Introduction
Annette Stahmer
When I was six years old, my mother often took my brother and I for a walk. At the end of the village street near the edge of the forest was a bench. We used to sit down there and my mother would read to us. I would lay my head on her lap and look into the dark forest. Her voice intermingled with the sounds of evening.
The voice is a distinctive product of a human body capable of rendering gender, age, state of health, even psychological moods (in German: “Stimmungen”) audible. The voice carries traces of the body, so to speak. On the other hand, the voice leaves the body which forms it, emanates from the mouth and attempts to reach another, hearing body. This kind of “reaching out” makes the voice an extension of the body, something directly linked with the inside of the body, while at the same time being located outside it. The voice is both “bodily and disembodied” (Jenny Schrödl/Vito Pinto); it becomes a “secondary body, a body double” (Steven Connor).
The voice (as opposed to writing) is thus considered to be an expression of the living. It is part of the living body and therefore also mortal. As an acoustic phenomenon it is altogether fleeting, fading as it emerges. This gives rise to the desire to overcome that fleetingness, to capture the voice and make it immortal. Thanks to continuing techological developments, it has become possible to record the voice and thus separate it from the body. Today we are accustomed to hearing disembodied voices speaking to us in the most varied of forms. These voices are not only separated from bodies, they are in part also highly alienated, automated through fragmentation. It is hard to image a body that would belong to them.
Not only is the voice fleeting, it is also invisible. As a result, there has always existed the desire not only to encapsulate its sound, but to also make it visible, to capture it visually and so make it legible. This was the main reason for various kinds of writing and notation, but also for various forms of representation, from the pictorial elements of medieval banderols to comic- strip balloons. These codify the voice, mould it into a form, make it available and able to be conserved, independently of the body that produced it.
Parole #1: The Body of the Voice / Stimmkörper is the first in a series of publications dealing with the materiality of language and highlighting the theme from various perspectives. The first issue is devoted to the voice and its “corporeality”. This involves both the relationship of the voice to the body that forms it and which it leaves in the process of speaking, and the question of the extent to which the voice forms a body for itself or slips into a new body. This publication is a collection of texts and works by international artists and scientists dealing with the “fleeting stuff” of language in an attempt to grasp it, make it visible and endow it with a body. The authors of the 24 contributions to this interdisciplinary theme circumscribe and highlight its various facets, whereby scientific and artistic works alternate, as interruptions and extensions of the theme. Often a single page provides insight into an extensive artistic project.
After
The Strains of the Voice, the opening text by the English literary theorist STEVEN CONNOR, which deals with the corporeality of the voice and thus outlines the theme as a whole, the publication presents four additional articles exploring the history of the representation and materialisation of the voice. The Austrian art historian BRIGITTE FELDERER writes about the exhibition she curated entitled
Phonorama – eine kulturhistorische Geschichte der Stimme als Medium at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and focuses on important inventions in the history of voice recording. In addition, the American sound historian PATRICK FEASTER describes the early attempts by the French printer and inventor Léon Scott de Martinville to record the human voice and introduces the spectacular discovery by the research group FirstSounds.org who in March 2008 used computer technology to make one of those recordings resound again, thereby reconstructing the world's oldest sound recording. The art historian and image scientist KARL CLAUSBERG deals with the genesis of the speech balloon, taking the example of William Hogart's socially critical engravings, while the author THOMAS KNOEFEL, together with ANDREAS FISCHER, artist and collaborator at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, describes phantom voices and various kinds of materialisations in spiritualist sessions.
These theoretical and scholarly texts are interrupted and complemented by artistic works which explore and manifest similar visualisations and materialisations of spoken language – speech balloons, impressions of mouths, and other “figments of the mouth”. The Berlin artist PETER TORP presents drawings from a series of rebuses which encode and transform sentences from Wittgenstein's
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. NIKOLAUS GANSTERER, an artist from Vienna, introduces his
Mnemocity project, an extensive data landscape where speech banners unfurl out of countless piles of paper, and also the joint project
bable.lab, with CONSTANTIN LUSER: a box with holes acts as a kind of experimental lab into which you can speak through the different sides. The natural-coloured latex balloons attached to the holes are blown up as you speak into the box. So speech, expressed here with effort, accompanies the movements of the balloons in a video and sound installation. The Austrian composer GEORG NUSSBAUMER presents three projects which revolve around the mouth as production site: In
Big Red Arias, for example, a choir of opera singers chews red gum (Big Red cinnamon flavoured) while the name of a human organ is whispered into the singers' ears. When the pieces of chewing gum are spit out, they represent small sculptures formed with the mouth.
