which it's been narrativized after its making, which sort of really focuses not on the names of the prisoners, but on Pete Seeger. And that troubles me, and that might undermine the really good work that was obviously done in the documentary. But I guess I'm still sort of thinking about this moment of how to speak for, or how not to speak for, and yet speak to marginalized groups, which is a problematic I think we've sort of talked about earlier in this symposium.

I think the two musical examples that I selected, they kind of represent really paradigmatic examples of music which combines what I call this notion of a certain kind of emotional deadness combined with a certain kind of flamboyance so that at every level from delivery to tonality, they incarnate this notion of what they call trap music.

So they are something like flamboyant performances of unfreedom, which I find seductive in their skillfulness. There's a kind of heroic bleakness about them that I find enchanting. And tactically speaking, separating them from image is a kind of invitation to hear into those sounds and to bring a form of attention to those sounds,

which one might be tempted to not do that. in other words there was no way not to bring a kind of close listening because it was just a tactical idea to shut off the visual channel in order to see what happens if you expand this kind of if you expand the kind of perceptual invitation to encounter their sonic complexity. This is music that's used to being ignored, which means that the invitation to listen to it is also an invitation to

pay attention to the forms of ignoring, the forms of active ignoring that surround that music. and to bring that in relation to some of the videos that we can see here seemed a challenge worth taking up. Thank you. We have to come to an end here, unfortunately. Yeah, time was... We expected that we didn't even realize it. was so entertaining and already two and a half hours were over. And yeah, in half an hour the

next session will take place. Thank you to you and thank you for your attendance.