|
 |
ACOUSMATIC SPACE
By Erik Granly
Published in Catalogue; Science Fiction & Other worlds_Ann Lislegaard by Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, 2007
Acousmatic Space
Ann Lislegaard’s Sound Projects
I.
When, in 1958, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry presented their musique concrète composition Symphonie pour un homme soul at the World Exhibition in Brussels, it was nothing less than a revolution. Distorted and manipulated sounds, noise sequences, cut ups and loops, as well as multilayered voices, superimposed in order to present human alienation in all possible forms. And add to this, the monstrous sound and light installation by architect Le Corbusier and composer Edgar Verèse, Le Poème Électronique, consisting of 400 loudspeakers placed in a small room with the sole purpose of performing the history of mankind in crackling electronic music. In both works, the staging of time and space, and of a human body sensing the immediate and the distant environment while searching for a direction to walk in and for a possible identity in a mediated, technological world, make up the underlying, creative ambition.
Stunned by these two works at the World Exhibition, the young Danish composer Else Marie Pade (1924-) returned to Copenhagen, to produce, same year, her early masterpiece, Symphonie magnetophonique, a 19 minute attempt to stage a day and night in Copenhagen through mediated and manipulated everyday sounds: typewriters, trams, the ringing bells of the City Hall, the fireworks in Tivoli, marching soldiers, sirens, singing birds, all presented in the most obscure rhythms. Through the circular structure of this work and the ambient sounds of Copenhagen mixed with amorphous and mysterious technological recordings, Pade approached the Danish metropolis in its international, provincial and nationalistic diversity, and on this threshold discretely presented a political interpretation of her own time.
For years Else Marie Pade’s works were forgotten only to suddenly appear, seemingly out of the blue, in the young Danish electronica scene and among laptop composers of the 1990ies. Due to her consistent use of urban ambient sounds and to the confrontation of these sounds in the rhythmic structuring of her compositions, Pade anticipated a number of the critical questions that would define the emerging sound art scene in the years to come. This goes particularly for the overall interest in the ambient sounds of everyday life, for the possibility of obtaining a female identity in art, and for the investigation of the manipulated human voice.
The interest in the staging of urban and domestic life, and of identity questions is pivotal to understanding Ann Lislegaard’s sound projects, made during more than a decade. An example of the kinship between Pade and Lislegaard can be seen in the work Off Stage (1998), that was installed in a covered passage in the down town area of Bremen, Germany. This work consisted of six loudspeakers embedded in the ceiling of the passage, playing a lopped recording of foot steps 24 hours a day. The visitors passing through the installation would hear their own footsteps echoing off the walls and ceiling, mixing with the recorded steps, hereby creating a cacophony of ambiences. The unique characteristic of the work is that this snapshot of recorded time transforms the space of the installation in conjunction with the changing sounds of the day and the city. As an outdoor installation, the changing rhythms of daily life in Bremen (working hours, rush hours, restaurant hours, and the coming of night) would seep in and color the perception of the work. The uneasiness of walking alone at night, would most likely increase when noticing the recorded footsteps, as if other visitors could be heard, but were nowhere to been seen. This transformation of reality is a recurring gesture in Lislegaard’s installations and indicates very discretely, but effectively, how the critical and the political implications of her works come about as the gesture of change.
Another of Lislegaard’s sound installations from 1998, Short Cut, was installed in a narrow passage in Aarhus, Denmark. This work consisted of one parabolic loudspeaker creating a defined and demarcated zone of sound that the visitor would walk into on her way through the passage. The sounds used in the installation were recorded at the exact same location where the speaker was later installed. The audience walking through the passage would be confronted with two soundscapes that could not be distinguished from one another. Both the ‘natural’ soundscape and the recorded one would present slamming doors, birds singing, shouting voices, cars driving by, but some of these sounds would be out of sync with reality not referring to anything visual. Lislegaard would hereby produce the uncanny feeling of being in an authentic time and space that, however, would turn out to be partly manipulated and illusionary. The world as a recorded world is put to a halt, but even if it in some sense is dead and historical, it can live up yet another time and show its phantasmagoric face with a gesture similar to Paris of the 19th Century in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. This play between representation and appearance, between acoustic cognition and visual representation introduces one of the most important themes in Lislegaard’s sound art: the notion of the acousmatic.
II.
