Composing the Artist Medium by Trisha N. Campbell

Composing the Artist Medium by Trisha N. Campbell

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Assignment, Readings, Resources:
Performative Sound Project

I've talked through the concept of the artist–medium, its relationship to archives, voice, and digital performance. Now I want to discuss the actual assignment I used in my Fall 2014 course and the readings and resources that helped lead students to the potentials of the artist–medium. To give you an outline and image of course progression, we watched RiP!: A Remix Manifesto (Gaylor, 2008) on the first day of class, using it as the springboard into the entire semester. This video underscores the relationship between history and archives and invention and creation. It discusses the "orgins" of popular songs or even cartoons, like Disney, demonstrating that none of those things were "original" to begin with, but rather, remixes for as long as creation has been happening. We then spent about the first month reading and discussing Paul D. Miller's (2004) Rhythm Science. With a firm theoretical grounding—because I like to balance theory and practice at every turn—we launched into the photo project, which asked students to recover and bring back to life a missing story in their families through photo. This was a difficult project because students had to spend long hours with their family photos—whatever they could get their hands on—and try to find what got left out or what was never told or told fully. Through this project, they began to get a sense of their own local archives and the potential to reimagine and retell stories through Photoshop. For instance, one student never got to meet her father, so she manipulated all of her childhood photos using Photoshop to include her father next to her, as a kind of grainy apparition. She reimagined her childhood photos with her father.

From there, we began the sound project.

I named the sound project Performative Sound so that students would immediately associate performance and sound. I asked them to "bring to digital life a remnant from any archive or historiography" of their choosing (from Performative Sound Piece assignment below). They had to research a person or event, using either court documents, historical documents, or any other documented and archived material in the archive of their choosing—digital or analog—and then bring it alive performatively by writing their own script, using their own voice or actors to animate people and events, all through the medium of sound. I asked them to think of this sound project as part nonfiction, all performative, and part fiction. And because I find sound to be a particularly affective medium, I also explained their role as the maker and producer as one of inviting the audience to feel with this reimagined person or event. You can read the rest of the assignment details on the assignment prompt below.

Leading up to the assignment, I had students read and experience three key texts, which I presented as models of artist–mediums and digital performance:

Anderson's (2013) "What Hadn't Happened" is a performance and reanimation of a story in her own family archive. Anderson retold the story of how her grandma's sister, Gloria, drowned in a copper wash boiler. For years, her grandma (three years old at the time) was blamed for this accident, but as Anderson recaptured and retold the story, she found that indeed someone else was to blame. Anderson used photos and audio to reanimate this story and make it present once again. She revisited the place of the accident and even found an identical copper wash boiler. As I frame it for students, Anderson's "What Hadn't Happened" is a poignant example of inhabiting and bringing to life our own personal archives.

From here, students also read and experienced Shipka's (2012) piece,"To Preserve, Digitize, and Project: On the Process of Composing Other People's Lives," which is a performance and presencing of the "life materials"—scrapbooks, travel diaries, and photo albums—of Dorothy and Fred, a couple (now deceased). Shipka described this work as an "inhabiting" and "composing" of those materials through the presencing of her own body and video capture. She, like Anderson, revisited the places and traces, driving the same route that Dorothy and Fred once took. Her video performance consists of her voice, their materials; it is her re-voicing their letters and exchanges. Shipka made Dorothy and Fred present in order to reanimate and, yes, reappropriate as method. She invited readers to ask questions about who and what gets archived and who decided. What resulted, I would argue, is an intimacy and proximity to Fred and Dorothy. Shipka knew them differently than her audience. In 2015, Shipka launched "Past, Present, Presence: Inhabiting Dorothy" in order to invite others—scholars in the field, but also people outside the field—to inhabit old images from Dorothy's life in whatever way they see fit. In that project, Shipka further asked us to consider remediation, but also intimacy through digital technology. How does our digital capture joined to our performative bodies invite a closeness? This is one of the questions students considered as they launched into their performative pieces.

The last piece, Matt Gray's (2014) "Lament for Joe Hall," serves as a stunning example of how sound and voice can be reimagined for intimacy and even uncomfortable closeness. In this piece, Gray reimagined the murder of Jeff Hall at the hand of his ten-year-old son Joe Hall on May 1, 2011. Joe Hall said himself that he committed the murder because he didn't want to be abused anymore. In the performative sound piece, Gray hired an actor, Vijay Perry, to play Joe Hall. Gray wrote a script in Joe Hall's words "and colored in a few details about personal motivations based on… assumptions and high-likelihood hypotheses." The piece renders Joe Hall a very sympathetic character and exposes him as human. While Joe is not a deceased archive person or event, his story is part of our American archive of murder and offers source material for digital composing.

The piece raises even more interesting questions about empathy and ethics and what it means to use digital production and digital composing to establish and practice a closeness or proximity with someone who committed a murder.

Further assigned texts included the following:

Performative Sound Piece Assignment Sheet

This project asks you to aurally un-archive and then re-archive, or bring to digital life, a remnant from any archive or historiography. You will research a person or event, using either court documents, historical documents, or any other documented and archived material in the archive of your choosing, and then bring it alive performatively by writing your own script, using yourself or actors to animate people and events, all through the medium of sound. This sound piece is part non-fiction, all performative, and part fiction.

You will record and edit a 4- to 6-minute performative sound piece. Your sound piece should weave together a range of sonic elements (oral interviews, voiceover commentary, field recordings, music, sound, sound effects, etc.) that you have produced and collected (archive.org or freesound.org) to re-animate your person or event.

You will need to collect the sound and then edit it, making it flow, giving it a beginning, middle and end, using suspense, adding effects, and so forth. This piece needs to have a "so what" or what Ira Glass (2009a) calls "reflection."

Before beginning your project, you will compose a 250-word proposal for your performative sound piece, providing a rationale for the following: the questions your project will raise, the individual(s)your project will involve, the methods you will employ, the audience you will target, the feeling you wish to convey, and the significance of telling this story. Also lay out what you imagine this project to look like at this stage—the different parts, content, and so forth.

After collecting your recordings, you will produce a detailed outline of your project, laying out the sequence, arrangement, and transitions of your narrative. For all sections that will feature your own authorial voice as voice-over (i.e., setting the scene, providing commentary, etc.), write out a verbatim script for your oral performance, with attention to principles of "writing for the ear." You may use your own voice and the voice of actors or other volunteers, but you must write the script.

Finally, you will compose a 500-word reflection on your audio composition process, discussing (1) your rhetorical, aesthetic and affective aims in selecting, layering, and arranging your audio content, and (2) how your project responds to and expands upon the approaches to audio media, archiving and missing information that we discussed in class.

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Technology used and taught: Audacity

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