Noise Vivarium: Spectral Radicalism
By D’ANDRADE
Introduction
A spectrogram is a visual representation of the frequency spectrum of a signal that varies with time. While there is much scientific material written about spectral studies in relation to sound, this article intends to focus on the spectral aspects of sound and how, by using digital media, we can achieve a visual and hyper-sensory experience of inaudible musicality. In this analysis, we will journey together to engage with this as existential poetics, aesthetics, and the desire for political re-existence. How can we analyze the spectrogram of a queer person? What does the representation this analysis produces mean from an integral view of sound and archive?
This article starts from the basis of three primary concepts—concepts that will help us become familiar with some of the authors and audiovisual material that guided the structure of the Noise Vivarium project. The foundations of the project were created from the study of silence and aspects of ecology, nature, and human activities, connected through a continuous flow of a priori understandings. The first concept is radical listening, a method for analyzing vocal relations and dissent through sound. The second concept is the spectral archive, inspired by the Manifesto Espectral of the Technodruids. The final part of the analysis involves an in-depth look at the term techno-poetics as established by Louis Chude-Sokei in his book The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics.
Radical Listening
Clarification of what is meant by radical listening involves a direct dialogue with Jacques Ranciere’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which can be read on several levels. The book primarily concerns what Ranciere discovered in the archives of Joseph Jacotot, an exiled Frenchman and teacher. In 1818, Jacotot discovered an unconventional teaching method that spread panic throughout the cultured community of Europe. Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach French to Flemish students who knew no French. Jacotot concluded from this that it is possible to teach without the need for explanation, but simply by keeping learners engaged in discovery through the link of something they hold in common (Ranciere, 1991). From this postulate, Ranciere built his theory and method for intellectual emancipation – a method initiated by Jacotot, which would allow, for example, illiterate people to teach.
Ranciere considers a chain of arguments against the thesis of the equality of intelligence, which he quickly dismisses by pointing out that the progressive intellectual consensus believes, as he does, that intelligence cannot be measured (Ranciere 1991, 1-18). However, his method ignores that the sources of human classification are not exclusively about intelligence. Other determinants have been argued to be the reasons for the superiority/inferiority nexus, which will be referred to in this text, as they relate to queer and racialized bodies.
The Noise Vivarium project starts from the principle of the intellectual venture. Within this framework, a pedagogical methodology was established in which the presence of a master or even the performativity of knowledge of a school environment did not prevail. Instead, an active critique of the hierarchies of educational processes and the questioning of how to work on emancipating the participants was proposed. The whole project was developed on the basis of shared and collective knowledge; workshops served as a space for the participants to contribute to the direction of the project and the possible results.
In early 2020 in Berlin, a series of communication workshops, organized with the support of the Durchstarten program for new cultural educators, focused on young artists within the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC) and Queer spectrum. The workshop series took Jacques Ranciere’s ideas in The Ignorant Schoolmaster as their point of departure. Teachers and learners were therefore placed in the same relational and political position, and moved around according to the load of knowledge they each brought with them. There was no one transmitting knowledge or performing learning. Instead, stories were shared in listening sessions offered by artists Fredrika Tsai and Leila Hussain to create a sonic map of thoughts, desires, and new ideas to build a new position of artists in collectives, teamwork, and collaborative methods.
The first meetings were based on Gayatri Spivak’s text Can the Subaltern Speak? which analyses, through a postcolonial perspective, to whom the right to speak is reserved, and how the right to speak guarantees a certain existential quality. These encounters inspired a discussion on structural racism, as well as problematizing the migration crisis as a basis for understanding how BIPoC bodies are silenced or under-represented at various levels in geopolitical contexts. The recorded noise, both vocal and ambient, became the key material for these workshops, given that we started from the understanding that everything that can be condensed in time-space is noise, including politics. Thus, in contraposition, we characterized silence as something physically non-existent but which exists primarily as an idea to bridge Spivak’s silence into a decolonial acoustic. Noisy silence, as defined in the workshops, was inspired by the approach of decoding sound and micro-social similitude as something that is in constant transformation, and is not lost spatially, as it becomes impermanent in constant circulation, the same process existing in memorization, archiving, and emotional openness.
