1,720,971 research outputs found
Animal Tracks: Affect, Aesthetics, Ethics
No full textIn this chapter the author listens through new materialism to animals’ voices in various art assemblages. Theoretically, ethically, and politically, new materialism opens up a recognition of the specificity, singularity and entanglements of animals voices with others. The author brings a range of works into conversation with theories of affect, attunement, assemblage; becoming-animal and ventriloquism. The chapter traverses an enchanted terrain in which animal voices speak themselves and speak a variety of relationships with people, animals and things, in and out of assemblages. These voices in media and art works speak to and with animal studies and new materialism, bringing forth understandings that are enchanting, engaging, disturbing, and curious.</p
Technology and Machines Speak (for) Themselves
No full textIn this chapter the author attends to things as they voice themselves, focusing on mechanical and technological voices speaking (for) themselves—rather than mediating or carrying voices of others. She listens to insistent thingly voices, by attending to technology that itself speaks, speaks itself, voicing its own curious essence as it brings its own voice forcibly into the conversation. This includes loudspeakers and microphones that no longer humbly and quietly enable or transmit other voices, but voice themselves at the same time. The chapter also engages with works of sonification, a curious case of ‘as if’ a thing or force of nature is speaking but, the author proposes, is more about the voice of technology. The examples—including machines, from robots to toys to tattoo machines—attend to what they have to say about politics and economics as they speak of and for themselves.</p
Voicetracks
No full textMoved by Aboriginal or Indigenous understandings of tracks, Norie Neumark’s Voicetracks seeks to deepen understandings of voice through listening to a variety of media and contemporary art works from Australia, Europe, and the United States. The author aims to bring voice studies into conversation with new materialism to broaden thinking within both. Through a methodology based in listening, she brings theories of affect and carnal and situated knowledge into conversation with her examples and the theories she works with. Through her examples, Neumark engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works with which she engages—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing humans, animals, things, and assemblages. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories from sound, animal, and posthuman studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with and within the assemblages of living creatures, things, places and histories around us. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.</p
Tracking Back
No full textIn this concluding chapter, the author evaluates the strategy of bringing voice studies into conversation with new materialism through her own engaged encounters with media and art works, as a way to provoke new ways of thinking about and experiencing both voice and new materialism. The chapter engages with figures of performativity, documentation, and infra-thin in its encounters with various works. Among these are her own collaborative artworks, Talking about the Weather and Coalface, which were driven by emotional, ethical and political—new materialist—concerns for the environment and which helped her along her path to new materialism. Finally, returning to her opening concerns for Aboriginal or Indigenous understandings of country that speaks, the chapter engages with silence, including the silence, which haunts voice and memory.</p
Ears to the Ground: Voicing Place
No full textThe chapter proposes that voice is always/already situated or grounded. The author encounters works that voice place in ways that speak to new materialism—following lines and plucking strings, ears to the ground and listening to walls, walking and hearing the voices of things in place and the places of things. Artful voices call forth a particular sense of place as they shift our attention to what we don’t normally see or hear in a place. The chapter brings its examples into conversation with theories of vibration, transperception, memory, and atmosphere, including stemming as voicing of atmosphere. Listening transperceptually to voice, one hears how it vibrates and performatively in/forms the space it traverses as voice connects speaking and listening bodies and things physically and affectively with each other as well as and through the spaces and places they share. In this moment of connection, memory speaks.</p
Introduction: Voice, Voicetracks, New Materialism
No full textThis chapter establishes the theoretical underpinnings of the book, introducing theories of voice, new materialism, posthumanism, carnal and situated knowledge, and affect. It discusses the unusual writing voice that a new materialist book about voice calls for. Presenting the implications of a new materialist approach to voice, the author discusses why she listens to this as voice particularly, rather than sound in general. Listening and conversations as the modes and methodologies are introduced. There is further discussion of voicetracks as the way through the book’s diverse works and transversal or inter-disciplinary theories. This chapter also introduces the engagement with the author’s own sound and media work which has shaped her apprehension of voice and the assemblages with/in which it speaks.</p
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