User:Yoana Buzova/ firstskelet

(shaky begining) Thesis skeleton : +

Introduction

The 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 but 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.

Chapter 1 / How did this voice come here

• Historical overview on the disconnected / disembodied voice (from ventriloquism, speaking machines to the telephone) ----> and then -->
  

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

The invasion of the voice in public space with mobile phones (few years ago) and the less present voice in public space now (channelled in message, email). Does this mean voice is gaining back its acousmatic property?

Chapter 2 /

• The voice as an object that remains. The recorded voice
  

Steven Connor about the voice - voice, as an object of hearing, lacks ‘permanence and continuity’,it ‘belongs to time’. How does this relate and change when it is recorded?

• The unknown voice.... lorem ipsum this is not clear yet
  

• Sound as a mediator to the environment. Voice as sound in the environment
  

Chapter 3 /

• Project and how it relates to the previous chapters
  

• In relation to ways of presenting and listening to the recorded voice
  

References

'Resonant bodies, voices, memories' (2008) edited by Anke Bangma, Deirdre M. Donoghue, Lina Issa and Katarina Zdjelar

'A Voice and Nothing More' (2006) Mladen Dolar

'Dumbstruck- A Cultural History of Ventriloquism' (2000) Steven Connor

'The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech' (1991) Avital Ronell

Scorescapes On Sound Environment and Sonic Consciousness, Yolande Harris, Phd thesis > voice in the sonic environment

"Networks without a cause" , 3.Treatise on comment culture , Geert Lovnik > voice as comment, comment as granular object

Annotations / notes

Mladen Dolar 'A Voice and Nothing More'

Mladen Dolar develops Lacan's position that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object a. Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as an aesthetic object, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. What is the role and meaning of the voice in culture? Mladen Dolar writes about the voice as an object of linguistics, metaphysics, ethics and politics. In the chapter about the linguistics of the voice Dolar talks about the omnipresent voice in everyday communication. According to him reading and writing taking over social life is much less common, with the Internet withstanding. I would like to add that messaging and short emails are much more common than voice calling and are ever more present in our public space behaviour.

'Resonant bodies, voices, memories' (2008) edited by Anke Bangma, Deirdre M. Donoghue, Lina Issa and Katarina Zdjelar

“Resonant Bodies, Memories, Voices” is a compilation of text about the subjects of memory, voice and the body. But it is not about these objects in a stable position, the texts investigate cases of instability, inability, uncomfortableness concerning these human objects. It is only when one's abilities to remember, speak or control their body are disrupted, that it becomes obvious what values these simple human objects hold. What happens to us as subjects, when we find ourselves in a situation where what we commonly take for granted is gone?

Scorescapes On Sound Environment and Sonic Consciousness, Yolande Harris, Phd thesis > voice in the sonic environment

Scorescapes investigates how sound mediates our relationship to the environment. I will look into the text, having in mind the recorded voice as the mediator.

"Networks without a cause" , 3.Treatise on comment culture , Geert Lovnik > voice as comment, comment as granular object