So good evening and welcome to today's live launch of the Formula of Giving Heart.
This event is part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding projects for the future.
Stephen Schwarzman, Centre for the Humanities. I'm Darcy Springle, and it is my pleasure to share with you this this event this evening.
We're all social distancing while safely live streaming this event.
And we hope that you're all safe and well wherever you are in the world.
And before we start this evening's events, I would like to remind you that you can share comments and questions for our panel in the box.
So first, I would like to introduce our artists. Adele is an interdisciplinary artist raised in Egypt and currently residing in London.
Is hybrid practise includes computational media, sound, generative images and sculpture and working with political and comparatives.
His aesthetic research contemplates two interdependent abstractions immorality of time and sovereignty of space,
which explore the balance between intelligence, emotions and moral judgements in both digital and physical realities.
He had a recent solo show at over an institute in Copenhagen.
He also participated in group exhibitions at the Saja Art Foundation Mosaic Rooms Gallery in London and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.
He also has an upcoming show at the 5th International Biennial in Casablanca, Morocco, and the residency at Finland.
He studied computer science at a city in Egypt and found art at the University of the Arts in London.
And so we're very happy to have followed as a visiting fellow in the humanities this year.
We originally developed our application together prior to the pandemic with the hopes of having an in-person music performance and exhibition,
a research talk and a student workshop. Unfortunately, we had to completely rework those plans.
And I'm very grateful to George and to Fellows for having stuck with the project,
especially had two completely recontextualize his work in relation to the new digital medium.
And so the visiting fellowship transformed into one that was kind of producing an entirely new work that engaged with its current model,
which is really exciting. And so before we get into that work, I want to introduce briefly the rest of the panellists in the order of presentation.
So since I will be presenting first,
I'm going to introduce myself so Underseas Springle and junior research fellow in music at St. John's College here at Oxford.
My work examines contemporary popular music in Egypt at the intersections of technology, capitalism and politics.
I spent the last decade doing ethnographic research on the independent music scene in Egypt,
focussing especially during and after the time of the 2011 revolution.
And I'm currently back in Egypt now,
continuing this work with the new focus on music streaming and digital technologies as they index revolutions of power between global north and south,
and as they may perpetuate inequalities related to the issues of race, class, gender and so on amongst listeners and users in the Middle East.
And our second panellist is, first of all, Sterling,
she is a musicologist specialising in ethnographic approaches to music and sound, art and contemporary urban environments.
She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow on the I.R.S. funded Project Centre of Cities towards Sonic Urbanism,
based at the music faculty at the University of Oxford.
Her research explores the social relations and coalitions that music and sound produce in their life forms,
focussing particularly on the potential for such coalitions to transform or reinforce existing social and spatial orders.
And our third and final panellist is Christopher Howorth, who is a senior lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Birmingham.
His scholarly interests lie and the broad areas of electronic music and sound art,
which he researches using a mixture of historiographical, philosophical and ethnographic research methods.
He is currently researching the short lived Soaper theory moment that accompanied
the mid 1990s hype for the Internet and the World Wide Web in Britain.
And he was previously an HRC early career leadership fellow on music and the Internet towards a digital sociology of music.
He also composes computer music, often incorporating principles from psychoacoustics music, psychology and cybernetics.
So how the next hour or so is going to work is that each of the panellists will give a short presentation.
Then, after all, the presentations will give fellow the chance to respond.
Then we will open it up and take questions from the audience so these questions can be for the artists,
the work, or they can be as a response to any of the panellists.
So please feel free during any of the presentations to write your questions in the
chat box and know that we will get to as many of them as we can and at the end,
after all the presentations have concluded. So I'm going to kick things off with my own presentation,
which is going to connect phalloides work to my own research in Egypt over the last decade and two notions of the political.
So I want to draw attention to the way that for many in Egypt,
this recent experience of isolation, of absence and disruption long preceded the current pandemic.
I've had several friends from Egypt.
Tell me, for instance, that the covid-19 lockdown's reminded them of curfews implemented during the 2011 revolution.
And so for the next few minutes and I'm just going to explore some ideas around these temporal and affective juxtapositions,
these overlapping with the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath.
So I do so to help focus our attention on the ways that global political events such as the current pandemic are uniquely
experienced each time and place due to the way that they animate and have an archive of affective memory that lives in the body.
So in the formula of giving heart, we see the performer Fadell wearing a gas mask that covers the eyes, nose and mouth, we could, of course,
be such a mask as evoking the contagion and now mandatory mask wearing of our present uncertain moment, our reality reverberating around the globe.
Such a mask was also a visible symbol of the 2011 Egyptian revolution,
when millions of protesters marched through an occupied Egyptian streets where they were met with tear gas, bullets and takes some.
Just going to share my screen. We have a bit of an image with this.
So hopefully you can see that. So here we see graffiti by the artists left from that time depicting Nefertiti wearing a gas mask,
the ancient Egyptian queen standing in as a symbol of the Egyptian nation and
people as they struggled for political freedom against a corrupt military regime.
