between the emitted sound and the receiving body interview with Julia E. Dyck
03/06/2021
between the emitted sound and the receiving body
interview with Julia E. Dyck
Alper Turan
Untitled Performance, Artist Commons, 2019. Photo by Michel Christelbach
Alper: It’s unfortunate that you and the other participants of this exciting residency program couldn’t travel to Turkey and start their residencies as planned, although, I am sure it will eventually happen. I’d love to start with your proposed project to be realized during the residency. Can you tell me a bit about it?
Julia: I was planning to spend this time researching the act of listening; as performance, mental state, and political choice. I’ve been inspired by the works and writing of American composer, Pauline Oliveros on the act of deep listening and lesbian musicology. Using this research as a starting point, I consider the potential of listening as a queer act, one that is embodied, situated in identity, and addresses an understanding of queerness as an ephemeral possibility, a mode of sociality and relationality. I thought this research could take the form of a video or audio-visual installation; rendering the invisible, subjective, and embodied practice of listening somehow visible.
Alper: I see that your practice evolves around sound in many shapes and shades. I believe there are certain conscious and unconscious choices as well as experiences we had that make us focused on particular mediums. What was your path to sound?
Julia: As much as I believe that the value or the essence of my practice is not medium-specific but rather faithful to ideas, concepts, and stories, there is definitely something about the aural and auditory that keeps drawing me in. I started singing in the children’s choir of my family’s church in Winnipeg as soon as I was able to stand and speak, and piano lessons followed shortly thereafter. So, singing and musical performance have always been a part of my life. The power of the voice and particularly voices singing together has felt really impactful for me. I’m unable to point to any other satisfaction like that of losing your own voice within a group of other voices. As the years went on I played in bands and then started hosting community radio. This is when I became really interested in sound itself as a phenomenon, the processes of transmission, waves of energy, and what the sonic has to offer outside of musical composition or meaning.
However, recently I’ve really felt the urge to materialize. Building electronics was part of my early practice, and I’ve been working on sculptures for an upcoming exhibition, some of them make sound but some reference a sound that’s implied rather than present.
Auditory Fantasy, Volksroom, 2020. Photo by André Chapatte
Alper: I don’t want to create a dichotomy between sound and image, or aural and visual, but what’s the distinct potential of the aural for you? Its being a penetrative, unescapable, fathom-like presence?
Julia: I think what drew me to working with sound in my art practice initially was the potential it leaves for the imagination. A lot of my work is structured around a narrative, or invites the audience to engage in fantasy; imagining another world, a parallel universe, or enjoying ours in a different way. When I was studying research-creation in communications and media at Concordia, I started working with science fiction and narrative, and most of my peers and professors wondered “don’t you want to make a film?” Then, I realized there’s no way I can express these ideas through the visual because this place doesn’t exist yet, it can’t be materialized and has to be built in the mind. Perhaps it seems like a lazy artist gesture or asking a lot from an audience, but I take fantasy pretty seriously and hope that through words and sound the image can be constructed in the mind of the listener. I'm also interested in the materiality of the sound of the voice and all that’s implied or projected when a voice is disembodied. There are many interesting implications here, especially concerning gender and affect/emotion.
This idea of being penetrated by sound is fascinating to me. Listening is a physical and mental process that’s subjective; perceived sounds are a co-creation between the emitted sound and the receiving body. Sound waves can also have a physical impact on the body and brain. In Infinite Source, an ongoing narrative work exploring acts of care, my collaborator Amanda Harvey and I work with healing frequencies and tone-based brainwave entrainment. These specific frequencies can cause the brain waves to fall into sync with the sound waves, which produce very strong responses in the brain and a state of altered consciousness.
Alper: What makes a sound queer? Non-representational or let’s say, non-indexical art is barely and hardly defined as queer if we don’t know about the sexual biographies of the artist. What makes your sound queer, you think?
Julia: I think a lot of discourse around sound and listening has taken for granted the idea that the listener is a neutral, passive subject which I think contrasts with the fact that we listen with our bodies, and our experiences inform the way that we perceive things. Rather than making work that draws from aesthetics that have become understood to be queer, I try to translate my experience or my desire into the work that I make. For example, Frequency Interference is a multichannel audio-visual performance where the plot is structured around speculative kinships between humans, technology, and the earth.
