April 16, 17 & 21 – The Sonic Unconscious: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris & Gina Badger

The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

“When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble like the House of Usher, so that mind and matter get endlessly confounded.”

—Robert Smithson

Pierre Schaeffer’s term acousmatic music—recorded sounds, arranged on tape—produces the first audible interstice between sound and its source. By imagining the cut to be clean, the mechanisms of reproduction create a sonic fetish: the tape. The disembodied sounds of the tape or record, alienated from their sources, create a metaphysical field for exploration of pure sound isolated from the visible. This surgical move, meant to attack the opticentric nature of modernism, relegates the aural into the realm of representation and replicates the privileging of sight. But what is happening at the source? Is Pythagoras unaffected by his students?

Jana Winderen, a sound artist and acoustic researcher based in Oslo with a background in mathematics, chemistry and fine arts, begins her compositional process in any number of unpredictable locations: “in the boat or hanging on a rope in a crevasse.” Describing her work as blind field recording, Winderen often embarks on long treks to search for unique sonic environments to source sounds for her elaborate performances and installations. Using hydrophones to record biotic and abiotic sounds, she then mixes these recordings into her layered compositions—uncanny semblances of inaccessible places.

Winderen wants to bring “all the physical and emotional experiences [of the trip] in addition to the sounds in the mix,” to her work as a composer and installer. Intricate layers of reworked sound create a quality of underwater eco-realism, giving voice to living and non-living underwater forces. Winderen’s work is neither a purely objective representation of hidden worlds, nor purely subjective composition. At ISSUE (4/21), Winderen will continue her investigation into the sound of shrimp, exploring how the smallest creatures of the ocean use sound for communication, orientation, and feeding. Hydrophones—originally a military development—are repurposed, inadvertently producing unexpected qualities not informed by their original design. Here, the production of music and the study of cod are in excess of the technological thought.

One proposition of the Sonic Unconscious is that it supposes music to be a byproduct of another desire. Just as a bird song has nothing to do with human pleasure, it is still appropriated and aestheticized by humans. Bird songs are cultivated, but how do the birds take part in this?

Yolande Harris creates technological interventions in the gaps between phenomenal experience and mapped data. Her practice, fundamentally ecological in nature, takes sound as its primary material and subject and purports to unhinge anthropomorphic concepts through purposeful misuse of technology. Technologies produce machinic images—images or sounds not informed by human consciousness—as a byproduct of their intended purposes. Harris’ work explores this excess. Her project Sun Run Sun sonifies satellite signals through headphones, creating portable composition machines. These compositions are are always in flux, depending on the users’ physical relationships to the satellite.

Fishing for Sound, which Harris will present for The Sonic Unconscious, is a live composition incorporating sonified satellite signals and underwater recordings from hydrophones, grounded by clicking noises appropriated from psychotherapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The composition weaves together recordings of sonic fields outside of human perception. Through the aid of technological devices, the listener navigates—a metaphor often employed by Harris—through these renderings by way of the EMDR clicking, linking bodily movement, like the blinking of an eye, to the navigation of virtual space in the memory. In Harris’s work, sound is the material and central metaphor for the transformation of space.

Navigation is perhaps an apt metaphor for thinking about the above practices because it relies less on presentation of an object through image or playback, and instead suggests provisional linkages between the non-place of the work and the site of the presentation. In order to navigate, you have to be somewhere.

Gina Badger works in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, encompassing new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. Her current thematic concerns deal with urban ecologies and environmental histories, while her projects tend to blur the line between artistic production and reception of the work. Using what she terms critical prosthetics—prosthetic devices that carry out a non-normalizing or hegemonic function—Badger often works in small groups at site specific locations with these tools, creating embodied interventions and explorations in the field.

Transmissions: A Botany of Decolonization creates a critical prosthetic via a scored performance and tape manipulation. During a ferry ride from Boston to Georges Island (selected because of Boston shore’s historic relationship to colonial and military power), a performer listens to a recording of Badger reading excerpts from Winona LaDuke’s The Ethics of Collecting. This performer then recites a section, from memory, to a second performer. The second repeats the text to a third, who is reading a copy of Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. The third then recites a passage that she has been reading, which the second performer repeats, recording it over the initial tape of Badger’s reading. Badger records this performative action on video and plays it back, manipulating the cut-up tape in performance. The transmission of text is the material manifestation of colonialism, manipulating the reception through failures in the mneumonic and machinic function, a kind of de-performance of colonialization.

For The Sonic Unconscious, Badger will lead two afternoon plant walks (4/16 & 4/17) through the Gowanus Canal area with specially developed critical prosthetics exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds, followed by a reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.

Experimentation here is concretely linked to being in the field, to an active exploration of heterotopic space. Expression is a conscious function of the symbolic realm; The Sonic Unconscious brings together artists working on site, working through a wide spectrum in order to elicit material change.