At the centre of the publication is an article by the American author and sound artist
BRANDON LABELLE who, under the heading
Laughter Notebook, explores laughter as a form of uncontrollable vocal expression. This is followed by articles dealing with the theme of script and notations, such as the interactive computer game
Pousse-pousse a onomatopée, jointly conceived by the French typographer PIERRE DI SCIULLO, the artist ANTOINE DENIZE and the author LAURENT COLOMB. With the help of a typographic construction-kit the users can shape onomatopoeic words and influence their sound. Pierre di Sciullo developed a special phonetic alphabet,
Kouije, which reflects various features of the French language, including articulation and pitch. With the help of these forms he also shapes excerpts from the subsequent contribution by LAURENT COLOMB,
Chicken-Troy – Kilogramm #1, a short drama that plays with the relationship between voice and fitness: Two men train their language muscles by arranging a sequence of expressions from the jargon of fitness. Laurent Colomb shows a link between the sound formations and the sports activities. There follow two contributions by the Dutch designer MELLE HAMMER and the sound performer JAAP BLONK, who have been visualising voice for many years in joint experiments and performances. Melle Hammer's
Typo-Voice-Guitar is played with prepared chalk and so poetically intertwines sound, voice and script, while their joint video for the performance
kré captures Jaap Blonk singing under water, thereby producing voluminous speech bubbles. The article by the director of the Brückner-Kühner Foundation for Literature in Kassel, FRIEDRICH W. BLOCK, introduces the notation system developed by the sound poet and performer VALERI SCHERSTJANOI, the so-called
scribentische Zeichen which he developed using Russian and German so as to serve him as an individual repertoire of signs. This is followed by an article by the journalist and literary scientist CHRISTINA THURNER from Basel, describing William Forsythe's performance installation
Human Writes at the Schauspielhaus Zürich: Over a time period of six hours, dancers try to write individual sentences from the charter of human rights under difficult physical conditions. This long and painful writing process, which the viewers become involved in, is a pictorial expression of how difficult it actually is to translate human rights into reality.
For the final section of the publication, questions of voice and technological mediation are explored. The article entitled
Körperstimme – körperlose Stimme by the theatre theorists JENNY SCHRÖDL and VITO PINTO, describes the ambivalent relationship between voice and body, highlighting the often uncanny experience of their separation. This is followed by a documentation of the work
The Future of Radio Art by the Hamburg group LIGNA, consisting of radio artists and media theorists, where they had small portable radios transported in shopping bags through the pedestrian precinct in Stralsund. From out of these bags a voice speaks an hour-long monologue about the medium of radio, about the disembodied, even ghostly radio voice, and about those listening to that voice. Following the theme of technological mediation, the theatre theorist DORIS KOLESCH, director of the special research field
Die Stimme als Paradigma des Performativen (The voice as a paradigm of the performative) at the Freie Universität Berlin, focuses on the disembodied voice of the telephone information services, an automated voice with which it is no longer easy to associate a body. The work
distance equals loss plus time by the Israeli artist
ERAN SCHAERF, who lives in Berlin, brings the publication to a close. This is a fictional radio programme addressing the theme of live reportages and the simultaneity of event, report and reception which they suggest.
Adding to the publication are a number of visual works. Photos from the series
Foam by the Chinese artist ZHANG HUAN are presented on the inside of the book cover, while
His Voice fits his Mouth by the Belgian artist
OLIVIER FOULON, which utilizies a pictorial citation, that of the etching of
Courbet talking to himself, appears as a loose page within the publication. The size of the etching, its position on the page and the page format of the cited book have been adopted.
Complementing and performing many of the works and themes explored, a CD of sound works and documentations accompanies the publication. These include the oldest sound recording in the world reconstructed by FirstSounds.org, various occult voices collected by Thomas Knoefel & Andreas Fischer, as well as sound works by the artists Fabienne Audéoud, Jaap Blonk, Laurent Colomb, Nikolaus Gansterer,
Brandon LaBelle, LIGNA, Constantin Luser, Georg Nussbaumer and Valeri Scherstjanoi.
Finally, as a designer I have been interested to engage the materiality of the publication as a further extension of my research, and the very notion of “the body of the voice”. This has taken shape by conceptualizing the design of
The Body of the Voice as an embodiment of the actual theme. For each article in this volume another existing book was sought that had an interesting thematic or formal link to the respective article. The text bodies of these books were “dissected”, their form and content separated, and the old layout “filled” with the new text, which then entered into a material or structural relationship with the original book. As a result, the design of
The Body of the Voice contains 17 other book designs. The cited books and their designers are listed in a source reference at the end of the publication.
The concept for the publication
Parole #1: The Body of the Voice / Stimmkörper is based on my research project on the “materiality of the voice” 2002
/ 2003 and the symposium
Speech Balloons in December 2003 at the Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht. That project was further developed in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and the Free University Berlin. I would like to sincerely thank all of those who made this publication possible, in particular the authors.
