Studio Drawing: Sounding Embodiment
by Andrea Parkins

I’m considering subjectivity in the context of sound: in relation to my own embodiment as a performer and through that embodiment’s gestural extension into composition; and also my refusal of – or at least ambivalence about -- mastery.

As a sound artist and electroacoustic composer/performer, I’m drawing upon knowledge I have developed through my work with interactive electronics and generative processes, my somatic experience as an acoustic musician, my visceral engagement with visual arts and sounding materials, and my responsiveness to site and acoustical/physical space.

I have worked to develop a gestural approach as a composer/performer, focusing on the dynamics of tenuous states: moments of accident and chance, and entropy’s role in compositional process. I’m interested in those awkward moments when one is up against the limits of one’s own virtuosity, when the performance or enactment of sound might “fall apart” in real time. My work has aimed to address tensions between the concrete and the ephemeral, and slippages from phenomenological experience to memory, and into the poetic, or uncanny. Within installation, composition and performance, I’m seeking to build and layer systems and structures that point to these shifting states, and ultimately relationships between object, gesture, site, meaning, and beings.

My most recent pieces have been spatialized performances and installations featuring acousmatic sound, or material that is created through my manipulation of amplified objects. These elements are processed through what has become my primary tool for composition and performance: a custom-designed software instrument that is inspired by Rube Goldberg’s machines. Built into instrument’s programming is the possibility for intentional relinquishment of my control as a performer/composer, utilizing seemingly “randomized” sonic events to highlight and/or alter specific frequencies and densities, with emphasis on repetitions and interruptions, and moments of stasis, gap and rift: with the goal of arriving at an indeterminate sonic outcome. The instrument promotes an interaction with a composer or performer that is highly dynamic; my response to unforeseen and “badly behaving” sonic events creates a fast-moving sonically gestural language as sound sources are morphed and incorporated into a structure from which compositional “sense” can be made in real time.

As a composer and performer, I seek to connect physical gesture to acoustical space to sonic result. I want to maintain a gestural language that derives from the physical experience of acoustic instrumental performance. However, I often compose or perform with multiple instruments in simultaneity, and experience myself in this context as physically awkward even clumsy, or that my instruments and processes may suddenly – and literally – exceed my grasp.

I want to retain that precariousness or the feeling that something easily can – but doesn’t quite – collapse. Therefore, I set out to manifest a compositional decision-making process that emphasizes idiosyncrasy, fragile states of being and sounding, and even total disintegration.

My relationship to gesture is rooted in my background as an acoustic pianist, and my awareness of sound production and articulation through bodily shifts of weight and movement. And now, working with processing software, I notice the effort (my) body must make in order to employ my instruments, and how I anticipate/experience that an immediate sonic gesture “back at me” can thwart this effort: reversing intention yet creating new (unforeseen) ways to make sound and to listen.

There is pleasure and engagement in systems and structures, but also in their misfiring, as a means of exploring tensions/interactions between the body and mind of the performer/composer. In recent years, I have exploring Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” to see if it can address this experience of psychophysical intention and enactment within my performances and installations.

Dino Felluga writes: “According to Julia Kristeva in her text, Powers of Horror, the abject refers to the human reaction … to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” He states that for Kristeva, the abject "is radically excluded and” as she explains, "draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”

“Abjection,” in the context of a performance or composition that features the kind of misfiring I am talking about, and which attracts me, might imply the moving, encumbered body of the performer, and the potential for its physical control or articulation to lose fluency, or even to fail. This interests me as a site of creative potential; here, abjection might be, as Kristeva writes: “… something rejected”, but (also) something from which “one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself.”

The gesture might fall flat, or achieve nothing. But what happens when a sounding body is sapped and cannot continue, or when a sonic dialogue is moving so fast that the composer/performer ceases to understand what is aurally proposed and that dialogue – between the artist and her materials/instruments, between a performer and others, between the subject and her own understanding of herself as sonic generator – breaks down. And also: What happens – and not only in the sonic sense – after one learns how to second guess a system that is supposed to thwart one, or fail, and therefore achieves a mastery that was never intended?