When we speak, we emit sound, we sculpt the surrounding air using architecture and geographical accident to shape it. Through recording, the content of what is spoken, when organized into language, takes on new characteristics from a spatial perspective of acting, archiving, and unfolding what is communicated—not lost in the air, but propagated to live in the spectral dwelling. It is thus possible to record conversations, not only as a tool of documentation and archiving, but also as a poetic manifestation of a certain ephemeral moment, a landscape, or an emotion.
Radical listening takes place in the moment after the noisy silence, when the awareness of sound and politics is clear in the room. This was strongly influenced by Grada Kilomba’s ideas when the author points out an imposed silence in tortured voices, and in the dimension in which she dwells when writing. In her work, Kilomba posits writing as a way of materializing the voice, of abandoning the position of being the “other” to become “self”. Writing is a resource for becoming a subject and no longer an object, the exotic, the non-human, the hierarchically inferior. It entails having the power to speak your own words: “I become the absolute opposition to what the colonial project predetermined” (Kilomba, 2019, p.28). Writing becomes a political act. Writing can be an act of decolonization, specifically through the process in which we stop being objects and become subjects. The inspiration to think object to subject, according to Kilomba, is derived from the seminal author bell hooks,[1] of speaking with one’s mouth, writing with one’s own words. In the second chapter (“Who can speak?”), based on a 1995 dialogue with Gayatri Spivak, Kilomba stresses the question of “whether the subaltern can speak”, also invoking the intellectual Patricia Hill Collins as they think about the subject and the conditions of the enunciation of speech.[2] The act of speaking is a negotiation between the one who speaks and the one who listens. Listening, in this sense, is an authorization towards the speaker. Such a process constitutes a structure of knowledge validation with hierarchical dimensions that preserve white supremacy. Given this scenario, the question is: how can a black person, racialized and with gender binarism imposed on them, produce knowledge in the academic context? Once again, the question seems to lead back to “who can speak and under what conditions?” There is no point in speaking if there is no structure that allows one to be heard.
Here we can eclipse Ranciere’s intellectual emancipation critically in the context of bodies outside cis-normativity by bringing radical listening into the practical realm through the creation of spaces and experiences in which learning becomes horizontal and accepts connections with a broad political sense of diversity. The illiterate philosophers, who do not display the overly conservative characteristics of institutional canons, provoke the appearance of a new type of intellectual. This new intellectual does not belong to the ambivalent game of belonging or not belonging, but rather radicalizes listening and has their praxis in survival and re-existence—the surviving intellectual.
The field recording
The field recording of the workshops served as a tool when it came to composing with these voices, translating the whole process of radical listening into spectral tones, using digital tools, delays, and frequency shifting. All vocal elements of the discussions were transformed into emotional soundscapes. In the Noise Vivarium sound archive, there is no precise documentation of what was said in a certain situation, who said it, or how it was said, but only a noise record of the sound spectrum and whose interpretative capabilities. According to the participants, speech as a constituent of power still provides a legitimation, and noise silence is then a form of protest intrinsic to the system of dogmatic silencing generated by colonial institutions (schools, churches, universities, etc.). Instead, the workshops reached several critical conclusions in relation to Grada Kilomba and Spyvak’s critique about the moment after subalternity, i.e., when the subaltern gains a voice, and this vocalism becomes a tool for easy manipulation and appropriation in the context of the prevailing colonial hegemony. Speaking, shouting, or vociferating is not the only step—there also exists the step of re-appropriating the sound or speech of the one who is considered subaltern. The use of abstract noise was a strong element during the workshops, in creating a soundscape composed of a range of frequencies, loops, and feedbacks, characterized by a connection with non-human cosmologies and inaudible perspectives in particular. Noise Vivarium is primarily research for a new ecology of sound, based on radical accessibility, decoloniality, and synaesthetic poetry.
