TAM LINES - MMus Sonic Art
Letting the Out-side in: Utopian Practice Research into Aural Bubbles and Eerie
My practice research piece, bluelightnospaceflattime, is an extended audio piece for headphones. Influenced by the strange affect of experimental radio and podcast found in Samuel Beckett’s Embers, Chris Morris’s Blue Jam, The Blindboy Podcast, On Vanishing Land by Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, and the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, I made a selection of ‘sonic fictions’ - pieces which experiment with the relationship between voiceover, soundscape and the listener.
My project began with two things that were troubling me personally. The first concerned my consumptive relationship with specifically digital media, with one standout form - podcasts. I continue to spend a large portion of my waking time listening to podcasts, not uncommonly five or six hours a day, often in noise cancelling headphones. Reflecting on the habitual, emotive, and embodied relationship I developed with my listening devices (one of constant listening and constant noise cancellation), I began to notice the political and ontological implications of what is only one expression of the contemporary subject’s complex entanglement with online communication networks. I found myself in a constant state of distraction and self-mediation, embodying the overstimulation that Mark Fisher noticed in his further-education students, “post-literate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’”.
Researching for bluelightnospaceflattime, I explored the auditory bubbles of podcasts and noise cancelling headphones, noting their tendency to quell political impetus. In an attempt to undermine this soothing audible affect, I explored concepts of the eerie, absurd, and out-side through an interrogation of the strange haunting quality of the recorded voice.
Links to work
Haunting A - Ghosts We Made https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn7LzRYJJvM/
Haunting B - Isolated Breath https://soundcloud.com/thatwhichcrawls/isolated-breath
Haunting C -Message for Casey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh5wCtltcRw
Biography
Tam Lines is an artist, writer, and musician with an ongoing fascination with our entanglement with non-human actors (e.g. architecture, cyber-technology, plants and animals). Following a conceptual framework of contemporary ontology and critical/queer theory, Tam pokes at the limits of representation, trying to access the affective, embodied elements of contemporary culture and reality. Sound, as a vibrational energy that passes through non-human and human matter without discrimination, and as the primary mode for language, presents itself as a deep resource for exploring these limits