Non-Invasive, Jonathan Magat

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines are lauded by medical professionals, patients, and
others for their non-invasive capacity to produce images of soft tissue, organs, bones, and virtually
all other internal structures of the body. For subjects inhabiting the ill or diseased body, this capacity to provide visual accounts of abnormal or diseased tissue is woven into both the spectacular
event of the medical diagnosis, as well as the more quotidian dimensions of managing and treating
chronic illness. For anyone who inhabits the enclosed MRIwhich may last anywhere from ten minutes or over two hours at a timethere exists a sonic element. The MRIs vibrating magnetic, gradient
coils with rapid, pulsing electricity come together to produce a cacophony of loud, jarring noises.
Using these MRI noises, in this performance I explore the ways in which MRIs introduce rhythms of
time not only by virtue of its noise, but by way of its silences in between. What might MRI noises do
for the patients that inhabit them? How might the silent intervals spliced with the harshness of MRI
noises magnify the more subtle, everyday, often taken-for-granted bodily sounds, such as a heartbeat or a breath? What else resonates beyond the resonance in Magnetic Resonance Imaging?

Genius Loci, Liz Laurie

In his article on sound walks, Toby Butler analyses the most important features of composer John
Cages work 433 (1952), and concludes that the way the piece exists in space and timethe audience is forced to consider and appreciate, in real time, the real sounds of the place in which they
are situatedwhere the hall is geographically located becomes important to the experience. Some
of those real sounds are created by the audience members themselves, who cant help but fill the
silence with their own noisiness. Butler notes that other artists have followed Cage by locating their
work in areas of the urban landscape that are inherently more sonically interesting than a concert
hall. What is less sonically interesting that an empty room? But in the building of a university and
in the creation of empty rooms that become classrooms, how does sound help to register these
rooms as places of learning? What are the everyday noises that turn empty rooms into rooms that
fulfill a specific function? By isolating those sounds, can we create a soundscape that allows us to
appreciate the function sound carries in preparing us for tasks and orienting us in space and time?
My piece isolates elements of the soundscape of the classroom, so that the audience can meditate on the background noises that transition us from one purpose to another throughout the day.

Composing Listening, Amy Swanson

Jean-Luc Nancy asks, What does it mean to exist according to listening, for it and through it, what
part of experience and truth is put into play? while Jacques Attali characterizes composition as
an end in itself that creates its own code at the same time as its language, tying people into relation with one another. Composing Listening asks participants to truly listen, to observe the extra-aural information that arises through listening and that contributes to the shaping of social
formations. For the duration of the performance, participants will practice existing according to
listening, paying attention to the emergent language and its codes that may arise in the process
and that tie participants together. Composing Listening attempts to uncover the often-overlooked
communicative potential of non-verbal aural information through the practice of heightened listening. At the same time, it suggests a future in which production is a collective, egalitarian effort
requiring attentive listening to oneself and to others, and in which the means of production is valued more than any resulting object. To what extent can a group communicate through listening
alone? Can we sense with, in relation, and through one another guided only by auditory information? How does the act of listening create community and determine symbols rendered meaningful within a group? What can be achieved through increased attention to auditory information?

Please join us after the performances for refreshments and a roundtable critique
in the performance studies seminar room.

Aural Acts, Sonic Distortion

Performance Sensorium
9 February 2015
2:00 PM
Alvina Krause Studio
Annie May Swift Hall
Northwestern University

The Sound Feast, Grace Overbeke

In his film theory text Audiovision, Michel Chion characterizes sound as a transsensorial phenomenon. He illustrates this idea with a story from Ben Burtt, the sound designer from Star Wars. Burtts
sound effect for a spaceship door opening was so convincing that the director never actually had
to shoot such an event taking place. Lucas simply put a shot of a closed door next to a shot of an
open door under Burtts sound effect, and audience members felt as though they had seen the door
open (12). Chion provides numerous examplesdrawn mainly from horror films or torture scenes
in which specific sounds make spectators believe they have seen things they have not. But could
the transensosrial power of sound be extended to other senses? In my piece, I will try to extend
Chions concept of sounds transsensorial properties not only to vision, but also to smell and taste.
This interactive performance event, The Sound Feast, cordially invites audience members to take
part in a multi-course dinner party. However, in lieu of using their faculty of taste, spectator/participants will savor the meal with their ears. Diners will hear the sounds of their food begin gathered and prepared as they eat it. It is my hope that these sounds may prompt encounters with the
other senses. Playful and irreverent, this is a meal compatible with everyones dietary restrictions!
Like a Straight(?) American, Touched for the Very First Time, Didier Morelli
I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of
State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the
policy of the State Department. Senator Joseph McCarthy (Republican-Wisconsin), February 9, 1950.
If a picture is said to be worth a thousand wordswhat value does a sound have? Like a Straight(?)
American, Touched for the Very First Time, a seven-minute performance, is an exploration of
the communicative potential and power of sound waves as they move through different material bodies. In a continued interest in the confluence of American historical events on the day of
the presentation, the performance combines a speech delivered by Senator Joseph McCarthy in
1950 with Madonnas Like A Virgin, which toped the U.S. musical charts for a third straight week
in 1985. Intrigued by the ways in which both of these public figures sound bites have become
part of collective memory, the performance uses the highly iconic sounds they produced in order to create an unstable listening environment. As the performative actions unfold, the clarity
of pop and political oration are muddled and placed under duress, and the ability of the performer to communicate sonically with clarity is tested and failed. Madonnas song about the loss
of virginity, truth, purity, or essence, paired with McCarthys Red Scare statements and anti-homophobic declarations are collapsed into a question: what does it mean to be a real American?
Sound = Life, Eddie Gamboa
In 1987, six gay activists began to plaster the walls of New York City with a simple message: Silence = Death. Meant to draw attention to the social discomfort with discussions of condom usage, alongside the U.S. governments reluctant response to the unfolding crisis, the slogan quickly became a staple of HIV/AIDS activism. While the campaign was designed to spark particular
conversations in its call to action, this performance stretches its limits, inverting the terms of the
equation to question under what conditions Sound = Life. Whereas the possibilities of sex as a
world-making project is often tied to its visual representation or its kinesthetic relationality, I am
invested in playing with the sounds so often relegated to the background through a soundscape.