In this context, then, the gas mask was a symbol of empowerment, specifically of the people's power in the formula of giving heart,
I couldn't help but feel these multiple temporalis and effective regimes,
not only of ancient Egyptian heritage with the contemporary political reality,
but also of the gas mask as a symbol both of one's inherent bodily vulnerability and of
one's inherent bodily power as being part of a larger collective of the people against,
for instance, a political regime.
The formula of giving heart likewise draws our attention to how much we rely on a kind of recurring normatively in our temple.
Perhaps the best exemplified in the concept of false.
So the performance is marked by the hitting of metallic sounds as well as the visual biodata of the performers Harpreet each,
which seems to suggest a sort of loose pattern of clarity for many.
The recent pandemic could likewise be described as a period of losing the pulse of everyday life.
There have been marked absences in our lives, activities we cannot do, people we cannot see,
and feelings of confinement in places and conditions that are beyond our control.
So in the artistic world in Egypt that I'm currently researching, notions of sleeping, disappearing,
absence, confinement and silence have been major concepts of interest across a variety of artistic mediums.
And I've been focussing especially on the emergence of these themes within the last six years when the military returned to power.
So Fideles previous work, the essence of disappearing from the Kimosabe Rooms in London in 2013,
for instance, directly explores this theme of disappearance so set in a dark room.
The performance consisted of the Dow hitting or strumming a series of metallic objects,
sometimes rhythmically but often not, and seemingly not intentionally so.
The listener in such a performance is left to consider perhaps how everyday objects and materials can reverberate with sound.
They can be, if not musical, then resonant in my research.
Explore more broadly how it is that artists are conceptualising disappearance, absence and silence in the wake of especially traumatic events.
So writing in the wake of the defeat of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, for instance, writer Hazem Unworldliness How to Disappear.
This is a book, quote, designs a set of oral exercises that show readers how to disappear,
reappear, join a group, leave a group and other necessary skills.
So in the first exercise, how to disappear. You recommend sitting in a public place such as a park or cafe and shifting one's focus to what one hears,
he instructs readers not to privilege any single sound or give the sounds any meaning, ruminating instead only on some quality.
Eventually, he writes,
you will find that your inner voice gradually diminishes and at the same rate by which you immerse yourself in your sonic environment.
When you ultimately succeed in listening to the sound in its entirety,
you will find that the distance between yourself and the spaces sounds has diminished and that you have become part of this case.
You will find that no one around you notices your presence. Everyone will pass by without saying.
So through this exercise one and throughout the rest of the book,
one is meant to learn how to shed the ego and personhood to disappear by listening and learning, to listen to objects and materials around you.
So I see some resonances here with Adel's formula for Giving Heart, which invites the listener to hear a variety of materiality of sound qualities,
including the sound of the biosensors and the performance, the heart, rather than recognise,
rather than listening only to recognisable sonic or musical objects. So I would rather close as kind of a question here.
Does the listener disappear as they are immersed in these different kind of qualities?
So I I'm viewing or approaching the formal beginning part,
then in conversation with a series of other distinct and unique works that explore
themes of disappearance and absence following traumatic sociopolitical events.
So these works that I'm in conversation with in my research include in our twenty eighteen musical album, Slumber Unworthiness,
the Book of Sleep and Visual Artists for the Year eighteen exhibition When Dreams Call for Silence wants to start sharing this cue.
So taken collectively, these works seem to suggest that silence and absence can be a creative practise of listening,
of soft questioning and of self rediscovery after a period of intense trauma or rupture losing the pulse,
then these artists might argue or might suggest can be a means of rediscovery and rebirth.
So one thing that Federalsburg work brings to these conversations about absence within confinement,
I think, is an incisive engagement with technology's role in shaping these experiences.
So technology is something that will likely shape how we rediscover ourselves,
how we rediscover our pulse after this moment of collective uncertainty.
So Fidele described the work not as a video piece, but as a, quote, loathsome performance with codes.
So here the machine, which is ultimately a surveillance system, stands in the place of the absent audience.
The machine is the audience.
So music scholars such as drought and others have argued that the increased reliance on digital technologies for music distribution and consumption,
for instance, have transformed music making into a technology of surveillance.
So one example being music streaming platforms such as Spotify collecting our user data not only in relation to our sonic habits,
but in relation to our everyday lives.
So whereas this is often framed as a somewhat recent phenomenon in much English language scholarship on music streaming in many parts of the world,
listening and artistic performance have long been political tools of surveillance, for instance, for state regimes.
So technologies and technologies such as streaming platforms today likewise are
increasingly encouraging artists themselves to use this data collected as surveillance,
as a means of transforming their artistic practise. For instance, in order to better meet the needs of their customers and their audiences.
So, in other words, there seems to be and and Adele's work seems to be suggesting this kind of artistic performance for machines.
And so just kind of wrap up some of my thoughts here.