Spectral Archive
The spectral archive is a term I coined to be able to analyze the sound material of Noise Vivarium. We started by mixing artistic techniques, such as field recording documentation, noise production, and spectrogram analysis with free software, to create an emotional and poetic clip of three South American queer bodies that participated in the project. The workshops with Joa Assumpção, Nicole Desposito, and Walla Capelobolo were the last of the series that concluded the first phase of the workshops, focusing on a critical reflection about borders, trans-lives, and poetics.
The term spectral refers to the Technodruid’s Manifesto Espectral, made anonymously in February 2019 in the City of London, in the context of the TecnoXamanism project. The Technodruids present the manifesto in poetic form, using elements of the Amazonian indigenous cause, coloniality, and paradigms of technocratic capitalism. What is interesting about this manifesto is its evocation of the Anti-Narcissus through the ecology of sound or even the noisecracy (Manifesto Espectral, 2019). They elaborate the pagan polyphony of the tropics that navigates a warrior ancestry, its archive, in the end, found in orality like a wave propagation, condensed in the digital archives.
To decolonize the bowels, put your two fingers to the throat,
to decolonize the thought,
to hack the unconscious
To know the other, the mirror
let’s do it in dream, let’s dream in action!
Show your face Anti-Narcissus
Technodruidas
The Anti-Narcissus character refers to those people without mirrors in the struggle for a counter-narrative against the technical capitalist, leading to a reflection on the spectrum and its propagative and diffusive dimensions. Spectral Radicalism exists in radio, tv, internet broadcast, in the international traffic of forbidden information. It is the tool of the exiled Anti-Narcissus, invigorating forces against the colonial catastrophe. In turn, the myth of Narcissus, of the beautiful young man who falls in love with himself and only himself, is fought in spectral radicalism through the vociferation of existences suppressed by cis-heteronormativity.
Nicole Desposito: Limits of Affection
In Sunset, Nicole Desposito’s spectrogram, colors in linear scale were chosen. The sound frequencies as can be perceived in fig.1 transmit calmness, with the warm tones being enveloped by the blue blanket. Nicole’s entire dialogue is permeated by these tones, connecting to the fact that there is a certain control required to deal with the subject while keeping emotions protected. Nicole’s case is extremely important for this analysis because it is directly connected to trans-lives in the dynamics of relationships in the cis-hetero normative world. The gaze, or even the expectation, that passes through the cis gaze is in fact the most widely known and used sexual and affective dynamic in the social environment. When viewed through the glasses of a trans perspective, this becomes extremely painful due to the process of becoming trans and the differentiation that the individual undergoes. There is a need to find a way of coping, of dealing with withdrawals, and ideas that no longer coordinate on a larger social plane. One of the biggest problems lies in the affective issue and the particular brand of social suffering a trans person goes through due to the moral judgment they are subjected to, as well as the institutional burden of criminalization of allegedly deviant bodies. Nicole described her recent affective relationship, beginning during the Covid-19 viral pandemic in Brazil, and how its dissolution became a place of deep and experiential self-knowledge.
Figure 1. Sunset, the spectrogram of Nicole Desposito, Noise Vivarium, 2020.
Nicole chose to present a poetic diary about herself, offering a self-analysis regarding the aspects of the trans body being subject to desire and the constant need to fulfil fetishistic fantasies based on cis-heteronormativity. The critical point is to realize that suffering is fully connected to a subaltern and silenced femininity; a differentiated option of desire, yet not taken to the second most serious level of relationship. The boundaries imposed on queer bodies are directly interrelated with structural racism, classism, and gender, often devaluing black and trans people, who are considered second-class partners or reduced to sexual utility. One of the ways sometimes used to overcome the trauma of rejection is to hold to a self-hypersexualization of these bodies, a complex form of self-defence and an act of survival act. This act makes conscious the exoticization and devaluation of these bodies through the same tool of objectification. For example, the body of a trans woman can meta-critically denounce patriarchal gender dogmas, as well as implicitly enable the displacement of prevailing normativity to the empowerment of that which diverges, using beauty, femininity, and care, which establish power relations based on gender binarism. Loving a trans, black body, or even a body that bears colonial traces, enables the reactivation of relational dynamics, creating a new emotion. The black or trans body, suffering the love rejection typical of the cis-heteronormative gender war, gains as a coefficient the tools for self-reflection on what love outwith gender binarism is, how these emotions are healed, and what is left in their place to overcome. Nicole’s diary delves into the experience of becoming a woman in a cis-normative practical format and going through the relationship crisis as a woman in an experiential way, but with a trans positioning. Beyond the feeling of loss and loneliness, we have a self-reflective emotion and a criticism of the binary world.
