imagining the listener

I write for myself Its not any other way.

I have been washing up instead of writing this documentation :-)

I made a work for radio broadcast- this work was available to anyone who cared to tune in, but was crafted specifically with women doing chores, and the listening situation of the domestic kitchen sink in mind. These are both situations I share with my imagined listener- who, essentially, is me- this whole project arises  from the recognition of my own radio use and my wish to develop one very specific moment further. 

 

I researched artists who worked with similar domestic themes.

The performance artist Bobby Baker gave a lot of inspiration for this work. She is a  artist making intelligent, personal, humorous performance scores that often deal directly with the material of domesticity, the role of women, and the role of performance itself, intelligently considering and exposing these themes in a way that is accessible to the 'everyday person'.

Her piece that interested my most, Kitchen Show, was performed live in Baker's own kitchen. Sometimes labelled 'feminist autobiographical performance', Bakers' most famous works are action based performances which expose some element of a woman's lifestyle rawly (a formal meal, entertaining friends in your kitchen, shopping, and how we communally consider these things) - as both beautiful and full of terror, and fraught with contention.

I think these subjects still need our attention.

Remarking on her inspiration for 1984's Kitchen Show, and how she saw her work as part of the ongoing debate on womanhood, femininity, domesticity:

I got very angry and frustrated about the way these daily actions, these daily routines and rituals are not observed and cherished within our society. ~I could see how fundamentally complex they were and how they related to things such as the butterfly effect in chaos theory, or the Blake thing - “the world in a grain of sand”, the idea that the miniature contains the enormous.
 

Tied into her augments for an attentive humorous and honest approach to the ordinary, are explorations into autonomy and agency: the articulations of an identity overshadowed by patriarchy are recontextualized by the work being so very private yet sited into the public world-  questioning and awareness are encouraged by participatory dialogue focusing unashamedly on that which is considered below notice, or worthless, or demeaning. Work such as Baker's instigates a relationship with audiences which can facilitate a very simple questioning of complex social and political assumptions about roles.

Her humorous studies engender identification and empathy and a feeling of comradee, on which transient moments of existence can be revalued, examined, celebrated:

“Yes, the sharing of those moments. I am constantly looking at different ways of taking or highlighting moments like those which I have all the time. I find life a very exciting arena; the small actions, tastes, sights, observations, discoveries that are so thrilling.”

I found this excellent example of the difficulty facing the production of art which wishes to tackle the thorny issues of 'women's work' :

Main Entry:	responsibility
Part of Speech:	noun
Definition:	accountability, blame
Synonyms:	albatross, amenability, answerability, authority, boundness, burden, care, charge, constraint, contract, culpability, duty, encumbrance, engagement, fault, guilt, holding the bag, importance, incubus, incumbency, liability, obligation, obligatoriness, onus, pledge, power, rap, restraint, subjection, trust
Antonyms:	exemption, freedom, immunity, irresponsibility

Main Entry:	responsibility
Part of Speech:	noun
Definition:	maturity, trustworthiness
Synonyms:	ability, capableness, capacity, competency,  conscientiousness, dependability, dependableness , efficiency, faithfulness, firmness, honesty, levelheadedness, loyalty, rationality, reliability, sensibleness, soberness, stability, steadfastness, trustiness, uprightness
Antonyms:	distrust, immaturity, irresponsibility

http://thesaurus.com/browse/responsibility viewed on 01/02/2011

(how fabulous- the whip and the carrot! Being a grown up- is to get on with it- a noun that holds in place – a relationship that is in the world and made to carry it- who takes it on, rejects it- the ultimate sacrifice, the daily chore.... The two definitions are so entwined, as if to illustrate the point we define ourselves through dichotomy, having our cake and eating it, liking it and lumping it, making our bed and lying in it...)

Bakers' Kitchen Show was made for live performance, face to face, but I experienced 'Kitchen Show' through a video made from a TV screening in the 80's, and her script as reproduced in Bobby Baker. Creative medias offer diverse modes of publishing work and exploring ideas of 'liveness'.

Baudrillard writes in The Ecstasy of Communication- of a media induced world of 

absolute proximity, the total instananeity of things, the feeling of no defence, no retreat”  (1985, Postmodern Culture)

One could see this the challenge of modern (contemporary, present) living- this subjectivity can be explored- not as a fearful (No defence ! No retreat !) exposure, but as a redefinition of presence- we are recontextualized by our attention and attunement to the input of our 'mediated environment', and can involve ourselves in its processes, and rather than being effected we can affect and evolve ourselves through this relationship. Through our media exposure and activities- the viewed, the heard- we are taught and shown how to perceive- the continual supply of media to ingest and respond to develops styles of attentiveness. We are stunned – the music of pop follows us as our humming, we recycle motifs from television and film into our languages, the Rorschach test and stereotypical dream interpretations dog our meetings... Baudrillard was writing about the power of 'live' medias and their place in our modern (postmodern) lives- our relationship to these services are cultivated, coveted, imposed. Is it fair to suggest that everywhere now, we are living in 'mediated experience'? -Radio offers itself as a live technology-  
 

If the idea of “transmission” invokes the subject position of senders engaged in a “sending across” or diffusion/distribution of content, then contemporary transmission art practice can be characterised by a persistent interest in displacing one-way or point-to-point communications with polyvalent transception. (Transmission Art in the Present Tense, Anna Fritz). 

