Audio Paper Manifesto – ‘Box Ticking’

1. The audio paper affords performative aesthetics.

The audio paper is experimental in character and is positioned against the conventional written paper. The audio paper insists on awareness during the dissemination of the academic argument; it is performative, and it is acutely aware of its own means of presentation and representation.

The performative nature of plunderphonics and sampling.

I feel that the seismograph audio paper manifesto places to much of an emphasis on language and performance of worlds.

2. The audio paper is idiosyncratic.

While academic knowledge often tries to avoid the idiosyncratic, the audio paper is deeply rooted in idiosyncrasies. It investigates environments –  the social, the material and the sensorial – by taking several dynamics of the perceptual and analytical process into account. The audio paper welcomes this. Inventions often occur in attempting to formulate or mediate through a media. The researcher always makes choices, also when writing, but this process of experimenting and choosing becomes palpable when transferred into a new format.

The audio paper is related to genres such as reportage, montage and feature. Reportage, as it relates to a certain place and the issues related to it; montage, through its awareness of mediations and any meta-reflexive components; feature, as it proposes a subjective and sensory approach to an issue. But the audio paper differs from the above three genres through its concern with the idiosyncratic: formal, auditory, inventive, experimental and investigatory idiosyncratic. The audio paper is an answer to Schulze’s rhetoric question, as it does “identify our respective, individual and sensory idiosyncrasies as the actual core elements in any historical as well as future research methodologies.”

3. The audio paper is situated and partial.

As an academic format, the audio paper can contribute with its “partial and situated truths”, a knowledge production that is qualitatively attentive to the various situations of research and their inherent aesthetic and sensory potentials. Situated and partial knowledge also implies that the production is restricted by its means of production: technologies, tools, media, places and contexts. The audio paper draws attention to the knowledge situation by, for instance, reflecting on the means of production. As sound material is visceral, the audio paper also is aware of different modes of expression and the aesthetic potentialities of sounds. Situated implies that the sound work is composed with sound [technologically extracted] from the environments with which they engage

4. The audio paper evokes affects and sensations.

The audio paper works with sensory and affective modes of knowledge. Sound has a material quality. Language is rendered through the voice with its attunement to the surroundings, its rhythms and pace. Feelings and sensations are present in the audio paper and work side by side with the semantics of language and sound. The aesthetic, material aspects of the audio paper produce affects and sensations in the listener. Affects are felt. What is felt could be the body of the soundscape, the body of the voice, or the feeling and sensing body of the listener while listening.

The tone and timbre of the voices used in the audio paper makes the narrator present. It affords feelings and sensations. Voice and tone thus perform meaning in the broad continuum between cognitive reason and bodily sensations.

I could have placed for of an emphasis on performative language, however I did really want to remove as much of a focus on the voice as possible.

5. The audio paper is multifocal; it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices.

The audio paper is – like 20th century avant-garde radio art, drama, literature and poetry – not necessarily narrated from the perspective of a one-dimensional protagonist. The audio paper’s research questions and arguments are developed within academic frameworks, while the presentation can take various forms. The audio paper hereby continually opens towards an integration of dramaturgical complexities that not only functions as a representational and performative tool, but also integrates the overall academic argument in the presentation itself.

I have created my audio paper with the intention of portraying a single perspective narrative from my journey home, to returning to London. I thought about the idea of talking about Australian aboriginal culture, as well as Maori relationships with land. I was trying to take an autoethnographic approach.

6. The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.

The audio paper is not limited to narrations performed by human beings. Not only humans act, also landscapes, objects, technologies and politics are rendered active agents (Latour 2005) in the audio paper. 

I feel that this was achieved.

7. The audio paper brings aesthetics and technology together in mediation.

“The audio paper is produced by means of digital audio technologies. With the field of Art and Technology in mind, technology – its function and dysfunction and the development and investigations generated – have demonstrated that technology is in itself a carrier of aesthetics”

“In the case of the audio paper, this frame of understanding underlines the awareness that recording equipment, filtering, mixing, mastering and conversions are not neutral processes and tools. They are in themselves expressions of various actors and aesthetic means.”

Plunderphonics is inherently tied to technology as is a direct aesthetic representation of digital music technologies emphasis on the ‘sample’.

http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html

8. The audio paper is a constituent part of broader ecologies.

The audio paper depends on diverse sound environments and human practices in its attempt to assemble aspects, narratives, phenomena and sensations of the world. Its dissemination and production depends on technology, which becomes a part of the expression and a key to information itself: “Technology does something in and to the world by modifying existing relations and constructing new ones between humans, tools, processes and the environment in which all are deeply entangled” (Salter 2010: xxxxv).

The audio paper is never conventional, as it always incorporates an awareness of the processes of research and technological production. It not only reflects its own research question/s, but reflects the reflection itself: the process of knowledge-production, the presentation and representation of language and voice, the narrative and dramaturgy, and the aesthetics of sound.

I tried to abstract the convention of a plunderphonic/collage by drawing on one of the major influences, the KLF’s Chill Out, and turning the ‘musical composition’ into a composed soundscape remenicent of a roadtrip, or more specifically of the journey that I took after recording the opening field recording at home (stationary on the boundary, a short drive to the train station, the train into London and the digital realm once I put my headphones on).