Kevin Logan- Why I’m High-Definition and Lossless 3 (1)

7/23/2019 Kevin Logan- Why I’m High-Definition and Lossless 3 (1)

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Kevin Logan

Why I’m High-Definition and Lossless

(Or, doing / hearing embodied pedagogy)

The title for this short piece of writing is intended as a provocation of sorts, a

critical slight underscoring what I consider problematic within current sound

studies and sonic art, in particular where these intersect research practice and

pedagogic procedures.

What might at first glance appear to be a title championing the ‘authenticity’ of presence over technological mediation is in actual fact a playful misuse of

digital media terminology. I appropriate this ‘geekspeak’ to introduce a

particular concept, one that analogizes audio compression rates as modes of

performativity.

In this writing I would like draw from my practiceled research, at the core of

which is the e!amination of contested definitions of ‘liveness’. These oftenadversarial definitions are critically engaged in the ‘doing’ of sonicevent"s#.

The ‘sonicevent’ here refers to a sound producing somatic act, a physical

cause and effect with audial outcome. My research is both situated in, and

motivated by recent developments in theories of performativity and

performance. My practice considers the critical and operational imperative of

these two ‘p’ words in the lexicon of contemporary sound art.

A primary objective of my research is to investigate whether performance, as

an art practice, and sound share a common ontology in foregrounding their

experiential nature. This second ‘p’ word ‘performativity’, refers to a cross-

disciplinary turn that addresses questions of agency by employing an analytic

originally developed by the linguist J.L Austin in his work on speech act theory.



In this conte!t, I will reflect upon my recent consideration of the act of

presenting as not merely a way of disseminating sound studies research in

general and my own my own work in particular, but a form of mediatedpractice per se. $y practice uses the sonic as a device within performance

based work"s#. These works e!ist %anus like, being in turn a performative

interrogation of sonority.

The motivation behind my audiocodec analogy came about whilst attending

one of many sound arts related conferences in &'(). *uring this conference,

which will remain anonymous, I found myself considering the style andsingularity of each paper, as much as its content, both the format and the

manner of ‘staging’ brought into play by each individual presenter (. The

papers ranged from solid chunks of theory unaccompanied by visual

elaboration or sonic embellishment, to those that not only engaged with the

audience, but with the possibilities of the ‘theatrical’ as a pedagogical tool.

While I sat passively for hours in a lecture theatre I began to consider the

crossover between the curatorial possibilities of sound art, and my personal

thoughts on how as a research student, I situate my practice within a

necessity, to disseminate. + circulating and sharing that happens both within

the academic sphere, symposium, conferences and so on, and the non

academic, galleries and performance art venues, etc.

+t some point in the course of the second day of this symposium a passing

reference was made to ‘format theory’ and the writing of %onathan terne, and

in one of those moments of woolgathering that facilitates unconnected

connections, I was led to a rather tentative parallel. -earing in mind that a

( +n audio codec is a device or a computer program implementing an

algorithm of lossy or lossless compression in which the amount of data in a

recorded waveform is reduced to differing e!tents for transmission with or

without some loss of uality. /o information is lost in lossless compression.



presentation is a process of information filtration, refinement or purification, I

began to consider audio compression rates as a useful analogy for modes of

research demonstration.

The original impetus which started with %onathan terne’s, MP3: The

Meaning of a Format "&'(&# has now become a serviceable tool for modes of

‘doing’, It ree!amines the performative as it originates in the speech act

theory of philosopher and linguist %.0 +ustin. It also touches on the work of

theorist and artist Mieke Bal, in particular her consideration of cultural studies

and methodology.

I imagined a hypothetical line from left to right as a possible spectrum. If a

display of performative practice, where the recipient "in this case a

symposium audience# is asked to fill in the blanks and make their own

connections to critical discourse in the relevant field"s#, is the euivalent to an

undigitized analogue recording, then a densely theoretical monotonic

mumble is an 1 kilobits per second $23. The later has an economy of data to

size ration, but sonically is of a lower ‘uality’. 4sing this yardstick, I ask

myself what proportion of theory to practice do I employ in the concoction that

is my research dissemination, where along this line do I situate myself5

The performativepresentation is a relatively recent ‘turn’ within my research, it

is refle!ive par e!cellence, and concerns performing and ’doing’ as both an

element of my practice and as a research methodology. I use the term

performative-presentation to identify a particular type of real-time live activity,

which is reliant on audience reception for its realisation. This practice differs

from what is usually considered to be performance or performance art, in that

it has a bias towards modes of knowledge sharing. In the performative

presentation individual events or gestures are combined to create something

that pastiches a themed lecture, transcending its individual elements to

produce a multiact performance.