I wonder if that might comment on the process of conceptualising and artistic and performative work with the machine as audience in mind.
So how does this fact inform your artistic practise as an artist who who has practised and performed in a variety of political contexts?
So does the machine here in your perspective serve as a kind of stand-in for some kind of absolute or great power?
And if finally, if this is indeed the direction that performance might be moving, what, if anything,
is really new about this idea of performing for a machine from your perspective as an artist and as a performer?
So I will end there and I will pass it on to Chrissy, who is our next presenter.
Thank you. Oh, thank you. Hopefully I'm now unmetered.
Thanks so much, Darsey,
and thanks for inviting me to be part of the panel is it's a real pleasure to talk with all of you and thanks to Halad for sharing his work.
So I, I wanted to to pick up mainly on themes of of sound and space in relation to Kelly's piece,
but also more broadly with respect to music and sound culture and our kind of current historical moment.
So starting with something from the film,
I think one thing that I found very striking about the piece was the way that sound is used to create an atmosphere of of confinement,
but also how a sound kind of becomes almost an escape from that confinement.
And for me, this was kind of achieved through this constant kind of liminal space between pulse and kind of arrhythmia or rhythm and non rhythm,
which kind of goes back to what to what Darsey was saying.
So in the piece, the sonic portrayal of the cage and the human interaction with it starts off as quite sonically sporadic and rhythmic,
but at the same time very spatial and very corporeal, the kind of reverb trios that come with physically running your hands across the bars,
the clatter of shaking metal and the very bodily kind of percussive performance.
And these moments really give a sense of how sound is inscribed with information
about the surfaces and textures and spatial dimensions of a physical environment.
And I couldn't help but think here of Laurence Abu Hamden's investigation into said Saidnaya prison in Syria,
where in the absence of visual documentation of what went on inside because the detainees were blindfolded,
Abu Hamdan worked with survivors to draw out their memories of sound inside the prison.
So what he calls the ear witness testimonies and his documentation,
it brings home this kind of troubling notion that under conditions of physical incarceration and visual deprivation,
sound becomes this way of orienting yourself in space.
So the space of confinement is defined less by its physical architecture than by its acoustic architecture and its reflective surfaces.
And the way that sound collides with those in your piece,
I found the very kind of spatial sounds of confinement become more and more kind of viscerally
confining through this quite relentless kind of clattering and hitting of objects.
Until a certain point for me, they started to become something else.
So something more rhythmic and more patterned that I could recognise and I could almost in train to.
And to me, this kind of reflected some of the perceptual shifts that I experienced with the pandemic in the U.K.,
this kind of inward turn away from the complex kind of external rhythms of pandemic life and towards the body and its internal rhythms.
But equally, this as part of a kind of new state of exception, to use a gambin term,
which increased kind of state and peer surveillance of our bodily functions and kind of sanctioned the increased gathering of biodata.
At the same time, the way that the kind of clattering cage sonic space morphs into this more percussive,
more rhythmic performance in the work for me really brought to light the kind of intensely effective physiological qualities of rhythm.
I was reminded of Raymond Williams's notion of rhythm as, quote, transmitting a description of experience not merely as an abstraction or an emotion,
but as a physical effect on the organism, on the blood, on the breathing and on the physical patterns of the brain.
In the kind of threshold space that you create between something sonically quite chaotic
and viscerally stifling and something more horizontal and kind of rhythmically aggregated,
I was reminded how powerfully sound can modulate our bodily states.
Going back to, you know, what Darcy was saying, its ability to move us from from one state to another.
And I guess I wanted to ask you a bit more about what it is for you that sound can
communicate that differentiates it from maybe other media like so images and,
you know, do you feel that sound can convey something that language or even narration can never quite do justice to?
And related to that, how do you see the sonic and the visual elements of the piece as kind of interacting this kind of switch from the very spatial,
three dimensional sonic space of the cage to the kind of flatter, more two dimensional sound of the of the biodata and and text to speech narration.
And then the second theme that I just wanted to touch on has to do with the shifting spaces of sonic and visual performance throughout the pandemic.
So some of the questions that I've been kind of asking myself are, you know,
what does it mean to participate in a musical or a sonic event through a screen?
And, you know, what has it meant for musical and sonic publics to lose their physical presence and their spatial propinquity?
And what's happened to the kind of visceral forms of musical collectivity that gain their social political force through the space of appearance?
I've mostly been thinking about these questions in relation to my work on electronic dance music in the UK and other forms of music.
Noticing how, as Ben Acid's points out,
the migration of musical culture online during the pandemic in many ways accelerated
currents that were already underway with live streamed platforms like Boiler Room,
for example. So ideas about the dematerialisation of collective musical experience through this kind of BAJRAM participation,
the intensification of the technical aspects of musical performance through the positioning of cameras over their musical
equipment and the ambivalent role that the live stream plays in widening access to musical culture on the one hand,
while consolidating power amongst big tech on the other.
