CHAIR: Anna Tible

John Shiga

Refractions: Making Cold War Archives Audible

"Installation: Combining archival material, sonification and storytelling, the Refractions installation sonically remaps archival materials related to militarization of ocean space during the Cold War and the vertical cartography produced by the global expansion of military and scientific remote sensing infrastructures during this period. The audio and visual components of the installation are based on documents related to Canadian and American military-scientific research on underwater acoustics, surveillance and communication held at various government and university archives in the U.S. and Canada, including the Department of National Defence’s Directorate of History and Heritage, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), MIT archives, Harvard University archives, and Stanford University archives.
Paper presentation: In the paper presentation, the author will discuss the manner in which Refractions diverges from predominate approaches to soundscape composition and sonification (as sonic representations of data) in that the installation does not aim to recreate the soundscape of the Cold War or represent military data in sound. Instead, as its title suggests, the installation uses refraction as the guiding principle for creative and critical engagement with nuclear imperialism and the political history of relations between media, war and the environment. The concept of refraction highlights the manner in which the boundaries or differences between elemental (ocean, land, air) and technical media and focuses attention on the ways in Cold War nuclear imperialism mediated, but was also in turn mediated by, the sonic and material environments it sought to capture and control. The concept of refraction, I suggest, opens new directions for archival sonification, and in the context of the Cold War, enables sound to articulate the social and environmental impact of military activities and infrastructures on ocean space while also amplifying the material contingencies of ocean environments and their resistances to and disruptions of military logics of command and control."

Warsamee Isee

Sheekada Bankii Naagi Taagnayd (The Tale of Standing Woman Desert)

Sheekada Bankii Naagi Taagnayd is an experimental audiovisual archive of memorialize my family history and my Somali heritage. This short film focuses on my father’s relationship with his mother and how she passed down her traditions, stories, and knowledge to him. The film centers on the specific story of when they traveled through Bankii Naagi Taagnayd (Standing Woman Desert). This is one of the first stories my father ever told me about my grandmother or Somalia. This story gave me one of the first visceral understanding of my family, our beliefs and the land we come from. My practice is informed by my Diasporic Somali identity and intergenerational storytelling. My work is expressed through sound and video art. I use abstraction such as distorted Morse code through Granular synthesis and footage of dried water droplets. I expose bodies of water to soundwaves of recorded conversations which affects the shape of the dried droplets. These efforts at abstraction are done as a form of ethical redaction to not show painful images and to respect the person’s privacy. However, there is a secondary reason, I believe that nothing can be translated in its entirety. Be they words, memories, traditions they all tend to get transformed and translated. This may strip them of their nuances or
leave gaps in understanding. To explore those gaps and give new articulation to oral storytelling I visualize the audio through water droplets and accentuate Somali words through distorted Morse code. I archive memories and stories in this abstract manner to express the ineffable aspects of memory, language, and the Diasporic experience. Moreover, it is my attempt at creating what Weheliye describes as the Hypersoul. The Hypersoul is the augmentation or extending of the soul through electronic media (Rollefson, p.87). I aim to reveal the beauty in this counter archiving through this experimental method.

Émilie Camacho

I am a library – the Body as an Archive

Est-on capable de quantifier la masse d’informations archivées par le corps ? Corps apprenant sans même le savoir, accumulant, imitant, vivant, mémorisant. La mémoire préoccupe, mais à l’heure où le grand public s’empare de la mémoire cellulaire, disque dur incorporé qui archiverait des informations inconsciemment depuis des millénaires, comment envisager ces ressources ? Qu’en fait le corps ? Où les range-t-il ? Quelle est sa capacité ? Peut-on les maitriser ? Si la performance du sportif est dans le développement de la puissance et de la technique fine, celui du danseur est aussi dans la sensibilité. Le danseur acquiert et archive des connaissances de pas, de mouvements, de notes de musique, d’intentions, qui se transforment en gestes, de gestes qui se transforment en déplacements, de déplacements qui deviennent chorégraphies, mais qui sont insuffisants pour ouvrir la porte de la poésie, ou des émotions, indissociables de l’objet artistique. Les archives cellulaires, sentimentales, émotionnelles sensationnelles entrent en jeu pour amener une plus grande connexion avec celui qui regarde. L’artiste danseur a donc pour outil cette bibliothèque kinesthésique dans laquelle il puise avec conscience ou pas. Son enjeu va être non pas de les maîtriser mais de savoir les invoquer et les laisser agir afin que la magie opère. Sous forme de conférence dansée interactive, je vous propose d’exposer et de mener cette réflexion en questionnant d’abord les archives balletiques de mon apprentissage. Dans un second temps : la puissance transformatrice des démarches artistiques contemporaines sera évoquée (Je danse donc jepense autrement). Dans un troisième temps : les pratiques somatiques qui, puisant dans les mémoires cellulaires, permettent au corps une liberté d’action nouvelle, l’apprivoisement de l’improvisation qui permet de sortir de la répétition du connu pour explorer une liberté exponentielle. UN ATELIER POUR PRATIQUER SA LIBERTÉ L’atelier proposé sera un laboratoire d’expérimentation physique des propos mis en jeu lors de la conférence. En retraversant notre propre histoire d’être bipède depuis les mouvements intra utérin ( mémoire cellulaire ) jusqu’aux premiers et leurs chutes multiples ( souvent oublié.e.s), seront évoquées nos méthodes naturelles d’apprentissage et d’archivage de l’informations pour déployer en mouvement cette problématique : La liberté du corps permet-elle de penser autrement ?