The anxiety of the lonely listener

Text on listening originally featured in /seconds. peer reviewed online journal. The radio is not one thing it is multitudes. Radio is not innately anything, but is everything it is, dependent on who is listening. In this sense any radio transmission is truly contingent on the temporal, spatial and psychological (understood as an inner dimension) circumstance of the listener. The radio broadcast, emitting from its unsighted box, gives the room it enters different colours; working with the tones that are already there, stretching them in every direction. Sure, this idea of contingency could be applied to other media too, but nowhere is the multiplicity of production and perception more profuse than in the darkness of radio, where no image preserves our hold an on authentic sense of reality, and thus no sense of non-reality limits the imagination of the listener. The temporal flow of radio is a blind stream, emanating from a faceless, boundary-less place. The association of this transitory stream with a visual actuality is produced in a fleeting action of listening. Radio does not produce a certain object, but incites figments of individual imagination. It does not affirm the surety of a location or object but produces its own reality as a perceptual and individual uncertainty

Sonic memory material as 'pathetic trigger'

Memory, according to Henri Bergson, is gleaned from the present and realises the present perception from its sensory-motor elements through movements towards that which it perceives. The purpose of this article is to propose and debate the deliberate use of such ‘present memory’ in the sonic artwork. The suggestion is that sonic memory material – sounds that are plundered from old recordings – can be collaged into complex sonic works to produce, not a nostalgic experience in the sense of a recognition of the past, but a current production of sonic material in a continually present perception. Such a production strategy employs the affective quality of memory to ‘trigger’ a sensorial engagement in the sense of a ‘pathetic’ engagement understood as an emotional and sentimental involvement with the work. The understanding is that such an emotional engagement involves the listener centrally in the production of the artwork and challenges modernist (visual) art discourses, which evaluate the work from a distance

Places Hardly Exist

Catalogue essay for the Nicolas Perret & Silvia Ploner exhibition 'Island Songs', Grimmuseum, Berlin, Germany, April-May 2016

Practising Timespace-Collage: Art as Material Complex

This is a thesis on the artwork as 'Material Complex'. The written element is a critical enquiry into the ideal of totality and homogeneity for artistic production, and a critique of this ideal as orthodoxy. I consider the idea of aesthetic judgement in relation to its ideological investment, and challenge the idea of normalised readings for its assumption of universality via an understanding of individual perception as practice. Although I realise the impossibility of escaping an eventual collective (aesthetic; ideological) intelligibility, I argue that the motivation to do so nevertheless produces criticality. I am starting from the position that the judgement of an artwork is produced in the performance of a Hegelian sublimation (Aufhebung) of its conflicting material elements. I stage the ideological import of this sublimation via Christian Metz. This focuses the enquiry in the first instance on audio-visuality. The thesis thus commences with a cross-reading of Sergei Eisenstein's position on montage with Roland Barthes' ideas of the symbolic and signifying. I develop this critical trajectory in the second part, where I theorise my viewing of Robert Smithson's film Spiral Jetty and of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker via Julia Kristeva and Jean-Francois Lyotard respectively. Thereby I identify the method of 'collage-montage' and, in a critique thereof, I advocate 'temporal-collage' as a strategy that provokes, through its deliberate non-resolvedness, complex individual productions. The last part of the thesis tests this strategy on concurrent contestations of the network age in dialogue with concerns of '70s Conceptual Art. In conclusion I come to propose 'timespace-collage', produced continually in 'subjective ideality'. The concerns of the text element are informed by, and developed in, my studio practice. Here I am working with sonic and visual material to produce complex expressions that provoke a sensorial practice rather than an intellectual judgement

Writers’ habits

Transcription of performance talk jointly written and performed at the Kunstraum Riehen, Switzerland

Inaudible Disaster Warnings

Keynote at Aural Lighthouse, part of the 'PSi 2015: FLUID STATES – Performances of UnKnowing' International Performance Network Event, Santorini Greece, 17 – 23 May

Night Train

Book chapter discussing relational radio listening at night time. ‘Nachtschichten’ is a publication resulting from and evaluating a project into long durations on the radio, funded by the practice-based arm of the Swiss National Fond, DORE (Do REsearch), together with University of the Arts, Zürich. Voegelin’s chapter evaluates 5 works produced as part of the project, by reflecting on her own listening through the night. It brings a phenomenological perspective to radiophonic discourse, working from a ‘close-listening’ over long durations, to an interrogation of time experience in night-time radio. It articulates the intersubjectivity and nonchronology of radiophonic time, as it plays out away from the day time schedule. It forms part of Voegelin’s sustained research into radiophonic practices: ora : voyages into listening and writing - monthly broadcast on Resonance104.4fm, co-hosted with Daniela Cascella, since 2013; Audio Art on the Radio symposium, (co-organiser/chair), Zürich, 2009; and A short history of radio listening, chapter in ‘On Listening’, CRiSAP l RGAP, 2013

Aurality and Environment, Auralidad y Entorno, Exhibition at La Tabacalera Gallery in Madrid, Spain part of FASE 6. 30.11.17 – 02.02.18, with David Mollin (Mollin+Voegelin) and Brandon LaBelle.

Exhibition of two installations (Vocal Site Report, The way I walked the cars went backwards)includes section in bi-lingual book: , Alex Arteaga and Rachel Rivera (eds), Ministry of Sports and Culture, Madrid, 2017, and Curatorial Performance part of FASE 6. at Hybrid Lab, Berlin, 04.11.16 https://vimeo.com/19481570

Points of Listening: Reflections on the Collective, Communal and Participatory in Sonic Practice

How might polyphony operate across the collective, communal, and participatory dimen-sions of sonic practices? What aesthetic and political observations can be gleaned from listening and sound making that attend to the simultaneous affects of shared sonic experi-ences? This essay reflects on the possibility of plurality in collective and participatory listening and sound making in relation to the project Points of Listening (PoL), an ongoing series of workshops and discussions, co-convened by the authors, in association with Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice, CRiSAP, University of the Arts London