Watching Carla's piece,
I found it sort of interesting to reflect on the potential so differences between the digital experience of music and of audio visual art.
And Ben's article that I just mentioned,
he describes how during a live stream he spots a friend in the chat box and they perform this ironic kind of dance floor interaction.
And though, you know, though the pandemic presented few alternatives,
I think this it kind of highlights for me the absurdity of attempting to replicate the kind of sensorial bodily,
vibrational and intensely social experience of live music through electronic space.
And perhaps one of the most interesting outputs from the dance music sector during the pandemic was Detroit techno producer Carl
Craig's sound installation that addressed the kind of loneliness and tinnitus that often follows collective musical euphoria.
On the other hand, experiencing your colours audio visual work through a computer screen in the domestic space that
I've spent most of the last year in a kind of mediated experience in a way that both exaggerated
the kind of general sense of claustrophobia and also served as a reminder of the kind of gross
inequalities that the pandemic has exposed and the privilege of locked down and of remote,
you know, engagement and working.
And I guess this opens more broadly onto issues concerning physical and virtual space for, you know, while the pandemic is doubtlessly demonstrated,
the kind of life saving relief that digital connectivity can provide,
it's also drawn attention to the uneven distribution and access to network space.
Thus, obviously, paradoxically, being scribing, geographic and concrete spatial divisions between north and south.
And you know, more than this, I think as the past year has shown,
electronic space can really only ever go part of the way towards challenging enforced
kind of local separatism and other spatially proximate forms of social and political.
Who's owning the urgency with which people have taken to the streets to protest in the last year
indicates there is still physical bodies in alliance to use Judith Butler's term upon his existence.
The publicness of a political cultural terrain depends, even while militarisation plays a crucial role in this.
And just to bring this back to music and sound is sort of striking in turn to think about the
kind of urban transformations or violations that may have taken hold in the absence of present,
you know, often anti-racist, anticorporate musical spaces, which were already threatened by financial urban space before the pandemic.
So as a as a kind of final question, I wondered what your thoughts, you know,
had been about the reception and the audiences of the work and the kinds of spaces that it might be experienced in and
how that did sort of didn't affect your your aesthetic choices and and how that might affect the work as a whole.
So just a few thoughts for me. I think I am now handing over to Christopher.
Hello and well, yeah, thank you, everybody, and thank you for sharing your work and.
D'Arcy is already introduced me,
and I won't say any more other than just to give a bit of context to what I'll say in
the I'm currently working on a kind of edited collection on music and cybernetics.
And since this is kind of in my brain at the moment a bit, it will inform my response to Harlettes work.
And so I hope some of it is in some way useful.
And so I'll start just to say a bit about cybernetics and then talk about how cybernetics gets into music.
And from there, I'll come on holiday work and post some questions in relation to it.
So cybernetics is often seen as quite an off-putting discipline associated as it tends to be with a kind of grim,
grey Cold War military industrial atmosphere.
And in many ways, this perception is true.
I would say going back to its formation, it did form the beginning of the Cold War and has its roots in military research in the US base.
What we can say about cybernetics is that it's just science of control and communication systems and the aspire to kind of generality.
So the systems could include organic systems, biological systems, mechanical systems, computational systems,
social systems and the ecosystem and more in terms of understanding cybernetics and what it attempted to do.
It's helpful to look at the origins of the term in the Greek word key virginities, which translates to statesmen or orchestrator.
And these terms are more useful, I think,
for English speakers in terms of understanding the issues of agency control and complexity that cybernetic agents were interested in.
If you think of piloting the plane, steering a plane, conducting an orchestra and the kind of control that one has in these situations,
it's a much more complex matter than if you're simply in the orchestra playing a triangle.
It's an emergent effect of lots of individual processes that all have a certain autonomy and could all break off on their own if they wanted to.
And while a human operator sits at the centre of them, it doesn't necessarily have to.
You know, you can have a completely auto poetic cybernetic system that operates independently of human control.
And so this this notion of a kind of.
More emergent form of control. You know, if you think of it in relation to electronic music,
where cybernetic ideas have been very popular and it describes the kind of control that you might have over a modular synthesiser,
rather better, I think, than, you know, you might understand the control you would have over a guitar or a piano,
that sense of sort of steering something's steering sound, which has its own autonomous momentum and can continue without.
The operator describes the kinds of systems that psychometricians were often interested in analysing.
Now, cybernetics was unusually interdisciplinary,
but musical and cultural systems weren't the initial sorts of things that sanitation's were interested in.
So Norbert Vyner, the founder of cybernetics, had done war related research for the United States going back to before they entered the war.
And one of the systems that Vyner pioneered early on was an antiaircraft fire control system,
which was a gun with a human operator that could anticipate the position of an enemy bomber,
taking into account the time the missile would take to reach the enemy bomber, environmental factors and so on.
So it is just important to sort of situate cybernetics inside of that context that it emerged from, I think and within that early research,
it was often the case that these systems that were components of humans and machines were in terms of the way they were model.
