Project Description

In what way is the image meant to, or made to speak –this strange utterance that marks, stains, dis-confirms, –indeed echoes into other images? The Dying Wind / A Ventriloquist’s Art / Luminist Silence and the Sublime Noise of Progress (2013) is a dual-synched video presentation that takes the form of an automated lecture. Through three brief reflections on the sound works of Jack Goldstein, the inception of the talkies into the sound-film, and the visual production of silence in the Luminist landscape painters of the late 19th century, the presentation explores the broader questions about the transmutation of the auditory into the visual, and vice-versa. Here, the absence of the lecturer and the dis-embodied voice further distorts the common language linking the relations between speaker, author, and the objects to which one speaks. The politics of speaking, sounding, or picturing for one another suggest a powerful if fraught space of medial communication and contingency. (A different version of this lecture was frist presented at RECESS Activities, New York, inSeeing Voice: The Seven-Tone Color System, Organized by Christine Sun Kim, and R.H.E. Gordon in Conjunction with the Center for Experimental Lectures in the Spring of 2013).

Presented as part of Anna Craycroft’s C’mon Language, at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR.