To encourage this reconfiguring of our metaphorical habits, Neumark works through stories she’s collected, performances, sounds, still images and projected animations, “that fracture the ‘natural’ body.” The images by digital visual artist Maria Miranda entail X-Rays, scans, the skeleta of the computer and body organs, but avoid the literalness of western images of the body. The vocal track (pre-recorded by sound artist/performer Amanda Stewart to text by Neumark but also performed live improvising with herself on several occasions during the installation’s gallery life) also fragments and transforms. Stewart, a distinctive poet, reports that she’s enjoyed the rare process of working to someone else’s text and is looking forward, says Neumark, “to reacting in a lateral way to a mixture of memory systems.” Composer and programmer Greg White, writes Neumark, “creates the pulses which hold the room/machine together and has designed special software to enable the complex sound design.” Neil Simpson lights the space in which Miranda’s image-printed sheets of copper and silk will hang. Six loud speakers will “express the organs”, drawing on Stewart’s performance and sounds from the Dead Centre sound art piece Neumark produced earlier for ABC FM’s The Listening Room.
I ask if the radio work forms the template for the installation. Neumark says yes and no, a lot of other things happen as the work transforms from one medium to another. She likes the creative accidents that happen The one thing that is constant, she insists, is her preoccupation with sound. For all the visual appeal and drive of Shock in the Ear and Dead Centre it is sound which is at the heart of these works. The voice too is of the body and carries its own cultural baggage. An important part of Neumark’s ongoing project has been to see how sound artists can work with visual artists. In a few months, Neumark, a Senior Lecturer in Media Arts Production, University of Technology Sydney, will return to the United States for a year on a Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, teaching a course she’s designed and doing a lot of work on her next project, about the envelope making machine—her grandfather invented the device and also the envelope with window—and the genealogy of email. It’s a work about the desire to create ‘envelopes’ and the culture of invention.
Dead Centre: the body with organs, The Performance Space Gallery, July 8 - 22. Live performances with Amanda Stewart July 8, 11 & 18.
RealTime issue #31 June-July 1999 pg. 28
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]