Being multiple, doing multiple: Intra-medial mosaic as an entangled process
Practise Research
[c. Jan 2024]
Fragments of a Family is an audiovisual work that explores interplay between mediums as a generative process. This is a practise I had been instinctively following in my visual poetry (D’Souza, 2023), but I wanted to create a more deliberately entangled process; an expression of my multiplicitous being through interdisciplinarity. Determining my practise has often felt limiting, as though defining myself as one thing does a disservice to all my other parts. This sentiment is echoed in Moses Sumney’s album grae;
‘I insist upon the recognition of my multiplicity…
I truly believe that people who define you control you
And the most significant thing that any person can do
But especially black women and menIs to think about who gave them their definitions
And rewrite those definitions for themselves’ (2020, track 6 and 10).
I have not yet rewritten my given definitions, and in this practise research project I had to face the tension of my undefinition. I began with the questions:
- How can I enact a practise of doing multiple to express my being multiple?
- Acknowledging the restriction that I feel when defining my practise, how can removing disciplinary boundaries affect creative flow?
For me, creativity is holistic; I wait until something draws me in creatively, emotionally and intellectually. For this specific project, this appeared in the form of my younger brother coming over and smashing our Dad’s favourite mug. Collecting the shards, I found them to be rather beautiful. I recalled Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn’s discussion of Karan Barad’s theory of Agential Realism whereby ‘the continuity of time and space can be radically fragmented and rearranged “as some things come to matter and others are excluded, [and] as possibilities are opened up and others are foreclosed”’ (Toksöz Fairbairn, 2022, p. 21). Rooted in quantum physics, Barad argues that reality is made up of phenomena which come into being through a series of ‘intra-actions’. Instead of there being ‘separate individual agencies that precede their interaction… distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’ (2007, p. 33). In removing ‘the hierarchical determinism of a linear cause and effect’, Barad’s theory expands the world into a ‘diffraction of multitudinous agencies’ (Toksöz Fairbairn, 2022, p. 48).
Figure 1
Picking up the mug shards, I felt there was potential for reframing this metaphorical and physical shattering through a process of fragmenting and rebuilding. I planned to make a video where I would rebuild and smash the mug over and over, filming the process in order to abstract it through editing. Tim Ingold argues against a hylomorphic approach of matter and form, instead advocating ‘a process of growth’ and ‘thinking through making’ (2013, pp. 21, 6). Here, the maker becomes ‘a participant in amongst an active world of materials’, and nothing more than an intervener in already happening worldly processes (ibid). Ultimately, Ingold asserts it is not the imagined form that creates the work but ‘engagement with materials’ (ibid, p.22). Indeed, once I engaged with my materials I quickly came to shed my initial plan, like a reptile shedding skin, in favour of a more intuitive flow. I built the mug into a sculpture and dropped it on a mirror to create a reflected smash- it was instead the mirror that broke, fracturing the reflected image of my childhood home (figure 1). This in turn inspired a poem (appendix 1), which I also fractured and rebuilt. Like Lauren Redhead’s Creative Textual Practices as Critical Re-writings, this was inspired by Oulipo poetry, but instead of inserting new material I rearranged the words semi-randomly to create a new prose piece (Redhead, 2022; appendix 2). By writing the text on paper and mirrors I physicalised it, thus enabling a tangible fragmentation and a new embodied relationship with the words.
Figure 2: Asylum Oedipus
Interdisciplinary artist Sean Borodale, also develops an embodied relationship with words through his lyrigraph practise, a ‘live, situated, writing capture process’ whereby poems are penned whilst walking and then externalised as OS map style screenprints (2024, email correspondence). This process has developed into more theatrical, free improv based and fragmented multimedia works such as Asylum Oedipus, and For Some Time Nothing (Borodale, 2019). In writing the poem out on a mirror, the grey sky becomes my canvas. Smashing the words gave the materials agency to form new meaning, transforming ‘she cannot bear silence’ into ‘she cannot be’. The broken mirrors resembled naked trees stretching into a grey sky and overlaying these two images saw a merging of fragmentation and growth (figure 3).
