2011 Tag

Orpheux Larnyx

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

2011

Vocal work for three artificial voices and soprano, feat. Stelarc.
Music by Erin Gee, text by Margaret Atwood.

I made Orpheux Larynx while in residence at the MARCs Auditory Laboratories at the University of Western Sydney, Australia in the summer of 2011. I was invited by Stelarc to create a performance work with an intriguing device he was developing there called the Prosthetic Head, a computerized conversational agent that responds to keyboard-based chat-input with an 8-bit baritone voice. I worked from the idea of creating a choir of Stelarcs, and developed music for three voices by digitally manipulating the avatar’s voice. Eventually Stelarc’s avatar voices were given the bodies of three robots: a mechanical arm, a modified segueway, and a commercially available device called a PPLbot. I sang along with this avatar-choir, while carrying my own silent avatar with me on a djgital screen.

It is said that after Orpheus’ head was ripped from his body, he continued singing as his head floated down a river. He was rescued by two nymphs, who lifted his head to the heavens, to become a star. In this performance, all the characters (Stelarc’s, my voice, Orpheus, Euridice, the nymphs) are blended into intersubjective robotic shells that speak and sing on our behalf. The flexibility of the avatar facilitates a pluratity of voices to emerge from relatively few physical bodies, blending past subjects into present but also possible future subjects. Orpheus is tripled to become a multi-headed Orpheux, simultaneously disembodied head, humanoid nymph, deceased Euridice. The meaning of the work is in the dissonant proximity between the past and present characters, as well as my own identity inhabiting the bodies and voices of Stelarc’s prosthetic self.

Credits

Music, video and performance by Erin Gee. Lyrics “Orpheus (1)” and “Orpheus (2)” by Margaret Atwood. Robotics by Damith Herath. Technical Support by Zhenzhi Zhang (MARCs Robotics Lab, University of Western Sydney). Choreography coaching by Staci Parlato-Harris.

Special thanks to Stelarc and Garth Paine for their support in the creation of the project.

This research project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and MARCS Auditory Labs at the University of Western Sydney. The Thinking Head project is funded by the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Music: Orpheux Larynx © 2011 . Lyrics are the poems by Margaret Atwood: “Orpheus (1)” and “Orpheus (2)”, from the poetry collection Selected Poems, 1966 – 1984 currently published by Oxford University Press © 1990 by Margaret Atwood. In the United States, the poems appear in Selected Poems II, 1976 – 1986currently published by Houghton Mifflin © 1987 by Margaret Atwood. In the UK, these poems appear in Eating Fire, Selected Poetry 1965 – 1995 currently published by Virago Press, ©1998 by Margaret Atwood. All rights reserved.

Video

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

Gallery

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

BodyRadio

BodyRadio (2011)

2011

Four-part score for electronic voices in organic bodies debuted as part of New Adventure in Sound Art’s Deep Wireless Festival of Transmission Art, Toronto, Canada.

Body Radio is a composition for four performers that reverses the interiority/exteriority of a radio, which is a human voice in an electronic body. Small wireless microphones are placed directly in the mouths of the performers, who are each facing a guitar amplifier. The performers control the sensitivity of both the amplifier’s receiving function and the microphone’s sending function in accordance with the score. The final sounds are a combination of inner mouth noises, breathing, and varying pitches feedback controlled by the opening and closing of mouths.

Exhibition/Performance history

New Adventure in Sound Art’s Deep Wireless Festival of Transmission Art, Toronto, Canada

Video

BodyRadio (2011)

Voice of Echo

Voice of Echo Series (2011)
Works for video, audio, and archival inkjet prints.

2011

Propelling the mythology of Narcissus and Echo into a science-fiction future, I translate Echo’s golem-like body into a digital environment.

I became Echo in a silent performance for camera: a love song for an absent Narcissus (who is necessary to give Echo presence at all!). I later interpret the digital data from these images not in imaging software, but instead in audio software, revealing a noisy landscape of glitch, expressivity and vocality.  I bounced the data back and forth between the audio and image softwares, “composing” the visual and audio work through delays, copy/paste of image. While the natural world and human perspective created a cruel hierarchy between a human subject/image and a golem-like nymph who was invisible except as voice, technology and machine perspective allow the image and the sound to coexist and presuppose one another. The work is a futurist, emancipatory tale of non-human wrenching itself from dependency on human and instead revealing itself as an entangled, co-constitutive force.