MUSE:REDUX, Elizabeth Hunter

MUSE:Remix explores the echoes of site-sympathetic performance work. In the mid 2000s, I started MUSE OF FIRE, a Shakespeare project at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, Alabama. Sloss, its website notes, is the only twentieth-century blast furnace in the US
being preserved and interpreted as an historic industrial site. Sloss is far from manicured park:
situated in a desolate part of town, it is bordered on all sides by active railroad tracks; the handful of visitors who do find it wander the 1,000 acres unsupervised. The structures are ramshackle and

rusted, and the juggernaut of Alabama vegetation has reclaimed every crevice. A defining element of Birminghams skyline and a favorite destination for photographers, Sloss is a visual landmark every local child
could draw. Far fewer would recognize its singular soundscape. My productions were unavoidably defined
and hamperedby this soundscape. In MUSE:Remix, I bookend excerpts from my archive with newly captured
audio of each scenes location, foregrounding the inescapable and often subsuming sonic elements performance places embed. By using various modes of playback, I interrogate the temporal filters and decay that
distance us from an aural memory of canonical text. In this piece, I rely on remix practices to demonstrate
how sonically powerful sites can disrupt the cultural authority of Shakespeares familiar lines. When location
imposes its own intractable performance soundtrack, the audience must engage active listening to decode
language already obscured by the evolution of idiom, or what was background hum will become a roar.

on a lower frequency, Kelly Chung

This performance explores the repetition and exhaustion of manual laborfrom drilling to pieceworkthrough sound on a lower frequency. What may be seemingly mundane and part of the
every day city soundscape, both audible and inaudible, is staged to amplify the durational nature
and its toll on the working body itself. Although labor is primarily accessed through the visual, this
piece invites audience members to reorient how to listen and hear labor. In doing so, the material
realities of laboring bodies can be glimpsed and tapped into. Through the confluence between
live repetitive movements and digital audio, on a lower frequency examines how sounds of labor
fill up and extend into space, provoking audience members to do what scholar Alexandra Vasquez
calls as listening in detail. What do repetitive sounds of labor drown out? How do we catch
and listen for the details, that is, the almost undetectable moments of exhaustion, which break the
sounds of repetitive forms of labor? What can we hear on a lower frequency?

And the Crowd Goes Wild, Bonnie Bright

What are the sounds of riots, protests, celebrations, competitions, and war? This piece explores
how a listener tunes-in to chaotic sound. Using soundscapes of crowd roaring recorded for public broadcasting, I attempt to demonstrate how crowds are read through the way they sound and
how the audience develops ideas of what is occurring and whose body is present in those crowds.
I take up Toby Butlers ideas of using sound and memory to capture the multiple voices and conflicting readings of a landscapes. This piece will require audience participation in anonymously
describing their interpretations of who, what, when, where or why.

PET Sounds, A.C. Leone

How does the human feel emotionally implicated in moments of sonic recognition, as they are
spoken to or talked back to by a speaker that does not -in purely human terms- have capacity
for speech? What baselines for intimacy and engagement situate the sounds registered as being
sounds of meaning-making, as opposed to purely registered to the category of noise? Machines,
animals, and humans are constantly engaged in intentional processes of sound-making for expression and action, as well as physical (be it mechanical or biological) acts of labor for which sound
is merely a byproduct. The performances sonic archive and split display centers thematically on
the polysemy of PET: the domestic animals with which many humans hold intimate conversation
daily, the Commodore International personal computers that allowed for a domestic intimacy with
computing technologies, and the Positron emission tomography scanners that function through full
immersion of the living subject into a machine to make the internal home of the human body into
an externally perceivable three-dimensional landscape. As an orchestrated performance of forced
closeness and sensory immersion, PET sounds asks the audience to listen to and with each other.
When isolated in their sensory capacity for interpretation, but connected to each other through expression, how does the human network physically network and form a pack mentality socially?
Further, how does the non-human noise begin not only to sound, but to speak, as embodiment
precludes emotional detachment?