I also have some broader ideas about ways in which listening can be queer and about how sound as a material can be queer on its in its own. I like that the sonic universe exists far beyond what our meager sensory systems as humans can perceive. There's this pluralistic world, and the ongoing expansion of frequencies below and above what we immediately hear, which I believe resists normativity. These are the kinds of things that I'm trying to tune into, or at least going through the world with an acknowledgment that this is not the whole picture; there's always something that's going on that's just outside of perception and there are multiple realities happening at any moment. To me, this action of tuning in or becoming available to something new, another way of living, another way of relating to other people or to your environment, is what I'm trying to get out in my work. And as I mentioned, for me working with sound is about imagination; allowing things to be created in the mind. The imagination is the most radical tool we have, and fantasizing or imagining worlds or futures or other ways of being is important.
Frequency Interference, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2018. Photo by Laura Fiorio
Alper: Thinking about how we define a sound quite distinctly as a rhythm, music, a noise, or just a voice, it felt strange to make such boundaries for a ‘material’ that is not tangible. Does your practice include a deliberate effort to break these boundaries? Can we see it as a queer strategy?
Julia: Yes, absolutely. I’m very intentionally trying to work beyond binaries; subject/object noise/music masculine/feminine, productive/unproductive, etc., and trying to kind of carve out new spaces between these. Even in terms of format, I’m pretty committed to the in-between, working adjacent to multiple disciplines.
I think also focusing attention on or bringing awareness to phenomena around us that are not always perceived (through eco-acoustics, atmospherics, field recordings) echoes the queer experience – of being told the world is one way but experiencing something else, and then becoming almost hyper-aware of this energy or sense. I’m trying to work with perception and attention in non-normative ways.
Alper: I am sure there’s a big difference between performing your work in public and recording it at home or studio. How dominant is the performativity in your practice? How does your sound take positions and shapes according to the contexts and spaces you are performing?
Julia: Performance is very important; something about the physical presence and energy created between audience and performer is pleasurable for me. Since 2018, I’ve been working on a lecture-performance called Auditory Fantasy, on the topic of communication, perception, and consciousness. I create a dense sonic space through vocals, noise, and feedback and experiment with different forms of transmission, including telepathy, in an attempt to create an environment for collective fantasy. It’s not the kind of experience that can be achieved through a stereo recording. Most of my sound works are documentation of live performances or a studio recording was made in addition. I don’t care so much about glossy production value or gear as long as I have the tools to execute an idea, and some of my favorite pieces were made with the most constraints.
When working in installation, there are often many challenges with sound pieces. If possible, I’ll try to have a good sense of the space to see what is acoustically possible, and I often like to work in multichannel or take advantage of the sound of the space. A group show in a classic white cube is a particular challenge for me - either the sound is going to fill the gallery and leak into the other works, or it goes in headphones. This has led me to work more with site-specific installation, visual scores, text, and video.
I created Some Words for a group exhibition at the Galerie d'art et essai, where I made proportional notations (scores) from verbatim radio transcripts, including the hesitations and false starts and everything, and had other artists perform them. The recordings were in headphones and the notations were on the wall, which was one way to translate the performance into something that’s able to take up space in a different way.
workshop voice echo transmission, Galerie Art & Essai, 2019. Photo by dotgain
Alper: How is your relationship with technology more than its practical and utilitarian capacity? What’s the queer potential of the sound, body, and technology?
Julia: As our contact with the world becomes more and more mediated through technology, and our devices take on a more affective role in our lives, I think it’s important to consider how we can queer this relationship. My early research in grad school was really focused on our relationship with our smartphones, how the technology performs an affective, gendered role, and the highly constructed nature of these relationships. Since 2015 I’ve been a regular contributor to the files radio show, which is centered around feminism and technology has been airing weekly on community radio in Montreal since 1996, commissioned by feminist digital artist-run center Ada X. Obviously the conversation around gender and technology or cyberfeminism has shifted over the years, which is reflected in the archive of the show. My current interest in technology is centered on questions of relationality, identity, and mis-use. I recently read Legacy Russel’s Glitch Feminism manifesto and the queer potential of the “glitch” really resonated with me.