SharonS

Hearing (our) History - Writing the Future

Sound Art installation inviting listeners/audience to reflect on how we turn our lived and heard experience into documentation: writing, sharing, translating into language.

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Phonemic Resistance - Writing (history) is a performative act: actively constructing reality and 'doing' (political) identity. Propelled onto the instantly-consumed feast of social media, writings about the just-happened or happening-now have the power to rapidly shape opinions, create polarisations and groupings, and generate multiple macro gut-responses (among those who have access to such media). SharonS

With:

Set-Up:
A quadraphonic sound installation system will be set up in Mediamatic and will play the sound piece Phonemic Resistance as well as excerpts from interviews made at the Dutch Support for Taksim Occupy on the 9th of June. Total is approximately 25 min, looped.

Listen at: https://soundcloud.com/sharonrstewart/voices-of-dutch-support-for

In the middle of the four speakers will be a place to sit or recline. Open-ended bits of text from the original recordings will be hung, painted on cloth and written on pieces of paper. These pieces of paper with this open-ended text, along with colored pens and a box to place writings will be available and will stimulate a written response to the work, reflection on the Gezi events, or writing down a bit of personal history.

Writings collected will be reincorporated into the exhibit, either physically and/or recorded and made part of the sound track.

Visual artist, Alexandra Arshanskaya, has provided advice and will support the visual aspects of the installation. (http://arshanskaya.com)

Materials needed:
4-6m square empty space
a laptop with a DAW installed (Logic, Reaper, Cubase, etc...) from which to play the tracks
an audio interface that can support 4 output channels
4 active monitors/speakers
cables (power and data) for all connections
plenty of cable path tape to fix cables (safety for visitors and equipment)

Interaction:
During listening, people are able to write responses, a short statement of their vision for the society they would like to live in. These responses can be used for HakY's exhibit.

Cooperation with Stigma Tunnel
This sound installation can later be incorporated into Efe and Jammin's Stigma Tunnel, another installation project.

Methods used:
This sound piece contains audio from two different recording moments:
One occurred on the morning of the 9th of june, 2013, at the Dutch Support for Taksim Occupy demonstration in Amsterdam. I interviewed individuals, asking them to answer, more with their heart then their ratio, the question of why they were demonstrating in Amsterdam, including how they experienced the distance between the two cities, Amsterdam and Istanbul. I also made recordings of the chanting and singing of myself and the demonstrators. I modified one short response, in Turkish, and excerpts of the singing and chanting with the Monolake Granulator in Ableton Live before incorporating them into the work.

A couple of days later I recorded myself early one morning, writing my dreams in pencil in my journal, an intimate moment of reflection. I stroked the pillow I was using to support my writing and spoke insights and short particles of language into the microphone.