Part of the research I’m working on is figuring out what research I’m going to be working on. As part of that, I’ve been on the lookout for compelling artistic practices, cultural objects, social constructions, and other sorts of media studies-related hoo hah.
For a class last term, I found an artistic practice that played with what I called “the aesthetics of disintegration,” but might better be called “recursive remediation,” or something along those lines. For the benefit of the Internet (and mostly me), I’ve collected a bunch of examples of this kind of work, and interspersed my own comments on why I think they’re interesting. (RSS folks may have to click through for the second part until I get my full feed set up.)
The godfather of all of these projects is (as far as I can tell) is Alvin Lucier, the experimental composer, and his work I am sitting in a room, which you can listen to here (the second clip on the page). The piece (or at least Lucier’s recording of it) consists of a recording of him reading a text that explains what will be done to the recording. To let it explain:
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
So, that is what happens, more or less, and that is the basic core of what I am calling alternately “the aesthetics of disintegration” and “recursive remediation.” Lucier’s piece is particularly evocative, and many readings can fit comfortably with it (I tried a few on in my undergraduate thesis), but for now, I’m more interested in its structure.
Basically, you have a recording, which is then used as the input in a new recording, whose output is then used as the input in a new recording, and so on. Lucier says he is going to suss out the “natural frequencies of the room” through these re-recordings, but what he is primarily doing is revealing something about the recording machinery itself. The high-pitched metallic whine by the end of the piece is not the result of the room so much as it is a step on the way to the piercing noise of full-fledged microphone feedback.
By repeating his process, Lucier is allowing the reproduction technology to shape the material it reproduces, in this case sound, as if it were water being shaped into a river. The sonic material is refigured by the physicality of the reproduction process—a different microphone/speaker/room setup would shape the sound in its own specific way.
On Vimeo, I found a video that updates I am sitting in a room by adding a video component. In addition to the audio being re-recorded, the video is recaptured from the screen. The difference in sound between this and the original is pretty interesting, as is the introduction of visual feedback.
Digital reproduction is not immune from this practice either, as you can see in this video of successive JPG encodings of an image of text (although the method she uses is not entirely clear; if the person is just lowering the JPG quality manually, then it’s not as interesting, I don’t think).
A slightly different example is this piece by Jürg Lehni, called “Apple Talk,” which involves two computers running speech-to-text and text-to-speech programs. Starting with some beginning text, they read back and forth to each other, successively transcribing what they hear. Over time, of course, the message becomes technologically garbled by the recursive process, but in a different sort of way from the whine of I am sitting in a room. I think this difference is significant in some way, but I’m not sure how yet.
and an earlier version, with text file transcripts!
The same idea is present in this contemporary work by Mohri Yuko:
These two examples come from Ethan Ham’s blog post on telephone game art
It is interesting that these examples focus specifically on the degradation of language. We have a special cognitive relationship with our words, recognizing them even when they are severely distorted. As information transmission technologies, they are quite robust. (One might look to the fake Cambridge study about rearranging the letters in a word and retaining the meaning of the word, or better yet, to the real Cambridge website that analyzes the claims of the fake study.)
Their “robustness” is not a result of mediating technologies, but rather of our ability to interpret sounds as words. So, we can understand what Alvin Lucier is saying well into I am sitting in a room, but the process itself is a testament to how our machines cannot understand. When children corrupt messages as they are passed along in a game of telephone, they are shaping their statements into the contours of learned language. For the computers above, the shaping force is the algorithmic interpretation of sound and built in dictionaries. For Lucier (or the two more modern examples), the shaping force is the technical apparatus.
More to come, in less brainstormy form.
