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language-of-trees · 5 years

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This is my diary of a 140-day correspondence with the Providence River and its watershed. It is inspired by the poet Maggie Nelson, who spent a summer as a “canal sitter,” bearing witness to damage and desire by the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

“Meanwhile the sitters have lived here forever / Their job is to sit and watch for new life / Sit and see if anything is growing, has grown, will grow,” she writes in the first section of her canal diaries. “Sit and see what is left after all human attempts / to strange it. What could possibly be born.”

Every sound you hear in this piece – field recordings from along the river, readings of Nelson's diaries and mine, multiple recordings of Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres” – was played back into the river with a waterproof speaker and recorded with a hydrophone. I think of this as a form of dialogical editing with a river that appears, at times, to be silent.

This river has witnessed indigenous care and European colonization, oyster digging and diversion and pollution, burial under a parking lot and “revitalization” into a Venetian simulacrum. Generations of people have traveled with and against and along it.

This piece is about how water moves matter, shapes contours.

I see a sign in a café about a cooperative kelp farming opportunity. “No experience necessary, just an open mind,” it said. And something about heart, but the bottom of the page was torn. “Please get in contact with me!” it said, but all the slips were gone.

I saw a rough texture on the surface of the river, where the geese were yesterday. A thin layer of the river had frozen. The darkness of the water still showed through. I wondered where the geese had gone.

Trees in the distance, as if that was the horizon. So many little shells. Bends and corners, the sound, a little bench.

Dreamt last night that I could listen to the river in winter. I dreamt that I could hear it freezing and melting, becoming and unbecoming. I heard its chill, its rush, the whiteness of ice.

In Newport: No Picnicking or Sunbathing on Rocks or Beach. No one in sight, no sun in sight.

Little glinting bits of metal. Trapped by the tide.

I come upon what appeared to be a horn sticking out of the sidewalk to the height of my shoulders. It's covered in layers and layers of plastic wrap. Beneath that, some kind of thick cloth. Beneath that, who knows. At the tip of the horn, the thinnest filament of tree.

I see a USPS truck being towed (??) near the river. Sirens.

Floating past me tonight, on the same dock as Friday: a red tulip, stem facing toward me, just too far. Sunshine Island.

Seaweed swaying, speaker swaying.

And, on the far bank, right above the water line, in white painted words: WHERE WILL WE GO WHEN THE WATER RISES

I see a tour bus covered in a language that I can't identify, parked next to sidewalk, door open, no one in sight. I see an entire lot full of buses, double decker, single decker, one with the landmarks of Washington DC listed on the side. A ghost tour.

The iridescent slick: a shattered surface, blooming and strobing.

“You used to love pretending to die. More than killing,” my dad tells me.

These days are thundering.

An account of the siren song: “The music crept by me upon the waters … I cannot describe it accurately, but it was low and somehow distant – a natural singing one might call it, reminiscent of the waves and the wind.”

Another: “Their song was so unearthly that it forced those who heard it to realize the inhumanness of all human singing.”

A sign along the Woonasquatucket: Some see a weed / Some see a wish.

Hydrophone in the water: that buzzing sound. The waves would sometimes bash it against nearby surfaces: concrete, rock, wood. The sound of impact. Not water itself, but the things that water touched, its outline. Not the way that water held it, but the way that water brought it somewhere else. Water as a shadow – audible at the edges.

Whale calls tacked onto the wall. Echolocation, I see, “helps determine size, shape, speed, distance and internal structure of an object in the water.”

The metal part of my microphone is in the river now. The Wild Place. A robin’s egg. Skunk cabbages.

I step over pieces of swan to record for the last time, which was not the last time.

Jellyfish in the river, like little balls of smoke.

I see those signs in the shape of yellow diamonds: END.

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language-of-trees · 5 years

Audio

This month, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is undertaking a “4 for Fair Food Tour,” visiting four major state universities to demand that they cut their contracts with Wendy’s, the last major fast food company not to sign onto the CIW’s Fair Food Program, which raises wages and prevents abuses in the fields. The Student/Farmworker Alliance and Brown Student Labor Alliance helped to organize a Northeast solidarity bus to the action at Ohio State University in Columbus. This diary is a (partial) account of that action.

Even when recording, this was a challenging piece to make. I recorded a lot of audio, but the pieces that I recorded weren't necessarily representative of the weekend as a whole. Traveling light meant that I didn't bring headphones, and so didn't monitor recordings as they were happening. Recording while participating (in an energetic rally and march!) meant that it was hard to prevent clipping or handling noise at times.