The hybridity of mediated voices might be placed in relationship: 

Transmission is understood not only as a radial description of space, but as a circle of relationship (ibid)

- a post post modern development which offers opportunity  to use our immersion in media as a empowering and exploritive.  :-)

 

Seeking writing on listeners, I looked at Brandon LaBelles' 2010 book and accompanying CD Radio Memory, which offers examples of how a radio experience can so imprint a mind that a single auditory experience (in this book, most often a pop /mass produced/ song) can be heard once, and is then related in memory forever to a place, a time, and a situation:

Background noise... these songs become provocative partners to our own trajectories and experiences, colouring and contouring the ebb and flow of our conversation and interactions, daydreams and errands. In this regard the background is not so much a form of wall-paper, however annoying or dull or pleasing, but a dynamic input into personalised and shared narratives.” 

(a few of the featured writings even placed the memorable radio experience in the kitchen washing up environment).

The placement of my work in the home, in the kitchen, at the kitchen sink, is a direct address to this idea- that the overlay or a sonic event might enrich a experience- both personalised, and in shared narratives. 

We are each the point of interface where meaning is generated. Tetsuo Kogawa suggests:  

Let's start with your own familiar space. Change in a tiny space could resonate to larger space but without microscopic change no radical change would be possible. (November 24, 2002/May 7, 2003/May 22, 2006) http://anarchy.translocal.jp/radio/micro/
 

With this in mind, and also with Brecht's encouragement- Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction, radioartists can unfold the situation of listening to be a platform for the propagation of improvisation, playfulness and sharing through a very formidable yet gentle sonic connection- our public occasions, our community, and its mechanisation's and possibilities:

Transception, then, would function as a means for the community to engage with itself, to enter into deeper relationships in a complex circuit of transmission that implied not just sending across, but sharing around: a feedback loop of sociality and expression. (Anna Fritz 2009)

(I find it amazing to listen to sonic work which can be 'defined' (40's/ romantic / Spanish/ aggressive/ elevator/ Spiritual/ 80's/ urban/ academic/ punk/ revolutionary), whilst engaged in my own small town boring white woman task... how wonderful- meaning and use are transformable, I am integrating a idea or ideal or another approach to understanding or partaking in a project of shared awareness....the work belongs to me now... I am washing up under the influence...)

Thaelitz writing in regard to the memorial legacy of listening, states. 

One only retains an impression of the experience of listening, and any ensuing ideas or feelings of comprehension we associate with our memories of that situation. Information ceases to exist without an object of conveyance, even in the instance of oral traditions where the orator's body becomes the object of conveyance.

He is commenting particularly on owned recordings(weather downloaded files or hard copies) and not listening as part of a diological relationship. This 'fixing' of listening- in memory and in format, is problematic. This back ground / fore ground relationship – ourselves as listeners, the environment, imported sounds, ideas of sonic 'product' and relationships through the mix, is what fascinates me as a artist. Curator and artist Carmen Cereboros Urzai states in Radio Memory:

when we listen for the second, third or hundredth time to a song that accompanied an event, its repetition makes us remember and further to become aware that we attended to a particular event which is our life: it (the noise) constitutes our own emotional landscape, it is ours, it belongs to us, and it is relevant and current.  

Rather than elevate a 'particular recording', this might been seen to be applicable to situational listening too- if sound engenders feeling there is a opportunity to refine the 'experience of listening' itself.

My thinking about the experience of washing up and hearing the act occurring over the airwaves.... an accompanied chore- and radio as a participatory activity has been influenced by the radioartist and theorist Gregory Whitehead. In his Radio Radio interview with Martin Spinelli, found on Ubuweb, at http://www.ubu.com/sound/radio_radio/whitehead.html Whitehead says “The material is the network, not the sound.” Whitehead revels in radios' possibilities rather than marking sonic parameters against other kinds of audioarts, or historical explorations or the cannon. He says radio is a sonic phenomenon- found in sound- but he feels radio's attraction is in the set relationships revealed as network, the living play of people. In good radio we hear not impression or projection, but seduction and invitation- 

here we are together in this very uncertain relationship, lets see what we can negotiate here.

Anna Fritz believes 

Resonance becomes palpable in these smaller transceptive circuits of relationship, enabled, for instance, by micro-watt radio interventions, participatory local and translocal networks, or environmental soundscape transmissions.  

This resonance is what makes radio work so exciting. 
When I imagine a listener, I imagine myself- a amalgamation of everything i have ever encountered- yet still with hungry ears...

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life :Editors- Michele Barret and Bobby Baker (2007) Routledge, Glasgow

(Beaudrillard, (1985) in Foster, H (ed) Postmodern Culture London: Pluto

Brecht, Bertolt.(1932) “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication.”  In Radiotext(e).(1993)

Neil Strauss, ed. New York: Columbia University Press p15.

Fritz, Anna (2009) Transmission Art in the Present Tense, veiwed on 02/03/2011 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/pajj.2009.31.3.46

LaBelle, Brandon (2010)  Radio Memory, (Errant Bodies Press, Audio Issues Vol . 4, Berlin)

Thaelitz, Terre

Whitehead, Gregory in Radio Radio interview with Martin Spinelli (debuted on 104.4 Resonance FM in London, England, in 2003) viewed at http://www.ubu.com/sound/radio_radio/whitehead.html