Suvani Suri

I’m Sitting in a Phone

51s

2019

 

 

<Sound played in the call>

 

 

<Call recording after multiple layers>

 

 

<About>

View this post on Instagram

Alvin Lucier’s wrote his seminal composition 'I am Sitting in a Room' in 1969. Over the last few days, in an attempt to re-enact the work over the communication circuit of the mobile phone, Lucier’s text was modified and recorded by @suvanisuri in her voice to be sent over an automated call. Each of the calls is algorithmically recorded over the one that came before. Each repetition cloaks the words in the peculiarity of the telephonic space(s) where the call was being received and every successive act of listening contributes to the voice slowly losing its shape until it becomes a composite of all the rooms-in-the-phones that were dialed in to. While it took Lucier 32 re-recordings of his voice to carve out the philosophy of ‘sound as space’, here it took ten sets of 32 calls each, iterated upon one another for the utterances to finally get drowned in all that they encountered, piling on the layers rather than stripping them away. The allusions to his work are clear, but the departure is in the absurdity presented in the image, grammar and semantics of sitting in a phone, and the splitting of inner projections from outer messages that takes place as a consequence. In an investigation into the telephonic uncanny, only the calls that were heard all the way through were relayed to the next. Participation foregrounded listening, to all that is being said, to the Kafka-esque splitting of dialogue, to one’s own voice and its proxy flourishing between the two termini of network. The stutter, at the very heart of Lucier’s work, smoothens out at the end. Here, the ‘regularity of the speech’ is blurred out, as it is turned into a register of acoustic events. – – — Video @suvanisuri Technical support @jaidevd Platform support @twilio – Sign ups for participation will continue throughout the show. See link in bio. . Next change tomorrow! – ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ *DM for any queries/feedback* ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ – #outofline #oflineout #soundart #textbased #virtual #exhibition #mobile #cellphone #automated #call #waiting #cellular #ring #dial #hello #connection #network #audio #soundscapes #experimental #sound #politics of #listening #signup #iamsittinginaroom #alvinlucier #repetition #soundasspace

A post shared by —out-of-line— (@oflineout) on