The editing process posed questions of both form and content. I knew almost immediately that it would have to be longer than five minutes, but I couldn't include everything. There were many components that I felt were important: a small portion of the 30-hour roundtrip bus ride, some background about what the action was, some recording from the action itself, and some representation of community togetherness (i.e. the world the action created). The trouble was choosing short clips that could do justice to this amazing action, which was the result of so much thought and labor. My intention is to invite people into the campaign to Boycott Wendy's: to give them a sense of what this action was, and (in a sense) to re-create its power. I am recording as a participant, not an observer. But I also want to share this piece with people who were there. They are my audience, too.

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language-of-trees · 5 years

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Archive

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I am contemplating an interdisciplinary/multimedia. research project in Malaysia for the summer. The proposal I submitted included sound as one of the media/forms that I will employ (alongside photography, interviews, autoethnography, and critical reflection). I want to use this space to begin to think about how I might incorporate sound (as method, as media, as mode of expression) in the project, with reference to some of the work from this week.

My proposed project is about food, nostalgia, and diasporic intimacy in Malaysia. I initially hesitated to pursue this topic because I was afraid of falling into the language and imagery of guidebooks. I worried that images of food – stalls! aromas! spices! – might occlude histories of (neo)colonial intervention, transnational movement, and racial formation. In short, I worried that it would be ahistorical – static, eternalizing, sublime – as Western representations of the “Orient” have historically been.

"An echo is nothing if not historical. To varying degrees, it is a faded facsimile of an original sound, a reflection of time passed,” writes Mark Smith in “Echo,” his essay on the sonic and the practice of history. Can a research practice (specifically, a research practice that incorporates sound) embody the ethos of an echo?

Smith doesn’t seem to think so. He argues that “recordings are inherently ahistorical and, as such, not only fail to communicate which constituencies heard what and how and why; they also lull unwitting listeners into thinking that what they are hearing is freighted with the same meaning as the sound (or silence) in its original context.” I like this, but I don’t think recordings are inherently ahistorical: context matters, as does audience.

Consider Emeka Ogboh’s Market Symphony. During the NPR piece, he spoke to the reporter about how he listened to the piece: what the hawkers were saying, and why. Listeners from Lagos would probably understand this context – there was a note on his site about his work made a Nigerian man think he was having an out-of-body experience, and prompted his first trip home in years. I think it’s possible to critique Ogboh’s work as the kind of sublime spectacle I worry about creating: the din of the market, the city, the postcolonial multitudes. But withholding assumptions about audience allows for a more nuanced interpretation of the work.

For some people, art means immortal objects. In Lolita, Nabokov writes about “aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.” But maybe sound can help expose the “fragility of objecthood,” to quote Arjun Appadurai. “All things are brief deposits of this or that property, photographs that conceal the reality of motion from which their objecthood is a momentary respite,” he writes in The Social Life of Things. Recorded sound, of course, is in the most literal sense a record of vibrations. Maybe sound is, in some way, better equipped to attend to the reality of motion – in other words, to history.

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language-of-trees · 5 years

Audio

What shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare? (Robin D.G. Kelley)

Outside Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, in Central Falls, there are signs that say "No trespassing / No photography / No video recording / Authorized vehicles only." A few yards down the road, there's an underpass. Cars go under; trains go over. On each side, more signs: BLIND / UNDERPASS / SOUND / HORN. I recorded most of these sounds from the other side of the underpass – the other side of blindness.

You who guard my sleep, dream, and a delirium mined with signs. I have the vision and you have the tower, the heavy key chain, and a gun trained on a ghost. I have sleepiness, with its silky touch and essence. You have to stay up watching over me lest sleepiness take the weapon from your hand before your eye can see it. (Mahmoud Darwish)

"For some time I have been thinking about how to convey the message of police and prison abolition to you, but I know that as a poet, it is not my job to win you over with a persuasive argument, but to impart to you a vibrational experience that is capable of awakening your desire for another world," writes Jackie Wang in "The Prison Abolitionist Imagination: A Conversation." Her piece, a chapter in her book Carceral Capitalism, brings together diaries and memories, prose and poetry, her voice and others'. She attends, throughout, to the rhythm and the imagery of prophetic dreams. "Everywhere I look I see sleepwalkers under the spell of the prison," she writes. "What counter-spell is powerful enough to break the prison’s stranglehold on our imaginations?"

Imperfectly heard, obscured by an incessant jamming, forced to change wave lengths two or three times in the course of a broadcast, the Voice of Free Algeria could hardly ever be heard from beginning to end. It was a choppy, broken voice. (Franz Fanon)

The horns that I recorded on either side of the underpass have an insistent, dialogic quality. At the same time, this conversation seems to represent the (physical, economic, ideological) commerce between prisons and the rest of society. The final element of my recording is a friend performing the language of sleep. She begins, again, to draw the shadows that words leave in humid air. Hers is a choppy, broken voice: the language of dreams and desire, the language of elsewhere.