It was Pierre Schaeffer who introduced this word ‘acousmatic’ to the vocabulary of modern media art. Generally speaking, an acousmatic voice is a voice where the speaker cannot be seen, as in the case of the telephone conversation or of the radio speaker. The acousmatic voice being the voice without a body or, a body consisting of sound alone is at the same time ‘a body without organs’ to use the phrase of Gilles Deleuze, who insists that ‘the body without organs’ is not just to be understood as “radiophonic”, but “as a plateau in communication … a component of passage.”. The question is then, how this voice producing its ever changing and transforming world is to be understood? In The Voice in Cinema, French composer and film critic Michel Chion turns to Schaeffer’s discussion of the acousmatic to explain why this notion of the voice could be of interest in art. Chion uses a brief story from a construction site in Paris to illustrate this:
“Near the Forum des Halles, which in 1978 was a large new shopping mall in the middle of Paris, a giant cement construction presented to the passerby the spectacle of a blind wall, an immense neutral rectangle, empty and vertical like a blank page. One day someone painted onto the surface a small walking man and his shadow – occupying about one hundredth of the wall. The moment this figure appeared, the visual space was constructed entirely around him. His presence gave the space an inclination, a perspective, a left and right, a front and rear. It’s the same for any sonic space, empty or not. If a human voice is part of it, the ear is inevitably carried toward it, picking it out, and structuring the perception of the world around it. The ear attempts to analyze the sound in order to extract meaning from it – as one peels and squeezes a fruit – and always tries to localize and if possible identify the voice.”
The human voice will structure the world in a sonic space, Chion claims. To Ann Lislegaard it is, however, not only a question of ‘localizing’ and ‘identifying’ the voice. To her, the human voice is an object for epistemological research, an opportunity for experimenting with language while searching for other linguistic approaches, new possible worlds to explore.
In the installation I-You-Later-There (2000) this idea is pronounced. Situated within the temperate world of the white cube Lislegaard has connected the sound to a flickering artificial light. At the very same moment the voice begins to speak, the otherwise darkened room is lit up. Technically this is achieved through a color organ, connecting the intensity of the light with the frequencies of the replayed sounds thereby creating an intimate bind between the female voice and the flickering light source. Installed in the space is a grey painted floor (3 x 4 meters) leaning against the wall (reminding of the blind wall of which Michel Chion spoke). It is onto this construction that the light is projected transforming the wall into both a tilted stage where the action is performed, and into a screen where Lislegaard’s movie without images is projected, a movie seemingly paying tribute to Guy Debord’s early blind film Howlings in Favour of Sade (1952). Listening to the voice in Lislegaard’s I-You-Later-There, it is, however, the experimental radio drama of ars acustica that comes to mind.
Throughout the work, a female protagonist describes her domestic activities in an apartment in a sober tone. The summary of her daily activities is fused with a mulititude of semi-abstract environmental sounds: cars passing, the hissing of a New York heating system, squeaking floor boards, water coming to a boil etc. At some point the female protagonist accompanied by the sounds of walking abruptly informs us: “I like the grey color on the floor. I turn on the light. I walk across the room.” (I-You-Later-There, 00:00-00:12). In these lines, the voice seems to represent both the protagonist and the work itself and it seems that the space she is describing is identical to the one in which the visitor finds himself. However, it soon becomes clear that the painted grey floor, the flickering light and her constantly moving around is rather a description of an imaginary space with a few physical access points and in this way similar to the set up of the installation.
At a crucial point on the sound track (3:42-4:10), the woman pauses and the only thing that can be heard is her playing with what might be a stack of cards producing a loud and intense sound. Immediately after, a multitrack of maybe five to eight layers of the female voice is heard as if the voice had been cut up, reproduced, and multiplied into ‘a stack’ of voices. Here it is completely impossible to understand any of the words. The room is totally lit up, a bright smear of light accompanied by an inferno of voices. The light measures the space, it lends perspective and depth to the room, but only the grey painted screen is made visible underlining the acousmatic quality. Since nothing can be seen that does not relate immediately to the superimposed voices, which blasts from the loudspeakers. The use of multilayered voice introduces one of the decisive components in Lislegaard’s sound art: the research on the human voice and the attempt to discover new meaning in the spoken language. This might even be a search for a whole new language as it can be found in the tape experiments of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who experimented extensively with the cut-up technique. Another example of this linguistic research in Lislegaard’s sound installations is the work No-no, where a female voice whispers the word ‘no’ over and over again with just small variations regarding rhythm, intonation and breath. With a voice that alters between pleasure and fear, sensuality and anxiety, Lislegaard manages to raise the question of the female identity. She turns to the materiality of language, and suggests that the research she is conducting could be seen as yet another attempt to discover new phonetic insights. Similarly in the work ! from 2001, Lislegaard presents a female voice that does not speak a word, only her breathing can be heard for 1:02. The strange attraction of the sound track is again the changing rhythm of pleasure and anxiety. It becomes a voice of ambiguous communication. From this threshold the voice without words that continues to produce sounds and rhythms of the body introduces a feminist approach to the world, an approach where the constant moving back and forth on the threshold becomes the very definition of the female identity, exactly as it was the case in I-You-Later-There.