Inherent in the performative-presentation is an endeavour to extend the

understanding of a particular subject. Whereas, performance as it happens in

a fine art context, can, and often does lend itself to an expressive dramatic

form open to broad interpretation. The performative-presentation on the other

hand, as I use the term here, should engage epistemologically, whether this

be through pastiche or elucidation proper. It does not demand the strict

confines of academia or formal tutelage, but should always be framed within a

broad context of learning. It is for this reason that the statement ‘doing

embodied pedagogy’ is the main clause in my subtitle.

6an embodied thinking in the delivery of my sound art practice and related

research combine form and content seamlessly whilst emphasizing the

fracture between the two5 7ow can traditional boundaries between critical

and scholarly writing on the one hand, and creative practice on the other be

blurred5 This development in my methodology interrogates what research

writing can ‘dooffthepage’.

$y preferred mode of research dissemination is now very much predisposed

towards ‘practice’ and its analogue e!treme. In the parlance of this audio

compression analogy, I am ‘lossless’. If performance is ‘doing’ its own kind of

thinking then my chosen ‘codec’ pre8udices highfidelity at the e!pense of

information bandwidth.

$y analogizing of compression formats with modes of knowledge sharing,might seem to discriminate practice over theory, however I would like to be

clear that this elected comparison is intended to act more as a ‘devils

advocate’ than an argument proper. +lthough somewhat flippant and tongue in

cheek, this recourse to a techniue that takes advantage of a perceptual

limitation of human hearing, has become a useful tool in the e!amination of

my ‘doing’ and disseminating research.



To further expand upon my recent examination of the possibilities of

pedagogic form as research methodology, and my use of performative-

presentation as a self-contained outcome, I would like to call upon Richard

Schechner one of the founders of Performance Studies. Schechner argues for

a ‘broad-spectrum’ approach to performance, stating that performance must

be construed as a continuum of human action. He asserts that any action that

is framed, presented, highlighted, or displayed is performance, and that

performance can be defined as “showing doing, pointing to, underlining, and

displaying doing, such that Performance Studies can be defined as

explaining-showing-doing” (Schechner. 2002. p.2). It is a ‘doing-showing-

sounding’ that is a basic principle of my compression rate analogy.

This incorporation of pedagogic practice as a doing-showing-sounding is an

undertaking to find within my research a more discoursal self, this in turn

involves the explication within the audience or colluder of an understanding of

how they themselves might come to consider the performances they give in

their everyday lives.

As previously mentioned, Mieke Bal has been an influential figure in cross-

disciplinary theory. She posits that it is not convenient to treat performance (in

the theatrical sense) and performativity (creating a state of affairs by the very

fact of its being) separately, and that beyond the unique character of ‘acting’,

here and now, it is very important that both these terms relate to a complex

temporality. This is in direct opposition to the position taken in Dorothea von

Hantelmann’s ‘How To Do Things With Art: The Meaning of Art’s

Performativity’, in which she analyses contemporary artists through the filter of

Austin’s theories, asking what societal impact their work has on the world, and



how it produces reality. She remonstrates that the term performative, “…is

mostly used in a way that is a complete distortion from its original meaning

(and that it) is widely believed that ‘performative’ can be understood as

‘performance-like”, stating that she “want(s) to restore the methodological

precision that the term seems to have lost with its popularity”. (Hantelmann.

2010. p.17.)

InTravelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (2002), Bal

introduces her theory of the travelling concept, and further harnesses theories

of performativity. This theory according to Bal travels not just between

disciplines, places, and times, but also within its own conceptualization. She

also draws largely on her lecturing experience in terms of defining the need for

interdisciplinary discourse as well as proposing a defence of lecturing as a

relational activity.