They were assimilated to one kind of mechanism to understand it.
So in the case of this anti aircraft bomber, it's a kind of survival mechanism, the kinds of things,
regulatory mechanisms that you get in, things like thermostats that we're used to,
that with this sort of frame of reference for understanding this whole kind of assemblage of human and
technological components and representing human psychology and human kind of desires once was deemed too difficult,
really, within this scenario.
So cybernetics starts to make its way into the experimental arts in the 1950s and then by the 1960s, it's fairly pervasive.
And a canonical example of cybernetics and experimental music is the work and music for solo performer by Alvin Lusia.
And in this work we see a similar simulation of the human to the mechanical.
In the piece, Alvin Lukas Alpha brain waves are analysed using an EEG sensor and this low frequency that between sort of eight and 12
hertz is amplified using a dial system that's to the ears to hand as alcoholic's sits down with this system on him.
And then that's sent to a loud speaker where it produces a low frequency,
reproduces low frequency that causes the kind of cone in the loud speaker to vibrate back and forwards slowly.
And this loudspeaker is placed face up and there are percussion instruments on on them, sort of hand-held percussion instruments.
So the whole thing is a quite complex chain that Lucier is sort of to use Douglas
Karns terms in circuit with providing the the the sort of input frequency,
if you like, but also the kind of regulation. And if he is sort of distracted by the sound of the percussion instruments in the room, then, you know,
if he opens his eyes, the frequency, you know, increases and he loses the alpha wave state and the effect is lost.
So it's this careful, subtle negotiation of the of the environment.
But the brain is very much not a of representational thinking device.
It's a it's a frequency generator that's acting. This is sort of.
Yeah. Sort of servo mechanical control system on the peace.
And and I think there are similarities really with the way that the brain and the human form is conceptualised and between the human
in the lickspittles and the human in the anti-aircraft guns system of finance in college piece the the heart joins the brain,
if you like, is a source of. At least from what I can understand, so biosensors on the heart provide the pulse for the acoustic sections of the piece,
and they also create interesting sorts of athletic sized signal representations that we see.
So you can see these signal representations that are probably we're not it's not clear to the audience what they represent,
but they're bio signals, presumably heart all brain data.
And so there are similarities, I would say, with Lucias work, firstly, in the sense that there's a kind of scientistic aesthetic.
And so in Lisas, this site of a kind of, you know, performer with this medical device on the skull stain.
Absolutely. Still, it's somewhere between a sort of scientific experiments and the science.
And then in how it's worked, there's this sort of data aesthetic and calling to mind, you know, medical representations of biodata.
And then another similarity, I would say, is the presence of sort of.
Percussion where? I'd be interested to hear what Howard says about this,
but it might be seen as a sort of symbol of human scale sound and agency
against the sorts of potentially autonomous instruments of industrial science,
which are the sorts of bio capture devices.
There are also interesting differences, I think, between formulative and music for solo performer and one that really stood out to me and again,
I would like to hear more about from Harlette is the presence of the serpent and the forms of the spells and the role they play,
because in the way that cybernetics has been sort of taken up within electronic music,
it tends to be in feedback, concepts of feedback or feedback systems, notions of distributed agency.
Distributed cognition as well are all ways in which cybernetics sort of takes shape within electronic music.
And symbolism like this is not typical, I would say, but it was something that Norbert Vyner was interested in.
And references to demons and sorcery do appear very frequently in his writings.
So I have a quote here from the human use of human beings where he says,
amongst the gentlemen who have made it their business to be our mentors and who administrate the new programme of science,
many are nothing more than apprentice sorcerers fascinated with the income tension.
So incantation which starts at devilment that they are unable to stop.
Now, Vinings fear of a kind of demoniac cybernetics reflects the position of scientific pacifism that arrived at later in his career,
where he rejected his early work for the US Defence Department and increasingly comes to present cybernetics as a struggle.
If you like to hold on to a normative conception of the human against a world of entropy, chaos and potential optimisation.
So what I'm kind of trying to elaborate, really, at least within cybernetics and obviously it's a huge area that I can only do full justice to.
But is that as well as the being shifting systems in play Eco-Systems technical systems, organic systems,
there's also a shifting concept of the human from one that regulates the machine and is conceptualised as on a par with it,
with the anti-aircraft gun sort of system to one that needs to be preserved from its alienating kind of demonic effects,
the demonic effects of sort of techno science. And I suppose what I'd like to know is whether any of this resonates with how it works.
Also, does anything change when we sort of transplant this from Western science to Egypt to North Africa and,
you know, with the presence of the symbol of the serpent?
And do we need to think more about the concepts of the human that cybernetics tries to universalise?
So, yeah, I'll leave it at that. So thank you, Christopher and Christopher.
It's really,
really fascinating discussions now going to turn it over to credit to give him a chance to respond to any of the many questions that were set his way.
So I've written some notes on some of the questions.