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language-of-trees · 5 years

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Representation

This information can never be lost, only irrevocably given in transit. We could never provide a whole bunch of smooth transitions for this order of ditches and hidden spans. There's just this open seriality of terminals in off transcription. Some people want to run things, other things want to run. If they ask you, tell them we were flying. Knowledge of freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break.

– Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons

I would like to return for a moment to the comment I made at the end of class last week. I was responding to someone's suggestion that Julia Yeznick should maybe have devoted her time to "bigger" subjects. What I was trying to convey is that we should be skeptical of the "big" subjects, the serious and the rigorous, the monumental. This is a conversation I've been having this semester with respect to the process of conceiving and funding a research project. When people in anthropology (her field) talk about "meaty" subjects, my research advisor told me, 99 percent of the time they mean other people's pain. And I think we should resist that impulse, to "suspend damage" (as Eve Tuck puts it) and focus instead on desire.

I think there is something admirable about spending a year training with a small theater group. I am intrigued by the idea of sensory ethnography, but in this case I am thinking about creative practice. I appreciate when art tries to capture (or be!) little pieces of the world, fragments of a city, specks on the wind that runs through a landscape. I am suspicious of totality. I'm not trying to say that these little pieces can be severed from their wider context – of course not, and I sympathize with critiques of Yeznick's work that engage with that context. But what I want to do, more than anything, is sit and listen. From a single spot. The worldliness of little desires like that.

I bring this up, both to clarify my thinking and because it relates directly to what Kisliuk and Halberstam are saying. The former is interested in how to "present or re-present the experiential since performance is experience." Ultimately, the boundaries between scholarship and experience are erased. I want to propose (and I'm sure others have done this before me) that the boundary between text and performance be erased: all ethnography, not just the ethnography of music, is a performance (of authority, or rigor, or subjectivity, depending on the author and the context). I've been reluctant to begin writing about Halberstam because I don't think I'd be able to stop. And now I'm out of space. (I'm planning to read his whole book now.) I will engage, for now, by reproducing one sentence and posing one question.

The sentence: "I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely."

The question(s): I am taking classes at this university that style themselves as critical, as radical. We read revolutionaries. And yet, some of these classes look and feel the same as the disciplines they rail against: lectures and sections, essays and grades. Why so unimaginative? Where is the radical pedagogy?

And a brief note about the 99% Invisible piece, which I loved. A reaction to these professionals, one I almost never have: maybe I could do this work. I could see myself doing this.

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language-of-trees · 5 years

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Early evening, a guy with a shopping cart full of debris.

He speaks in a raspy whisper, so if you want to hear him

you have to get very close to his mouth.

They dump down here at night, he says. Always have. Pure

economics. They pay a guy like me 50 bucks

to come dump. But I don’t dump, he says.

I collect, he says.

– Maggie Nelson, “The Canal Diaries”

In this recording, I depart from a canal. I embark for a canal. I record across a canal. A canal is an artificial waterway constructed to allow the passage of people through water, or water to people.

I begin at the Canal Street Subway Station in Manhattan. The street traces the path of a bygone waterway, which conveyed runoff from Fresh Water Pond. Because of pollution from factories and tanneries, this pond rapidly outgrew its name. It became a covered sewer, which quickly became an open sewer, which became a street. Maybe the present-day subway station, being underground, has a secret affinity with this buried history of waste.

I am departing, via the East River, for the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. This is the canal that Maggie Nelson writes about in her "Canal Diaries," a place of overturned strollers and shopping carts, tires and discarded tabloids. Gowanus is a Superfund site. On top of its surface lies an iridescent and ever-moving film, beautiful and terrible. I am embarking on what will be a months-long project on water by paying a visit to the canal that inspired the work that inspires me.

I am recording across the tracks of the subway, which cleaves and conveys at once. This is a piece about passage: everyday passage between boroughs, the trans-Pacific passage of the erhu, the passage of waste and the work of repair, and the inevitability of submergence.

#passage

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language-of-trees · 5 years

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Voice

More thoughts on the public. Part of my association between the medium of sound and the idea of "public" might have something to do with public radio. At least within the San Francisco milieu I am from, public radio is generally the only kind of nonfiction audio that people listen to. I am interested in how "NPR" became such a recognizable signifier for a certain set of aesthetic and political values. I think the Sonic IDs perfectly encapsulate the ethos of public radio, down to its wealthy and windswept setting. I do like the work (and the institutions of public radio), but I'd like to draw out its anodyne and agreeable quality. There's a sense that no one could disagree with public radio (the soothing voices, the gentle humor, the "stories") – only monsters would consider defunding it. However, as Chenjerai Kumanyika's piece showed, public radio is not as inclusive or as neutral as it presents itself to be. It, too, is a site of the reproduction of race and class, gender and empire. I am interested in tracing the limits of public radio: the stories it won't pursue, the jokes it won't tell.