What is the Voice of Echo?  It exists as repetition – of human voice, of Narcissus, a voice that extends anothers’ voice, this other body is somehow more tangible than Echo’s own body. The voice of echo and other non-human voices are unconscious and environmental, ambient, existing beyond symbolic content, the repetitions. The voice of Echo exists as a bouncing of processes, a distortion, a glitch, born of a love and desire uttered but never really heard.

I took stills from this love song and translated the raw visual data into an audio editing program, choosing particular interpretation methods to “compose” the echo.  I bounced this data between photoshop and audacity multiple times, eventually coming at glitched sounds of data interpretation, as well as an accompanying distorted image for each “song”.  Echo may only traditionally exist as a re-utterance of Narcissus’ voice, but in this case her cyberfeminist reimagining points at perverse loops somewhere between love, repetition and becoming.

Exhibition history

Dream Machines. TCC Chicago. Curated by Her Environment, August 16-30 2016.

Voice of Echo (solo exhibition) Gallerywest, Toronto. Curated by Evan Tyler, January 5–27, 2012.

Parer Place Urban Screens. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane AUS. May 18-20 2012.

Uncanny Sound. TACTIC, Cork, Ireland. Curated by Liam Slevin, September 14-24 2012.

Contemporary Projects. Curated by David Garneau and Sylvia Ziemann, Regina SK, 2011.

Links

Essay by G. Douglas Barrett (2011)
Review - Zouch Magazine Toronto

Sounds

Voice of Echo (2011)

Video

Voice of Echo: Song of Love for Technological Eyes (2011)
silent HD video for monitor playback, 18:01 (looped)  Photography by Kotama Bouabane.

Echo is in love with recording technology, particularly the video camera. The mirrors emanating from her throat are her concrete manifestations of her voice – the lovesong intended for the camera’s eye.

Above is the “original video work” that got the call and response process started.

Gallery

No grid was found for: Voice of Echo.

Voice of Echo (2011)

Essay by G. Douglas Barrett: Echoes of Narcissus, Erin Gee’s “Voice of Echo”

By G. Douglas Barrett, 2011

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

—Metamorphosis, Ovid

Presented as the centrepiece of Erin Gee’s exhibition at Contrary Projects is the artist’s work for single channel video, Voice of Echo: Song of Love for Technological Eyes (2011). A viewer is confronted with a portrait view of the artist staring directly into the camera while solemnly donning a white latex head garment, a cap which covers her head and appears to extend to cover some of her lower neck. Sternly, though in a thoroughly relaxed manner, Gee begins to pull small objects from her mouth—miniature circular mirrors varying somewhat in size—and attaches each of them to her face. Eventually the artist’s face becomes nearly entirely covered with the small reflective surfaces, each resting at a different angle and reflecting presumably light from inside the artist’s studio. Occasionally bits of her own body are visible in the mirrors—a glimpse of the underside of a finger, for instance, as she finishes affixing one of the circular surfaces. At other times it’s unclear exactly what is reflected in the tiny mirrors: Do we see more revealed of the artist’s studio, a view of the video camera, or, if only for a split-second, perhaps a momentary fragment of my own image as viewer?

While nominally invoking Echo, the musical nymph found in Greek mythology who looses all ability to speak except for the imitation of the speech of others, Gee’s video clearly refers to both main characters in Ovid’s tale of Echo and Narcissus. Voice of Echo: Song of Love for Technological Eyes: Gee’s title contains at least a couple of non-sequiturs: the voice of a mute character; a song which is silent intended only for the eyes. The small mirrors we see in the video perform a role that is both reflective and yet foreclosing. Foreclosing in the way in which the performer’s face is gradually masked, converted from an object of the viewer’s gaze to an object which reflects it’s own state of technological mediation.

Further still, the mirrors point to video art’s alleged “narcissist” history, its mode of hermetic “self-absorption,” which “enclose[s] the body between two machines, camera and monitor.”(1) In discussing seminal video works of the 1970s such as Vito Acconci’s 1971 work Centers—in which the artist stands with his forefinger outstretched pointing to the center of the video frame—art historian Rosalind Krauss comes one breath away from positing narcissism as “the condition of the entire genre” of video art.(2) Of course Krauss was writing this in 1970 when the widespread use of video technologies gave to physicality the novel dimension of teleportive mobility. When bodies gained the ability to move freely through space and time, art seemed to have shifted its focus from the referential category of the icon to the phenomenal—the “here-and-now,” present quality of the body. Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975) and John Cage’s famous silent piece 4’33” (1952) are two examples of this aesthetic presence. The latter presents the “bare essentials” of a (musical) performance scenario, while the former involves the reflexive component of Graham’s phenomenological descriptions of his own gesticulations and the observations of spectators as he stares at their reflections. Perhaps a more direct counterpart to Graham’s work is Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece of 1970 in which the artist used body-sized mirrors to convert individual audience members into momentary spectacle, thereby turning the performer/audience relation on its head. These works stand as historical “presence works” par excellence.