It's like you were to have had so happy to to to send any reminders or feel free to just jump in, whichever questions you answer him first.
Yeah. Thanks to all you doing. It's very insightful responses and and also like it gives me.
Different perception of of of my own experimentation in way and, uh, yeah, I would love let's go into it directly.
I'm interested in many points and I would start with the same sequence.
I would start with Sudarshan and we go to a restaurant. So, uh, I think like, uh, with what you say, Darsey, like mainly what interests me.
And I think you close it with the question that, uh, about like.
Exactly like what we are experiencing with the machine,
like how the experience of the production between an artist and a machine in terms of performance art and what is the political
notion between between as an artist and a machine within these circumstances of the pandemic and how it relates with similar.
Similar kind of political rupture in a way that happened in the Egyptian revolution.
And what are the similarities and differences in terms of.
Of absence and disappearance, the options of disappearance, does the listener disappear?
Uh. Through the pieces, I'm not suggesting anything I'm questioning through the practise itself,
but within the listening and the practise of listening itself and the notion of disappearance, that's very interesting.
And and I see it maybe because it's very fresh.
I just like both bones. And it came across yesterday on on in Sufism, for example.
And you have in Sufism the concept of a hijab, the veil,
which is like at a certain point of transcendence when the veil is released and you can see the beauty of creation,
which is a certain level of transcendence. Uh.
It comes from listening before before the visual, and it kind of grabbed me in a way, because this is how I feel,
I feel and this is all I could could could trust with answering or sort of responding to
Christobel in terms of like the audio visual and sound and in terms of production or whatever,
or as an artistic practise. I always feel that listening state is brings me the visual,
like the listening state is the main introduction to to to have the vision in a
way it takes to a certain spiritual state and that it is immersive and collective.
And this is where I struggled in the piece. Is the collective listening as a performer?
That's the main thing. More than the musical composition. It is the collective listening activity that it is ritualistic even before the the the, uh,
the the the linguistic communication is the ritualistic sonic practise that it's embedded in our human culture.
And and this is very interesting with the with the whole industry of of of music and arts,
which I don't relate to, by the way, although like I come from music as a musician.
Yes, that's my background. But I don't relate to the music industry. And so, for example,
like reflecting on the income encapsulation of time and space and in the music in the in the pandemic and everything became on YouTube,
everything became on Spotify, everything became like this is a formation of the, uh, it shapes the production process.
Even even after one, there will be physical, it will be shaped.
We found in history many examples.
And that like how technology could shape you can find it like deep in a way it was invented, invented, invented or formed by this, uh.
By political conflicts, from the economic crisis, from the war, the Second World War, you have the people shaped, you have the for example,
the musical composition was squashed into a linear temporal experience in a way like it's very linear from start to end.
This is by the invention of documenting and recording the music in a way.
So saving and documenting music, kind of this technology also limited and unshaved, the production.
I don't want to say no to shame the production of music and how the musician works.
The invention of piano totally changed the whole world in terms of the the varieties of scales and frequencies that the
humans used to play all around the world and the invention of piano with the colonial structure and colonial exploitation.
It also eliminated many, many sonic cultures.
So technology always like shaping in the form of production and we are witnessing this today.
We still don't understand where it will go or how it will be shaped in terms of a musical production.
We can see it as an experience, as a listening experience, as an audience, as as a consumer, let's say.
And I say consumer in terms of of of of, uh, the services of these applications.
Uh. But in production, I'm sure it will give them a totally new culture of music after the pandemic or whatever,
how how many years it will take, it could be a generation or two. Uh.
But in a collective listening experience, for me, this is something totally different than the music industry and the way of production and.
And for me, like listening experience is is a spiritual and the spirituality of this experience, it's collective as a ritual.
And music used to be part of a very important part of that,
and it's kind of a big distance and got through throughout history and through the entertainment industry that dominated the music culture.
It separated the collective listening experience from.
From music, so in in the piece itself, to choose to grab the listening collective experience, I didn't have a big struggle with it.
And this is my first engagement since the pandemic started,
I had a very clear decision that I do not want to engage in the world of cyber in terms of art,
because I see the medium,
the main medium that I work with is in space and in terms of inspiration is mainly the space and time and performance also like space and time.
So these are the two main mediums that, yeah, I can I can work with objects,
but the objects are that it is only the space and this is how I listen with everyone.
I'm not performing to people. I'm performing with people.
So. Transforming that into a screen experience, uh.
Me personally, I'm not convinced with it, and that's for me,
the formula of giving heart is not a complete it's a it's for me it's an archival material.
It's like sketches. And that's a very beautiful point for me when you started to compare between some sound and audio visual.
So in that sense, I do understand the experience on on on laptop, on the same desk where I work every day.
It's it's very different than I go to a certain space that has its own metaphysical culture that I'm working with.
And and and everyone is working at it, like the listener that every listener is working with,
not only the, uh, the the musician or the performer, it's everyone attending is part of the piece.