Benedict Anderson writes about how mass print forms (the novel, the newspaper) helped interpellate subjects into the imagined community of the modern nations. Jurgen Habermas discusses the role of "reading publics" in the formulation and transformation of the public sphere. In that vein, I am interested in local public radio stations and the ways they help constitute a "listening public" in a given community. Who is included and excluded? Who represents whom, and on whose behalf?

I know that radio used to be a dominant mass media form, exercising the kind of hegemonic influence that was later ascribed to television and the internet. My focus on public radio is the result, I am assuming, of relatively recent developments (although I am unfamiliar with the specifics). For the future: Given Spotify's recent acquisition of Gimlet, are we embarking on a new era of sonic commodification and mass circulation?

I don’t have much space to consider the other reading and listening assignments from the past two weeks, but I will return to those in the future as they come up. Briefly, on Jackson: I am intrigued by this work, but I would be interested in a conversation on the purpose of (re)circulating damaging speech. Weidman's analysis of the "associations between voice and individuality, authorship, agency, authority, and power" very much dovetails with my interest in media and construction of modern subjects. I wonder if sound (for its physical and affective qualities, rather than its signifying functions) might help us escape empiricism (i.e. the transparency of language). Is sound more suited to negating the boundary between form and content, mind and body?

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language-of-trees · 5 years

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One day, I was walking around North Beach and I went into this shop. It sold objects lost and recovered: menus from long-ago banquets, anatomical posters, the tips of fountain pens. I started talking to the older man at the counter, who had lived in San Francisco since the 60s. It'd changed a lot since then, he said. When he first moved to the city, he was in an apartment with a bunch of other young dreamers, maybe near Haight Ashbury. They dreamed of freedom, he may or may not have said. But those days had their excesses. Whenever an advertisement would come on, someone would scream and pounce at the television. They had to stop it, stop the gears of commerce and save their precious minutes.

These are recordings of commercial breaks. Now, there is something quaint about that term. Although we are bombarded by messages and images, waves and radiation, the moments when we are forced to sit through a predetermined interval of advertising seem increasingly rare. I use an ad-blocker and I don't watch TV, so these commercial breaks (as my friends and I watched Survivor on Hulu) seemed like an event. Part of what I wanted to capture is a dialectic of attention and distraction that seems increasingly to lay claim to our time. Another key element is the interplay and overlap of voices. Rather than being passive recipients of commercial messages, I am interested in how the media encounter is less unidirectional than it might seem. Finally, I want to highlight the embodied quality of the media encounter – these recordings are audibly situated in time, in space, and in human bodies.

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language-of-trees · 5 years

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Knowing

Sounds are not classified in Western culture the same way words are (i.e. Foucault’s “author function”). They seem closer to events than objects. But even though sound is not the privileged form of mediation in Western societies, it is still differentially experienced. It is its own business; it has its own modalities of subjection and subjectification. A takeaway.

Steven Feld’s “acoustemology” draws his ethnographic work in Bosavi communities to propose a relational ontology of sound. I’m interested in the relational and how it corresponds to the public. Are sounds, by definition, public? Is language? (Experiences of both are historically and culturally mediated, but that’s not the same.) I am thinking about this in relation to the “art object” as something that is created and possessed. Does the transformation/mediation of the sonic field into Art effect a kind of privatization, an enclosure of the commons? This question is not exclusive to sound, but with sound it’s harder to fool myself into thinking I’ve “created” something from nothing.

Sterne problematizes what he calls the “audiovisual litany,” but I still found many of its axioms at least intuitively convincing. For instance: “Hearing is about affect, vision is about intellect.” Designing sound for the theater, I was always conscious that my work would often work subconsciously, affectively – it was not the “content,” the main event. Maybe this relates to Sterne’s idea of distraction as constitutive part of sonic experience.

With Blue Sky, White River, I consciously listened to the audio without reading the liner notes or looking up the artist first. Perhaps a (doomed?) effort to listen with the clarity of absent context. This has something to do with narrative, too – a will to revelation.

A note on slippage between sound and image, displaced matter and imagined referent. Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone conjured images of ice, but perhaps only because of the spoken introduction. It made me think of a sound I used for a production of Frankenstein. This was a rumbling, looming sound that accompanied scenes in the mountains and the Arctic. It was recorded by Bill Fontana (a sound artist I was working with), if I’m remembering correctly, on the wooden dock of a body of water using vibration-sensitive microphones (maybe shock microphones). This is to say, the actual circumstances and sounds of the recordings were pretty different, but there was an affinity between the images where I imagined Winderen’s project and Frankenstein taking place.

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