SOUND ESSAY: A DIASPORIC MAKING
A body of
research-based performances committed to not committing to any single framework of listening, but to the interaction across borders of, and ambiguity in, listening. This project consists of performative sound essays that approach sound from
odd angles: What is the sound of pain? How does motherhood change the voice? Why does listening to your own voice make you cringe? What is the difference between the sleeping
and the dead? (Hint: the sound of breathing.)
Sound essay incorporates disparate material sources into a fragmented, yet coherent,
whole as a formal condition of diasporic making. It absorbs, inter alia, archival material, field
recordings, samples, speech fragments, and music, in order to blur the lines of reception
— are we listening to a voice, a witness testimony, a foreign accent, or a spoken melody?
And it is this categorical ambiguity that makes this project a diasporic making. If to be
diasporic in a postcolonial world is to not fully belong in any one place, but instead to
take up residence between identities, then sound essay, with its intentional juxtaposition
of fragmentary listening points, is nothing else than diasporic making.
︎︎︎Performance Documentation Archive︎︎︎
︎︎︎More Info: Research Sources / Performance Log︎︎︎
Performance for helicopter foley, ideological sound design, memes, glow-in-the dark balls with smiley faces, Hollywood films on the Vietnam War, and Wagner.
Performance for scratchy objects, porcelain, styrofoam, foley, rubble, painful sounds, and sounds of pain.
Performance for bad jokes, baddest bitches, speaking backwards, speaking forwards, rage arias, beat drops, sucking sounds and sounds that suck, in response to Florence Foster Jenkins and singing out of tune.
Performance for plastic packaging, pop rocks, carbon dioxide, constructed water and air environments, sugar, radio, samples, foley, and Chinese astrology elements.
Performance for Savasana (Corpse Pose), feigned animal death, foley of diseased lung sounds, die-ins, and holding the breath.
Performance for live voice, recorded interviews, voice effects, and pop rocks.
Performance for eavesdropping, sonic surveillance recordings, breast pumps, assembly instructions, contracts, and supply maintenance.
Performance for SOS signals, maritime audio distress calls, family youtube videos, news fragments on migration, inaudible language, wind, and feedback that navigates oceanic migration as a listening situation.
THE CAVITY WAS AS DEEP AS IT WAS HOLLOW