The issue now, however, is that not only have the categories of icon and phenomenal presence been shown as doubly embedded—the icon contains its own presence, while the phenomenal functions iconically—but what it means to simply be present in contemporary life has been radically overturned through technology. In our digitally-mediated daily lives we are consistently both “here” and somewhere else. (I’m writing this essay while I check my Facebook, write an email, and think about doing laundry.) Presence is divided and multiple.

Over the course of Gee’s eighteen-minute performance the artist gradually “becomes” the icon of Narcissus and returns full circle to bare presence, all contained within the technological frame of video. Voice of Echo synthesizes the characters of Echo and Narcissus into a single body and enjoins the iconic with the physical. Gee’s video presences the body as technologized while marking it as signifying and gendered. Noting that Freud himself had located a majority of his examples of narcissism in women, writing in her classic essay titled after Narcissus’s feminine counterpart, philosopher Gayatri Spivak had intended to “give woman” (back) to Echo.(3) By virtue of a kind of synaesthetic remapping, Gee enacts a series of givings: icon to presence, sound to sight, Echo to Narcissus, image to music.

While in Gee’s work sound and vision are counterposed and crossed, music and image are presented as interconnected. In Voice of Echo, music works as an intermedial site, a nexus of interconnected media within which sound is present only as absent referent. (As we have learned from Cage, music does not need sound as such.) Sharing the medium of video, music and image are framed together as a single entity. As a mute song, Gee’s wordless performance refers to not only Echo’s inability to speak, but perhaps also to the historical expulsion of language from music, the modernist conception of music as absolute and autonomous. Not only does Gee’s video re-inscribe language into music, it argues for “the condition of the entire genre” of music (Echo) to include Narcissus (video) as well. Or perhaps Voice of Echo points to the always already entwinedness of the two media.

In addition to presenting Voice of Echo as a single-channel video installation, Gee presents (rough) sonifications—digital equivalents of synaesthesia—of the video track of Voice of Echo. Gallery visitors are provided with iPods containing several digital sound files, each track a unique drone texture, a set of “buzzy” soundscapes which generally change subtly, though occasionally jar the listener’s attention with a burst of noise. Also included on the iPods is “album art” created by further manipulating and translating the audio tracks into images that appear on each small iPod screen.

Gee’s use of the iPods is interesting. She explains a wish to “emphasize the [visitors’] technological bodies,” bodies forming a core of the socio-cultural exchange occurring within the context of an art exhibition. While the iPods by no means completely disrupt the normal ebb and flow of schmoozing, the digital playback devices remind us of the less than subtle solipsistic character of the contemporary musical experience: to each her own musical world. Think of a crowded subway. Each passenger sonically insulated from the crowd, isolated within her own “media universe.” The lowercase pronoun—Does the “i” in iPod stand for (mass) Individualism?—echoes Narcissus’s own turn away from the collective musical experience and, as though caught in a feedback loop, his endless fixation upon his own reflected image.

(1) Wagner, Anne M. “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence.” (p. 68). October, Vol. 91. (Winter (2000), pp. 59-80.

(2) Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” (p. 50). October, Vol. 1. (Spring, 1976), pp. 50-64.

(3)Spivak, Gayatri C. “Echo.” (p. 17). New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 1, Culture and Everyday Life. (Winter, 1993), pp. 17-43.

G DOUGLAS BARRETT is an artist, composer, and writer. Drawing equally from the contemporary gallery arts and the performing arts traditions, he has exhibited, performed, and published critical writings throughout North America and Europe. He has presented work at the Incubator Arts Project (New York), Diapason Gallery (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), the Wulf (Los Angeles), Theater Perdu (Amsterdam), Universität der Künste Berlin, Phoebe Zeitgeist Teatro (Milan), Galerie Mark Müller (Zürich), Université de Paris-Est Marne-La-Vallée, the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, UK), and Neutral Ground (Regina). In 2009 Barrett received a DAAD grant to Berlin. He has obtained advanced degrees from California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2006) and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His writings include essays published in the interdisciplinary literary journal Mosaic (University of Manitoba) and Contemporary Music Review, along with “A Text Score Manifesto,” in Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation (John Lely and James Saunders, Eds., New York: Continuum, 2011).