And this is the listening experience that would make I would I would rely on on the fresh ideas that came
from yesterday is the notions of of absence and being hidden and ill Sufism into to to to the moon.
Again, it comes from the listening experience and and this is the notion of hidden, hidden and absence.
And that is not is not comes politically.
This is a response when we compare, for example, between the revolution.
So I'm crossing many ideas, responding to those, if you like, from from the revolution to till today, for me, personal experience.
Uh. Politically, I I defer to the medium itself.
Yeah, a political art, in my experience is,
is that the relation between me and the medium more than the political the political environment
where I'm in definitely the political environment shapes my relation with the medium,
for example, here and locked in a space I'm working with a lot space shapes the technologies with with what I'm working with.
But I prefer like the notions of absence in terms of the experience between me and the medium.
This is like mainly with with what I'm working more, for example, than the memories of the Syrian prisoners of war,
that in that piece he worked on their memory and being locked up and being absent from society.
I. I prefer to mourn the absence of my own experience is being hidden in the transcendence
by through listening and and my awareness to the to to to that or how I tripped in that.
In a way, it was the political situation at the time of the revolution.
Yes. One seeing that and working and experiencing death with people around you.
You have friends who died.
You had friends who kidnapped your friends, like in this environment and used in a daily you start to to to to feel the absence of.
Of not only people. Yeah, it could be also being you as locked, and this is like a very similar situation of the of the pandemic,
you start to contemplate a lot about being upset and and you contemplate a lot about the state of death.
And when at a certain point, I realise that it is a state of transitioning, it's not a state of absence, a transition from one state to another.
And this is what I liked in the profession, that it takes you from one state to another and sort of having a spiritual transcendence.
And here I would see absence and notions of absence totally different than at the time of the revolution that it is.
It's been authoritarian and that imposed on you and take you to be absent here.
And now I see it in a very, totally different way. That was the inspiration at that time.
And the translation from one state to another.
I would go into Christopher in terms of the cybernetics and and, uh,
and I really love like how you answer that to to to to or to talk more about the serpent,
because I think the serpent is the main thing that made me interested in in in framing the work in terms of,
yes, I want to understand response from a perception of cybernetics.
And I tell you why, because, um. Hmm.
Yes, sure. Uh.
If yeah, it's a linguistic and communication, this is what really interested me, um, because we can find like on general like mean mean uh.
Language, culture and communication culture from the Victorian times, and that totally transformed into the alphabetic era.
And. Now or if you don't like kids,
it's transferring to the competition and and the coding and programming and the computational language and the machinery language, and I like how.
How seeing the languages are being translated or the languages,
the communication is being translated in terms of system and authority and sovereignty,
and in that point transforming the mythical or the myth and the concepts and principles from ancient Egypt that talks about the
Poles and the dimensions of being translated into programming and and to try to cool it and to try even in the mythical sense,
not in the functional at all, not in the functional application of cybernetics,
but more on the contemplating on on on how getting the hieroglyphics that it is pictorial, that it is translated by.
Archaeologist into linguistic alphabetic, I'm learning about it and I'm translating it into a composing this character again,
which is a sort of authority and a sort of sovereignty, that it is a God that that's teaching a listener.
And this comes from a mythical drama that it got from ancient Egypt.
And I like to to to work with this in terms of translating them the same mythical but not to the audience.
I'm not storytellers to the audience, but more into me, myself and working with the with the phones, like coding the fight.
So how the eyes would be, how the tongue would be, how the intelligence would be, and how to decompose the serpent,
that it is an authority and sovereignty in a sense of teaching in the story and how to take this into forming a character through coding fights.
And here I got interested in sons of cybernetics more than the applications and the functionality of it.
But my relationship with the medium, so I want like to do and linking everything together, I hope I responded.
But there are. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, they're. So we have to have one question.
I think you began already to answer it. So it's about the serpent that maybe this will just invite you to expand on that more.
So the question is, thank you so much for your piece. How did the character of The Serpent Guide the work?
I'm interested in the role of the text slash symbolism in such a visually modern word.
Yes. Um. I try to look, I try as much as I can to prevent the ancient Egyptian aesthetic, I always try to prevent the ancient Egyptian aesthetic.
I try to go beyond the visual aspect of it because it has very strong visual.
And if there are audiences or into the the ancient Egyptian mythologies and history, it's, uh, it's very, uh,
the visual of it and the culture and the pictorial representation is very, very dominant and and beautiful.
Like, I'm not diminishing at all. But sometimes I feel it's it it's shadow, it's shadow, the principles or its shadow, the concepts and the meanings.
Uh, because easily we can gaze on the static itself.
So in that sense, I started to make a collage between the format of giving artists like a collection
of scripts that it it's we're used to in the process of mummification.
Yeah. So it is a tracing of the heart to to trace the heart before it goes to the underworld to be judged.
Because in ancient Egypt you have the heart.
And when it reached to the judge they it used to get balanced by a father and father is married, which is the goddess of harmony.
