Discussion

Finally, then, the "voice you speak with may not be your own" and that may be the desired goal—to mix voices, to speak with another's voice or to allow a voice to inhabit you and you to inhabit another's. What happens in the process is a saturation of voices, their perspectives, rhythms, tonalities.

What both Emily and Lauren note in their reflections is an attempt to reach the audience and to make them feel particular sentiments through their writing, editing, layering of sound, and the voice performances. A keyword that appears for both of them and which had thus far not been a term circulating in our classroom space was the word "empathy." Emily wants to make her audience feel empathy for the women of Nagyrév, and Lauren is interested in an entire empathetic experience for Charlie No Face. I pick up on empathy here because it has been explored as one of the ethical potentials of film (and now media) and because my students overwhelmingly bring it up in relation to their performative sound projects.

Empathy is a striking modality for digital scholars to explore. As empathy scholar Jodi Halpern (2001) noted, part of what makes empathy so difficult is that it proceeds on a sentiment of non-similarity, unlike sympathy. Empathy requires an imaginative, cognitive, affective, and communicative process that "involves discerning aspects of a [person's]… experiences that might otherwise go unrecognized" (p. 94). It is in contradistinction to sympathy, which is "an affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected" ("Sympathy," 2018). Contemporary uses of sympathy assume similarity between people. In sympathy, one shares the feelings of another person by focusing on oneself, on how he/she would feel in the other's situation, but empathy demands something else. It requires an "imaginative inquiry" (Halpern & Weinstein, 2004, p. 568) or imaginative leap into the individuality and particularity of another person. One must leave oneself and attempt to imagine another's life. This requires an act of imagination on both the affective and intellectual level, and it bespeaks a long and difficult process, which begins by feeling with and thinking with someone who may not be our friends or loved ones, but those, instead, "who have no relation to us, who resemble us not at all, whose circumstances lie far outside of our own experiences" (Landsberg, 2009, p. 223).

Scholars of cinema studies have pursued the imaginative leap empathy requires in light of technological developments in the last half-century. Alison Landsberg (2009) has written extensively on the value of "prosthetic memories" made possible through mediated representations like film and experiential museums. These mediums can offer viewers an experience they did not live through and thus invite them to take on a prosthetic memory, which becomes like an "artificial limb… worn on the body" and can work to effectively produce empathic connections through those memories (p. 222). Without downplaying the importance of film for eliciting ethical thinking from an audience, I would like to make the case that amateur digital production, as I have offered here, can offer a perhaps more powerful intervention towards empathy and ethical thinking. While both Emily and Lauren mention empathy as a desired effect, only Lauren discusses how her own relationship to Charlie No Face changed her through the intensive and durational process of audio editing. Their reflections are largely audience-focused, which is only one level of digital production, and which was, to be honest, the level I focused on as I taught the assignment. However, through the practice of teaching and some of my own digital practices, I have come to be more attuned to the second level of making media, which is the way in which the producer/maker/artist/student is infected and affected through the durational digital making process.

In part this is due to the particular qualities of digital technologies—the recording, re-recording, the hours of listening, the editing, the zooming in and out for a particular breath or sound of the character, the way the rhythm of the voice of another can inhabit the rhythm of your own voice through repeated listening—that work together to situate the producer in a particular position in relation to their subject's story. In other words, while digital technologies themselves can be employed in multiple ways and towards multiple goals, it is still the case that digital recording and editing, along with the vast amount of audiovisual public archives, create a particular vantage point—the artist–medium—from which to not only see the world, but to quasi-embody different perspectives in the world.

What this brings me back to is a question that Krista Ratcliffe (2005) asked in Rhetorical Listening: "Why is it so hard to listen to one another? Why is it so hard to identify with one another when we feel excluded?" (p. 3). She names this a "cross-cultural" distance (p. 1). There may be, as Renato Rosaldo has argued, "particular ways of being-in-the-world that are foreclosed to people who have not first had access to similar such experiences in the context of their own lives" and which thus work to draw lines of division around us (Throop, 2010, p. 771). These lines may be difficult and even impossible to traverse, but what I think Emily and Lauren show us is that one can at least begin the process of empathy and line-traversing through digital voice performance and digital production via the artist–medium. This might happen at the level of the audience, but I would assert that it could happen even more acutely at the level of the maker. In some ways, this is not a new argument for us. We know that students are changed in the act of writing, in the act of close reading, in the act of closely inhabiting the language of another.

Digital production with sound, and voice in particular, enters into this important rhetorical figuration, where the goal is to literally reimagine rhetorical lines of division and distinction—through the voices of another—but also that the digital itself can be a potent rhetorical instrument for positioning scholars, makers, students, and DIY practitioners to confront the lives of others through their own digital production practice. At its base then, we might imagine this pedagogy more broadly as an invitation to embrace recorded voice and archives of all kinds along with digital affordabilities as a "core material" of our practice, "to explore the possibilities for writing not only with words, but also with voices" (to quote Erin Anderson from one of her presentations). It is in this way that I imagine the digital pedagogy of the artist–medium to serve as a model for one way to begin practicing empathy, digital intimacy, and identification as reinvigorated digital pedagogical practices.