Joa Assumpção: Frontiers of Language
The spectrogram (fig.2) of the artist and educator, Joa Assumpção, chose magmatic colors on a linear scale. The variations of gain, pitch, and volume are represented in the intensities of the colors. Assumpção’s speech presents a constant intensity because the warm monologue is linked to experiences of dissidence that shaped her worldview. The speech was made out of fragments of the artist’s coursework for her degree in pedagogy at the Universidade Federal Fluminense. The text was used in the workshop to create a performance script based on fragments, where the artist could perform these in a sequence of short audio.
Figure 2. Magnetic colors, spectrogram of Joa Assumpção. Noise Vivarium, 2020
Assumpção’s audio material is directly related to language, poetry, and blackness, dialoguing with black lives as they are schooled through a white and cis-hetero-normative gaze. The artist’s performative reading leads us to a reflection on auto-ethnography and how knowledge production can permeate through and to the body by putting conventional academic epistemologies into discussion for critique.
“For a black writing” is one of the collocations that point to Assumpção’s thinking, in a radical positioning on knowledge production that takes on the misadventures of textual creation and the oral practice so important to black and indigenous cultures. For Abdias do Nascimento, Afrodescendants can adhere to–or choose not to adopt–an international black perspective. Although most African descendants assume forms of national identities, this does not mean that a black international perspective has not previously existed among people of African descent. One could argue that the black international perspective has had a significant impact on black people in the African Diaspora. The Haitian revolution is an example of how populations of African ancestry were inspired by the struggles taking place. In all parts of the Americas, the Haitian revolution inspired African descendants. More than that: the Haitian revolution became the model of black liberation, based on organizing society against slavery and guaranteeing equality for all who had African ancestry. For Assumpção, the white, elitist format is counter-revolutionary and will never embrace gender dissent and structural racism issues. To understand the artist’s archive, we need to understand the term “Quilombismo” (Nascimento, 1998), which addresses the creation of spaces of resistance and a civic culture based on the emancipation of individuals imprisoned by the dogmas of white hegemonic society. The quilombo would be the place in which oral culture and radical listening are primordial to accepting trans, black bodies, outside any normative standard.
Walla Capelobo: Limits of the Earth
In the archive of the artist Walla Capelobo, the sound recording captures the railroad of Congonhas, in Minas Gerais, and is related to the poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade “The Biggest Train in the World” (Drummond, 1984). For his participation in the archive, Walla was interested in addressing the aesthetic aspects of natural resources and how colonial bodies are managed in the same way, through expropriation, exploitation, and depletion.
Figure 3. Fruit Salad, spectrogram of Walla Capebolo. Noise Vivarium, 2020.
Mineral extractivism is one of the central axes in Walla’s work, an auto-ethnographic reference to his having been raised in the Brazilian state responsible for much of the mining economy in South America. The mineral sector and its environmental risks only became known to the general Brazilian and international public after the failure of the tailings dam in Minas Gerais. Thus, the mining model is interpreted by Walla as a field of knowledge and embodiment. The artist’s intervention consists of deepening the reading of the territory or space, the results reveal the importance of the poetic text as an instrument of critical and broad perception with territorial implications.
