Voiceless is an attempt to understand the experience of sound through silence, the visual and language. The recording is a silent recording of a person speaking to the camera in four different languages. In Voiceless both silence and the body are employed in an exploration of an ‘audible liminal’ in which linguistic sonorities are brought forth from the depths of the human body and silenced with technological means. Its audio/visual documentation instructs the viewer to watch the performance on continuous loop, serving to mask any beginning or end to the piece. The work does not intend to arrive or resolve. Its intention is to invoke an in-between condition and bathe in that condition perpetually. When we realize the potential of the body, as an inter-semiotic sounding board, and position this in combination with modern technology, it offers the artist a sonically liminal situation, brought about by the tension caused when body and technology meet. The body and technology have an uneasy relationship, and this idea of the body and technology inhabiting the same space, is conducive to liminal foregrounding. The meeting of body and technology and/or their fusion offers the artist a tension-filled scenario in which in-between states can be exposed and investigated. In this, and despite the fact that the physical body operates within a virtual field mediated by digital technology, our technological environment remains grounded in the corporeal. No matter how we try to entertain technology at the expense of the material body, the corporeal influence is always in play.

 

A phenomenology of the voice is not only a return to the center of embodied meaning in sound, but a return to the existential voice, to the speaking and listening that occurs with humankind. In the voice of embodied significance lies the what of the saying, the who of the saying, and the I to whom something is said and who may also speak in the saying. In the voice is harbored the full richness of human signification. Thus, not only is there the constant possibility of polyphony in the realm of voiced word, there is also the possibility of a harmonious or disharmonious gestalt in any occurrence of word. Here, there is a counterpart within sounded word that reverses the first approximations of sound and sight in relation to the experience of language-as-word. Vision is allegorical, its compensating logic is motivated by the desire to cover up any incongruity between expression and perception, sign and signification. In a panoramic view of the visual field there is an all-at-once quality to experience. Within the view lies a multiplicity of things united spatially in a gestalt. In listening to voiced word, however, there is a different type of all-at-once gestalt, which, although also serial in a strictly temporal sense, is a gestalt in which the harmonics of voice occur. The “meanings” that are more than merely grammatical ones occur within this all-at-oneness giving voice its amplified sense of possibility.

 

The speaker is capable of saying only what language permits. So the structures of meaning production are always already predetermined in the phallogocentric sense, whatever comes out of your mouth is already predetermined in its range of meaning; whatever you say and however you say it, you are always merely uttering the phallus. The speech situation occurs within the context of full significance. Here not only voice but the face as the indicator of pregnant silence remains part of the entire gestalt. But there also remains the hiddenness of the “silent” voice of inner speech, which like the hidden side of a transcendent thing remains hidden to the other. And beyond both the pregnant silence bespoken by the face and the “outer” silence that does not reveal inner speech, there lies the Open silence of the ultimate horizon. In all three respects there remains a hiddenness that belongs to the center of voiced language.

 

“In the visual I am different to you, at a distance other, and visible to you through this otherness outside your body. In vision you see me all at once, liking or rejecting it and I am through you liking or rejecting that which you see. Whilst you are visible to yourself only in my gestures that represent your visual presence towards me.” -Salome Voégelin

 

The immersivity of listening provokes a multitude of perspectives, suggesting at any stage more than one solution or its contradiction. Sonic meaning processes are complex and multitudinous, and do not work along linear lines of progressive discovery, driven by the desire for the agreement of the perception with its object in the quest for harmony and universal meaning. Sound consciously involves the experience of the individual listener in the creation of the imaginary source as complex and continuously changing possibilities. The visual body is a synesthetic whole, not disturbed by any incompatibility between the reading of the body and its reality, “…inventing the illusion of pure present meaning” - Young. The visual horizon makes us believe and lets us believe that is a whole we are seeing, existing there before us in a meaningful entirety. The visual whole neglects the details of its parts, which lie in the motion of its continuous construction in sound. Vision sets out a linear progression – in sound there is no linearity. The sonic loss is not compensated for in the same way as the visual distance recovers the lack. The metonymic audition does not impose its compensatory reading onto a ‘visual’ object in a linear way. The immersivity of listening to silence provokes a multitude of perspectives, suggesting at any stage more than one solution or its contradiction.

 

The sonic is not substantiated in the visual, but in the imagination of the visual. Our existence in sound is fragile, endless, multiple positioning, demanding continuous non-imperative fragmentation of the self, as well as if the object/phenomenon perceived. The non-compatibility of sound prevents the desire of hearing as a discovery of ones own pre-existing fantasy, and rather problematizes and questions this total fantasy, throwing the viewer into doubt, building the reality of the auditory image in doubt, and any engagement with it in uncertainty. The distance of the viewer onto the image, which enables the discovery of a total and pre-existing fantasy, makes a complex experience impossible. It renders the seen a fulfillment of the viewer’s expectation rather than at every moment in doubt constructed possibility. The correlation of the semiotic is compensating, nothing is left in-between for doubt to enter a more complex representation to emerge. The sonic doubt is incessant; its lack of a clear signification offers an individual complex narrativation, articulating a continued transgression of the visual horizon in time. The lack of space between sign and signifier in the visual logic frames a location of desire.

 

Stacey Sewell writes of the absence of visual reference in acousmatic music as enticing the listener to focus not necessarily on the inherent sonic particulars of the sound object, but on the listener’s own sense of embodiment. According to Sewell, ‘the lack of a visible performer may turn the listener’s attention back onto her own body’. Sewell refers to electroacoustic works that feature sound material where the biological body is referenced (inhalation of breath for example) as being particularly charged with this self-reflexive quality. In contrast to Pierre Schaeffer’s phenomenology of transcendence through reduced listening, Sewell suggests that the acousmatic experience can create the opposite effect, enticing and encouraging us to reconnect with our own corporeality.

 

Voiceless tries to approach this idea of the acousmatic in retrograde with an intention to explore the affect of seeing the source of the sound but not being able to hear it. This not only brings the viewers attention to the absent sonic material in the piece but also intends to raise their awareness of their immediate sonic environment and their sense of embodiment. A vital aspect of listening, in which the human body is the spatial referent for implied and diffused sound, which bears clear relationship to Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology.Kendell alludes to the important role the body plays, on our perception of the spatial parameters: “The deeply meaningful sense of space that is aroused when listening has its roots in a lifetime of embodied spatial experience. Beneath the apparent continuity of everyday space are the axes of the body giving structure and context to the experience of spatial event the body is an important point of reference in the realization of a digitally meditated working environment. This grounding of technology through the body is a key factor in enabling listeners and spectators to identify with digitally mediated art works. The body as an organizing metaphor, can be seen as seeping into the realm of digitally mediated arts practices, not least as a way to pacify the anxiety that can occur when technology is foregrounded.”

 

The intimate familiarity we have with our own bodies, our experience as bodily creatures in a fundamentally material world, shapes how we discern aural space. Our digitally meditated environment does nothing to negate this fact. Perhaps the most convincing argument for the relevance of the material body in technologically mediated environments is that the physical body is the receptacle of all that we experience. The material human body is the mediator in terms of how we experience the world. The centrality of the human body in performance activity resonates with Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenological take on the body as being the site through which all worldly experience is routed. Even when one negotiates with a digital avatar or enters into a virtual cyber world via computational connection, our reception of disembodied information, and the way we process it, is only made possible via the sensing organs of the body (eyes and ears) which are grounded in physicality.