Yeah. So it's a principle of the harmony being balanced with the heart and heart is the very core of of of existence at that time.
So the heart is the intelligence is the heart that comes from the heart of the brain in in Kemet or the ancient Egyptian.
So even these are like the heart is the seat or the throne of intelligence, emotions and moral judgement.
And this is a it has two dimensions. One dimension is the physical, the the the organic and the physical aspect of heart, and one is the motor.
And and these two dimensions may need to be in spite of the duality of what does it mean to have a pulse?
Because, for example, like musically, you can have there is there is a pulse in silence in music.
You can have the rhythm and one rhythm, one beat, and the pulse could be hidden and you can have upbeat and you still have it.
And kind of this duality, it was interesting to contemplate on it, especially when the pulse of every day got totally locked down suddenly.
So we totally change our policies and it confuse definitely it's a big part of confusion is the rhythm of every day it got shifted.
And so this duality is kind of attracted me to to work on this material and to try to.
Select and the three months to help me in translating into I don't want to say futuristic sounds,
but like we changed the names of gods into principles or that the gods would represent.
So we reworked it. We did edit it to to to to get into the contemporary sense.
But definitely it is an amazing inspiration.
And so I try to prevent the the literal script itself and the pictorial aesthetic of ancient Egypt and try to to get the inspiration from its.
A philosophy because it is a philosophy at the end, it's not.
Yeah, it is. Yeah, you got, so to speak, the meaning of the philosophies and try to work it in peace and personal.
Uh. Sketches.
Yeah, thanks. So that's really interesting.
We have a couple more questions, and I might just say them all at once because I think we're over time now.
So if we could just maybe conclude briefly and then we'll take these questions and then we'll be out.
So the next question is, there is an Orwellian quality of the work in the surveillance.
Was that purposeful or just as a result of creating the work in the time of covid?
We have another question that asks. Can you please elaborate on the idea of the mask?
Is it somehow fictionalised in your character or do you use it in most of your performances?
How does it connect to the revolution?
And then another question, asking to bring it to connect it more to you, because I have to assume that the first question I got,
the second the first question was there is an Orwellian quality of the work in the surveillance and so on.
Was that purposeful or just as a result of creating the work in the world like George Orwell?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting.
Uh. I don't know.
I don't know. George Orwell is definitely there is that there is a political response and that could be also like a response to just one.
You said like a bit of static and the political crying because definitely there is a political.
Surely that is a very strong political influence with all of this crazy here.
I don't have a direct response to the political movements or demonstrations that were happening.
I don't have any political positioning, let's say, in that sense.
But that is a politically static, surely, and that is a political field as as as as the noise or as the distorted rhythmic.
That for me is a political response. But but but I don't have a political positioning to a movement and maybe.
The notions of surveillance, yes, and this is a substitute of of.
And negative, substitutive audience, because the notion of collective listening is not there and and without an audience,
there is no art, which I don't understand what we are doing, to be honest, these days.
But like, if there is no audience, there is no artists. It is the art itself.
So I don't understand. Uh, yeah.
So in part of the experimentation, because of these circumstances, I try to substitute with a being surveyed by the character of Serpent.
So it's kind of conversation between me and, and, and the serpent, uh, in production and in the work is not in the work only.
It's also in the production because the serpent is the one that is filming because they are like five cameras in one server.
So the cameraman is the serpent in that sense.
So it's uh uh uh yeah.
Uh, it's not it's not only fictional in that in that sense, um, the cosmos, uh.
The gas mask, I have several people, I use the gas mask and it kind of.
Not all of them, so it's not like I create a fictional autistic character, so there are pieces that I use the gasmask.
I don't know why it puts me into a certain nostalgic state, surely that I that is the breathing sound.
And so when I breathe and it's in the mask, there is the sound of it.
And most of the pieces I use the sound in the performance, but not this piece.
I don't use the sound of breathing because I didn't want to overlay it with the heart and the concept of heart.
But the state of listening to my own breath, it puts me into a certain state where I can be a.
More free, and we are confident in a way, and it comes from the revolution.
I think so. So it's not it's not a created character.
It's it's it's a variation of me, of my memory. And in that sense.
We think sperm's responding to those questions and thank you to the audience for your questions, since we're we're over time now.
I think we will stop there.
And I just first want to thank Challenge for producing this work under extremely difficult and uncertain conditions and for sharing it with us.
I want to thank my four panellists for Sterling and Christopher Howard for their fantastic insights.
So I want to thank those Green and Christina McGauchie a torch for their tremendous help throughout this
entire process and to the torch humanities football programme for funding and supporting this work.
You can catch Kelly's next online event on June 9th at two 30 p.m.
So this event is going to be a workshop in which families will explore the development of the formula for of giving heart,
as well as the transformations of the artistic process due to the pandemic and its implications on the future of performance and installation art.
So we hope to see many of you there and hope that you take care and stay healthy in the meantime.
So thank you. Goodbye.