III.
The investigation of the materiality of voice and of language as such, point to the impact that modernist writers like Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett have had on Lislegaard’s work. In the case of Stein, the attempt to transform seemingly banal domestic activities to a world of poetic knowledge points to the core of Lislegaard’s praxis, and the same goes for the stuttering of Beckett’s characters, who like Lislegaard’s women confronts the materiality of the voice. More important than Stein and Beckett, however, with regard to Lislegaard’s recent projects is the sub-literary genre of Science Fiction as in the “What-if” scenarios of the two computer animations Bellona and Crystal World with references to sci-fi writers Samuel r. Delaney and J.G. Ballard. However, it is of interest to see Lislegaard’s animations in the light of the German writer Paul Scheerbart’s (1863-1915) book Glass Architechture from 1914, where the notion of an ‘utopian architecture’ is introduced.
Already in the 1920s and in the 1930s Scheerbart played a significant role among artists, intellectuals and architects like Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. It is therefore not surprising that the German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, turned to Scheerbart when outlining a possible future way of living, in his 1933 essay “Experience and Poverty”. Even if Benjamin at a very crucial point in the essay discusses Glass Architechture, then it is another work by Scheerbart that interests him the most: the almost forgotten science fiction novel Lesabéndio. An Asteroid Novel from 1913. Benjamin writes:
“There are novels by him that from a distance look like works by Jules Verne. But quite unlike Verne, who always has ordinary French or English gentlemen of leisure traveling around the cosmos in the most amazing vehicles, Scheerbart is interested in inquiring how our telescopes, our airplanes, rockets can transform human beings as they have been up to now into completely new, lovable, and interesting creatures. Moreover, these creatures talk in a completely new language. And what is crucial about this language is its arbitrary, constructed nature, in contrast to organic language.”
What Benjamin finds in Scheerbart’s novel is the recurrent attempt to think the human being in its (future) technological environment and to suggest that technology can transform humankind into better (and more lovable) creatures. With regard to Lislegaard’s sound works it is, however, equally important that Benjamin points to the creation of a new language as well. This language is not an organic language, but has – to use Benjamin’s phrase – a “constructed nature”. It is not just a language based on the transformation through technology, it is a language constructed for “new creatures”, in a new, only possible world. Later the same year, 1933, Benjamin would return to Scheerbart’s novel in his radio play Lichtenberg trying to articulate this language of the future. That Benjamin would use radio art to further explore the potential of Scheerbart’s writings is rather intriguing considering Ann Lislegaard’s sound art.
The other writer that Walter Benjamin repeatedly would return to in the essay “Experience and Poverty” is Bertolt Brecht. Brecht is of interest in our case because of Lislegaard’s most recent sound installation Founding of the City of Mahagonny, shown in Kunsthallen Nikolaj in Copenhagen 2007, and to be understood as a direct response to Brecht’s play The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. This work both reminds of Lislegaard’s early sound works and approaches the imaginative world of a new language that plays such an important role in the later works. The installation consists of a small plateau placed in a darkened room. Two loudspeakers are placed closely next to each other and independently of the voice that structures the sound track a light is turned on and off. Again Lislegaard uses a female voice, here layered on two tracks that constantly loop and interrupt each other, are cut up, and superimposed in ten or more layers. The woman is reading the opening of Brecht’s play over and over again, at various speeds and variations, even reading part of it backwards. The founding of a city becomes in Lislegaard’s productive destruction of Brecht’s text an attempt to create through alienation. Again the voice becomes both the tool and the medium for this truly Brechtian enterprise.
On the small stage the loudspeakers stand closely next to each other leaving room enough for somebody to enter and to perform. Sitting in the dark waiting for this to happen or for the room to lit up yet another time, the acousmatic space, finding ever new shapes according to the sounds filling the room, begins to show its potential.
Bio:
Error! Contact not defined. is a Post.doc fellow at The Department of the Arts and Cultural Studies at The University of Copenhagen. His current research project concerns the early European sound and radio art. He is the co-editor (with Brandon LaBelle) of Radio Territories, Errant Bodies Press: New York 2007.
1 For a similar discussion of rhythms, see Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis. Space, Time and Everyday Life (trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore), London & NewYork: Continuum 2004, pp. 51-56
2 Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism & Schzophrenia (Trans. Brian Massumi), London/ New York: Continuum 1987, p. 150, p. 158.
3 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (ed. & trans. Claudia Gorbman), New York: Columbia University Press 1999, p. 5
4 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” in Selected Writings vol. 2.2 (ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland & Gary Smith), Cambridge (MA): The Belknap Press of Harvard UP 2005, pp. 733-34. Ibid. p. 733.
|
|