Untitled (No Images)

An audio work commissioned for No Images, part of the 2010 Images Festival.

The 'screening' was conducted in a pitch-black auditorium.

The piece took inspiration from the work of Mary Ann Doane and Gary Hill. A single voice speaks to the audience about the materiality of sound and amplification and reflects on how the recording process affects its own indeterminate presence.

As the recording progresses, the voice moves further and further away from the microphone, revealing more of the space of recording through the reverberations of the room. The piece continually plays with the difficulty of perceiving proximity both in complete darkness and with amplified sound.

The voice's aggression in the recording deliberately counteracts classical cinema's attenuated male voice-over in which, according to Doane, the ideological power of the disembodied male voice is obscured in the service of the holistic sonic world of the film. In this sense, the aggression of the voice is meant to illustrate the voice's own fraught relationship with the audience both as voice-over, which commands attention and literally speaks above the audience, and as disembodied presence, which lacks any real physical affect.

During the screening, a fog machine slowly filled the auditorium with fog, which remained invisible in the dark until the audience was allowed to leave their seats.

Jonathan Adjemian was the voice.