It is this potential of a travelling exploration that I have applied in varying

degrees to my more recent performative-presentations. This reading of the

‘travelling concept’ as a mode of critical analysis is instrumental in

understandingwhy I consider a ‘highdefinition and lossless’ pedagogy to be a

necessity if sound studies is to progress past the merely descriptive.

It is in this respect that through interweaving narratives, playing the subjective

off against the objective, forcing alliances through juxtapositions, appropriation

and plunder (both phonic and textural), that a discursive narrative is

constructed. Whereas a ‘bossy narrative’ might produce a clear and coherent

postulate, it is an amalgamation of acts, events, images, sounds and so on,

that creates a space for doing. To paraphrase the philosopher



Jacques Rancière, these tangled networks may intervene in the

reconfiguration of the sensible (Ranciere, 2004).

There are of course a vast number of performance lectures to use as

reference material for the evaluation of this practice, and they all sit along a

spectrum suggested by Mieke Bal’s analysis of narrative, from the over-

bearing to the modest. This spectrum can be superimposed onto the one my

own devising referred to earlier, which illustrates my rather fanciful audio

codec analogy.

Whereas at the other end of the spectrum there is the potential to critique and

create disquiet that is more reticent. A sideways shuffle that through a skilled

incompetence eloquently mumbles, this may cause the audience to attend

more closely as they strain to listen. For example in ‘The Collapsing Lecture’

Aaron Williamson gives a series of lectures whose hidden objective is to

subvert the usual pedagogic procedure. The premise of the ‘The Collapsing

Lecture’is that the delivery of formal lecturing and conferencing is fraught with

mishaps, equipment malfunctions etc. In his description of his failed lecture

performance, Williamson explains that one reason this work came about was

because he “experienced some unease that, in fact, the theory of

performance art amounts to an argument precisely against the actions and

assumptions that fortify the conventional lecture…” (Williamson. 2010. p.55.)

Although perhaps not considered best practice for top-down pedagogy, I

believe that leaving the recipient to unsnarl, self-mediate and/or misconstrue,

to be a satisfactory outcome of my performance-lecture practice. This

application of ‘travelling concepts’ is not an overzealous or excessive

application of theoretical research methodology. Rather it is the very core of

my research interest, that of the ‘sonic-actant’ and contestations of ‘liveness’,



in all its existential glory and ontological uncertainty that have coerced me to

engage with performance and performativity.

The seeping through disciplinary boundaries of the term performance has led

it to be labelled as an “antidiscipline” (Carlson. 2003. p.188.), I however would

consider it an infra-disciplinary practice, and as such a perfect ‘structure’ in

which to create works that compel an engagement with the sounding ‘event’.

My hybridized practice employs the speculative sonic-event as it travels,

seeking the flattest possible route across undulating disciplinary fields.

2erformative-presentation practice is by its very nature a self-referential mode

of articulation and re-articulation. When the ventriloquist dummy says ‘gottle

o’geer because ‘bottle of beer’ is very difficult to say ventriloquially, it is

significant not just because failure or lack of virtuosity is comedic. It is

significant because it critically alludes to the illusion. It is a self-conscious

gesture that breaks the spell, even if the spell was never concretely cast. It is

in this respect that the failed / collapsed or performance lecture is a tool to

dismantle and reassemble pedagogy, implementing and doing-showing-

sounding new knowledge.

Austin, J.L., 1975.How to Do Things with Words, 2Rev e. edition. ed.

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Bal, M., 2002.Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide.

University of Toronto Press.



Bal, M., 2009.Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3

edition. ed. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Carlson, M., 2003.Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2 edition. ed.

Routledge, New York.

Hantelmann, D. von., 2010,How to Do Things with Art: The Meaning of

Art’s Performativity, JRP / Ringier, Zürich.

Phelan, P., 1993.Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London,

Routledge.

Ranciere, J., 2009.Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Polity.

Schechner, R., 2004.Performance Theory. London, Routledge.

Sterne, J., 2012.MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press,

Durham.

Williamson, A., 2010. In ed. Butt. G.,Performing / Knowing, Volume One

of Art-Writing-Research, Article Press. Birmingham City University.

Kevin Logan- Why I’m High-Definition and Lossless 3 (1)

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