Figure 3
As with piecing together the shards and words, editing too became a mosaic process. I was able to place non-consecutive moments in time against and on top of each other through montage, which sparked new meaning through recontextualization, as theorised by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov (Kuleshov, 1974). By overlaying the movement of my hands, and touching my hand through the mirror (00:03:40), I realised Barad’s concept of ‘self-touch’. As they explain, ‘matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is’ (Barad, 2012, p. 213). This audiovisual and mirrored rendering of ‘self-touch’ presents both an expanded reality and a multiple self.
I found sonic inspiration in both the internal sound of the film and the materials themselves. I used sonic elongation, a process whereby sounds from the recording of the film become reworked to form the score (Rogers, 2020, p. 90), and diegesis to layer reality and shift perception. The audiovisual dissonance of the first smashing sequence (00:01:28) allows for the diegesis to stretch out of the acousmatic space and into the viewers field of audiation as they complete the sound in their mind. As Rogers asserts, ‘emphasis on sound, and its distance from image, lies at the heart of sonic elongation’ (2020, p. 102). Taking my lead from sonic elongation, I began to use the materials featured in my video as instruments. For example, I dragged a shard of mirror along the edge of the bowl of water to create a sustained tone, and hit them against each other to create a bell like sound. Armed with an arsenal of sounds, I manipulated and mosaicked them together between Reaper and Premier Pro to create a score that could expand and subvert the meaning of the text and imagery.
Looping sounds and images and blurring the diegesis, enables me to both interrupt viewer expectation and affect perception of time. The looped smash and spoken word (00:03:25) provides a rhythmic basis for sounds to crossover from diegetic/objective to nondiegetic/subjective, akin to the rhythms created from shipyard clangs in Manufactured Landscapes (Baichwal, 2006; Rogers, 2020, p. 99). Looping also allowed me to engage with time in a nonlinear way, just as Toshiya Tsunoda’s O Kokos Tis Anixis, which loops sections of field recordings to render clock time malleable (2013; Gottschalk, 2019, p. 129). I also took advantage of the audiovisual medium’s capacity for absolute digital silence. By contrasting drawn out sections of quiet with absolute silence, I aimed to reframe perceived silence as loud. The digital silence also makes space to draw in the real time sounds happening as the viewer watches, intra-actively becoming part of the video, and entangling past with present. Once I had finished the video, I once more fragmented and rebuilt it. Editing, then, becomes a mosaic process inspiring new creation and moving through time.
There are several recent interdisciplinary movements that seek to express marginalised and intersectional identity, such as Xenofeminism, Sonic Cyberfeminism (SC) and Black Quantum Futurism (BQF). Sonic Cyberfeminism is a movement that emerged in the 2014, led by Annie Goh and Marie Thompson. An expansion of 90s Cyberfeminism, SC rejects the conception of ‘gender as singular, oppositional and universal [which] obscure[s] its co-constitution with sexuality, race, class and disability’ (Goh and Thompson, 2021, p. 2). This intersectional ethos is embodied by an interdisciplinary and collective practise, represented beautifully in their Zine Sonic Cyberfeminisms. which is a collection of collages, essays, poems, SoundCloud links and drawings (Sonic Cyberfeminisms, 2018). In her book Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practise, Rasheeda Phillips explains BQF as a mingling of ‘quantum physics, futurist traditions, and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time and space’ which combine to form a practise of time manipulation and future shaping (Phillips, 2015, p. 11). Afrofuturist multidisciplinary artist, Nwando Ebizie, puts this theory into practise through Atelier Nwando, a creative studio designed to enable neuro-divergent people and POC to actualise their full potential (Ebizie, n.d). In providing an inclusive space in the present, Ebizie shapes the future.
