The disconnected voice / the recorded voice

The feelings situations I find myself in, become an urgency for my work and research. How to understand an environment as a stranger to it. I find being a stranger both here and in my country. Detached from there even before leaving. And unattached, floating here, surrounded by foreign voices. At the beginning is a bliss not to understand, to have no relationship with meaning. Then after some time the pleasure of being isolated from the production of meaning of the voice , turns into a delicate, permanent unpleasantness.

For the last month and a half I have been experimenting with placing the box I built the first trimester in different locations in public space. The locations could be in any city, they are not loaded with any particular context. A street and a bar, places existing in any city, in any country. Like the locations displayed on tourist maps . Very neutral but at the same time very local. Up to now my experiments make a spontaneous map of each place. An exploration of isolation and connectivity in public spaces. I have initiated the creation of a little fragment of contact, a way of briefly communing in a typically disparate and isolating city.

Finding myself in constant flux, transition, on the border of feeling comfortable and anxious, at home and still foreign, I see why I am fascinated by the object voice. Mladen Dolar identifies the voice as a “zone of overlapping, the crossing, the ”extimate. It is somewhere between interiority and exteriority.

Voices contain a certain public moment in time. Voices enact the social space that is embedded in the every day. The voice is an intersection between personal and social.

(shaky beginning) Thesis skeleton : +

Introduction

Historical overview on the disconnected / disembodied voice (from ventriloquism, speaking machines to the telephone)

Personal interest in the recorded voice

Topics that contextualize

The telephone and how the acousmatic property of the voice becomes universal, and hence trivial

The recorded voice that remains / becomes an object, collectable but with nomateriality/

According to Steven Conor, voice, as an object of hearing, lacks ‘permanence and continuity’, and concludes that it ‘belongs to time’. What happens when it remains trough time?

The invasion of the voice in public space with mobile phones (few years ago) and the less present voice in public space now (channelled to in message, email)

The voice in non- speech expression. Laughter, singing, shouting, each of these all too human quirks makes more meaning than the mechanical voice. These quirks are not external to human meaning, nor, Dolar argues, should they be treated as external to the theory of the voice. - in connection to the audio selfie (observation from first experiments)