I maintain a daily studio practice, experimenting with process – some of it rules-based – through which I’m looking at my embodied interaction with my software instrument and a variety of sonic materials. These materials include amplified objects, electronic and acoustic instruments, and - most recently - amplified drawing tools, in which I’m exploring the body as Foley. I have been documenting my research with video and sound recordings, and what Debra Kapchan calls “sound writing.” I am considering my awareness of subjectivity as a body moving in a space, extending musical gesture into physical space, and moving past mastery to get to something else: the implication of gesture, presence and absence, failure, abjection.

Felluga writes that it is in literature where Kristeva finds the abject, in “a place where boundaries begin to breakdown… And it is also in literature where we find the sublime or the transcendent. The sublime, for Kristeva, is really our effort to cover over the breakdowns (and subsequent reassertion of boundaries) associated with the abject.” Felluga also writes; “She privileges poetry, in particular, because of poetry's willingness to play with grammar, metaphor and meaning, thus laying bear the fact that language is at once arbitrary and limned with the abject fear of loss: "…, but a language of want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges". Thinking of Kristeva’s attention to poetry as a site where abjection and the sublime are in uneasy balance with each other, I’m exploring the potential for my own project to do the same.

Documentation - (writing, video, sound, images)

WORDLESS AND MOVING 

“ … I am mirrored (echoed) through my body’s sonic apprehension – audible through physical effort, teasing out the sound in a wordless gestural embodiment that moves listening into voiceless dialogue with sonic space, sonic mark making, sonic collection, sonic activation of objects, and drawing as sonified performance."

> audio link

LOST OBJECTS

From interaction with instruments to interaction with objects, and objects as creators/elements of a Foley dreamscape: Foley because of the materiality and tangibility of the object, dreamscape because of the disembodied and physically distanced result. There is a gap between gesture and the realisation of the gesture as sound. There is an articulation of identity that is somehow displaced, and the objects are lost along the way. My instruments are my objects and my objects are my instruments. They are autobiography and are indexical to identity. But my objects are not ‘facing me’, they are always moving away from me.

An object (subject!), taken up and activated with a gesture, becomes ob-jest. Its use in performance becomes ob-jesture (gesture). To jest is to laugh: the laughter that comes with the body’s miscarried attempt to perform the virtuosic act – an attempt that is deeply intentional.

> audio link

DEMARCATION

Kneeling two-fisted (four on the floor), with contact microphones attached to pencils grasped in left and right hand.

I am left handed, and cannot do anything with my right hand except hold a knife over my dinner plate. I am retraining myself; one day at lunch, without thinking, I pick up my fork with my right hand. But still, there is no mastery. There is gesture, intimacy, and indexicality. I roll a roomsized sheet of paper onto the floor and climb into/onto it: feeling the floor and then ambidextrously scratching at it with my tools, processing sound. It blasts and shimmers; the floor becomes feedback. I trace the shapes of my objects onto the uneven paper surface and it becomes glitch. My charcoal-covered body rolls over the big paper, amplified. I feel the floor, lie still: listening. I’m embodied and roaming, displaced and wandering, encumbered and sounding.

> video link

Andrea Parkins is a Berlin-based sound artist, composer and electroacoustic improviser engaging with interactive electronics as both material and process. Her works include multi-channel sound installations, electroacoustic performances and compositions; and sound design for contemporary dance, film and intermedia performance. Parkins’ projects have been presented at venues and/or festivals including Whitney Museum of American Art, Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Kunsthalle Basel; NEXT festival (Bratislava), and Akousma festival (Montreal). Her recordings are published by Important Records, Confront Recordings, Atavistic, Infrequent Seams, and Creative Sources; and her writing is published by Errant Sound. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Artistic Research at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo.

www.andreaparkins.com