Contemporary music practise has seen a constant blurring of disciplinary boundaries, particularly since Dick Higgins’ advocation for use of the term ‘intermedia’ (2001, p. 49) in the mid-20th century. In my own work, interdisciplinary and intermedial practise has become an essential means for expressing and honouring my own multiplicity. By combining ‘intermedia’ with ‘intra-action’, I arrived at the term ‘intra-medial’. With this term, I avoid the restrictions of practise labels, instead working intra-actively with the world as my medium. This is analogous of Ingold’s propositions that instead of occupying a world of objects in their final forms, we should inhabit it; ‘to inhabit the world, by contrast, is to join in the processes of formation. It is to participate in a dynamic world of energies, forces and flows.’ (Ingold, 2013, p. 89). In the intra-medial mosaic, layers of inspiration and modes of creation expand non-linearly outwards, between and back on themselves, through medium and time. If ‘identity is never a “having” but is always a “doing”’ (Toksöz Fairbairn, 2022, p. 62), then it is through the intra-medial mosaic that I can enact my multiplicitous being.
Bibliography
Baichwal, J. (Director), & de Pencier, N., Iron, D., & Baichwal, J. (Producers). (2006). Manufactured Landscapes [Film]. Netflix; National Film Board of Canada.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2012). On Touching—the Inhuman That Therefore I Am. Differences (Bloomington, Ind.), 23(3), 206–223. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892943
Borodale, S (2019, July 26). Asylum Oedipus by Sean Borodale : Steve Boyland performs : a Theatre of Reading 1 [Video]. YouTube.
D'Souza, F (2023, September 29). your back is a landscape (I am recovering) [Video]. YouTube.
Ebizie, N. (n.d). Atelier Nwando. nwandoebizie.com. https://www.nwandoebizie.com/atelier-nwando
Goh, A., & Thompson, M. (2021). sonic cyberfeminisms: introduction. Feminist Review, 127(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778920967624
Gottschalk, J. (2019). Granulated Time: Toyisha Tsunoda's O Kokos Tis Anixis. In R. Glover, J. Gottschalk, & B. Harrison (Eds.), Being TIme: Case Studies in Musical Temporalities (pp. 113-130). Bloomsbury Academic.
Higgins, D. (2001). Intermedia. Leonardo (Oxford), 34(1), 49–54. https://doi.org/10.1162/002409401300052514
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Archaeology, anthropology, art and architecture. Routledge.
Kuleshov, L. (1974). Kuleshov on Film, ed. R. Levcao (University of California Press)
Moses Sumney. (2020). grae [Album]. Jagjaguwar.
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Redhead, L. (2022). Performance Lecture: Creative Textual Practices as Critical Re-writings. https://laurenredhead.eu/. https://laurenredhead.eu/post/Performance%20Lecture:%20Creative%20Textual%20Practices%20as%20Critical%20Re-writings
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Appendix 1
I wield my heart for to break you
I tape my mouth lest I hate you
And knowing there is nothing I can do to save you,
I leave softly so as not to wake you.
Dragging my finger through a thick layer of dust, I recall our childhood
Or fragments of it.
No two people have the same parents. I will never know yours.
Addiction is a disease, addiction is a disease, becomes my mantra as you break,
Shatter our family.
We cannot take much more cruelty, nor worry nor sorrow nor fury.
But your venom is in our blood now… or is it ours in yours.
Mother sits piecing together fragments for hours on end every day.
Appendix 2
As blood and cruelty layer fragments of a dragging day, dust is our mother.
Take your venom mouth lest I never wake you.
Our worry addiction is there in my thick mantra , yet I cannot break.
My sorrow becomes tape.
As I save our parents you leave fragments of nothing much.
I know two people softly piecing a heart together will not shatter.
Can I recall your disease? How every childhood fury is yours or ours?
In family sits my end.
For no addiction nor disease nor knowing more is yours.
I wield my finger through the same hate you have, or I break for hours.
To you we do it to you.