The sound of the train connects the late industrialization of the Brazilian context to the need for international acceptance as a modern country, in counterpoint to a wild nature that harbors the resources necessary for this modernization. The Brazilian drama continues in the critical paradigm of “the good savage” (Rousseau, 1996), as an anthropological analysis of the formation of Brazilian distinctions of political-social stereotypes, which intend a fixing of identity, based on a forest purism. Here we can establish an interesting counter-hegemonic narrative tool, which the Noise Vivarium project intends to fulfil at the conceptual level, in the ecology of sounds, as well as in the relationship between nature and silence, connected through the subalternity often projected on the feminine. Nature being the place of the feminine and, at the same time, presenting no language intelligible to man, it is notorious that silence is exploited in multiple ways within a colonialist, patriarchal, and expropriating mentality. The feminine here is not gender-based, but rather a set of epistemologies, rules of identification, and pedagogies, which are posited as femme. Colonial bodies are to some extent femme bodies, in terms of the domination process, directly connected to the borders of the land. “The resources of patriarchal maintenance are sustained in the exploitation or even in the creation of the feminine”, leading us to the analysis of “technocratic capitalism”, in Louis Chude-Sokei’s words, in which he points to the implicit relations existing between machines, raciality, and gender (Chude-Sokei 2016, 131-148.). Chude-Sokei points to the formation of capitalism based on the colonial agrarian project of the plantations and how this racialization of the black body is related to infinite free labor, similar to that of a robot, with ambiguous or even non-existent sexuality. The author takes us on a journey into Caribbean theory, making it possible to understand the strange love relationship between blacks and machines. Musical instruments are the main engine of this connection. In Capelobo’s intervention, the train assumes the same role as a colonial body, crossing borders and distributing nature’s resources.
Unarchiving
Noise Vivarium is an ongoing project that has no completion deadline, and is intending to become a tool for developing other works with artists interested in producing content for this archive. With all that in mind, Noise Vivarium is always unarchiving since it constitutes a direct critique of the classic institutional archives, in which queer and black bodies are often represented in racial and scientific categories. The project intends to test the possibility of archive production through refusal. This same refusal argues for the abolition of archives, which subject colonial bodies to white observation.
Drawing on Tina Campt’s suggestion that refusal is not just a strategy of resistance, but a fundamental negation of the terms through which oppression is exercised upon black life (Campt 2017), Noise Vivarium further asks what kinds of engagements with colonial archives are available if we wish to refuse the archive’s violent structuration of the present. Noise Vivarium’s spectral archive is an addendum to the unarchiving movement, strongly connected with the computing term in which you must decompress a file to access it, an increasingly normalized cultural practice in contemporary society. Digital archives then gain a disruptive capacity when it comes to the production and organization of archives. With the aesthetics of informational data as the great surface on which these archives rest, we advance a different feeling than that which extensive collections used to have, based on secrecy, mysticism, and a sacralization of knowledge locked away in departments. Unarchiving offers the file for decoding, and from the file, it can unfold into more files, always decompressing. In Noise Vivarium, sound is stored directly in digital form, and as images and codes that can be revisited and decoded through an artistic lens and engaged with mainly through inter-relational practices. Sound as not only something audible, but as a tool for socialization.
[1] For more about bell hooks see: hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Talking Black. Boston: South End Press.
[2] Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, And the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
References
Candido, A. 1984. “A vida ao rés-do-chão”. Para gostar de ler. Andrade, Carlos Drummond et al. São Paulo: Ática.
Fortes, L. R. S. 1996. Rousseau: o bom selvagem. São Paulo: FTD.
Kilomba, Grada. 2019, Memórias da plantação: episódios de racismo cotidiano. Translated by Jess Oliveira. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Cobogó.
Chude-Sokei, Louis Onuorah. 2016. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Nascimento, Abdias do. 2019. O Quilombismo. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva.
Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The ignorant schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Spivak, Gayatrik Chakravarty. (1995). “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In The post-colonial studies reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, p. 24-28.
Campt, Tina M. 2017. Listening to Images. Duke University Press Books
Technodruidas. 2019. “Manifesto Espectral” Tecnoxamanismo. Last modified 20 June, 2021. https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/manifesto-spectral/
D’Andrade is a non-binary musician, poet, and author, whose conceptual approach to Afro-futurism and decolonial theory develops investigative works on new narratives and counter-narratives through sound design, coding, archives, and gatherings. Their current research focuses on the project Onomatopia, which is in development towards a master’s degree in Art in Context at the University of Arts of Berlin, through sound, poetry, and digital games.