lottie sadd

I want to experiment with a practice that shows all this messiness, chaos, contamination, entanglement, show everything like I thought to years ago at the end of my undergrad; thinking about a library of ideas in which everyone contributes ideas and project and then draws real connections – using string, or using sound (maybe a soundwalk through a scape of idea(s), through imaginary terrain?) – between every influence they had within/out there. Everything must be submitted. 

I want to show the mess; 

Not to research ‘mess’ 

but to research with mess, to make a mess of research  

(Is this being done?) 

My initial thoughts about compassion and empathy are still in here – transformed into relations-between (selves and others). ‘Compassion and empathy’ are now part of a larger web of enquiry about the intersections of EMBODIED VOICE (voice expressed from fleshy body; fleshy (and Other ghostly) body/ies impressed in that vocal expulsion, emission, belch) SELF&OTHER (how to use this mess (method) to communicate mess (content) amid the mess (interrelated world of humans/non-humans)?) and MEANING-&WORLD-MAKING. 

Everyone talks about sense- and meaning-making. An anthropocentric drive to make sense of the world is taken for granted. Communication, philosophy, science…: making sense is progress – when is it not? But why progress? Is it natural? Are sense/meaning-making and progress a natural inclination, or is it all made-up? [EDIT 8^th FEB: Perhaps if we consider progress as a means for survival, and that survival is irrefutably a natural drive, then we might say yes, progress is natural. But what if we consider deliberately not to drive towards survival in a crumbling world; or we consider the progress we are making as humans has exceeded that required for survival and is now merely progress-for-comfort (and furthermore at the expense of space for others’ potential survival-driven-progress: i.e. cutting down forests for ourselves and inhibiting the forest’s opportunity for progress) – what then? If not for survival then can we cease progress-making, or is there some peace to be had in some amount of regression] In a messy world let’s pay attention to stagnance, even to de-progress. Let’s unmake-meaning. Dada did something similar then, but this is now, and then won’t do for now. 

I’m interested in the potential of the non-verbal embodied voice – the flesh-voice contaminated by breaths, stories, structures, voices, bodies (Chadwick, 2023; Cavarero, 2005) – to communicate the mess, via messy methods, to unravel the meaning strived for in the name of progress. What would this voice sound like? Would it be communication if actively against meaning-making (is communication necessarily meaning-making?)? And if not, why should it be anyway?

[Stop Making Sense and Talking Heads] 

Some (clearly messy) research questions 

* what is the voice that it holds the potential for mess-making (or meaning-unmaking)? (and what is it that it has been commandeered for the purpose of meaning-making (or in art as ‘trivial’ aesthetic consideration)?) 

* what impacts does an entangled, new materialist perspective of (embodied) voice have on vocal composition & performance? 

* what does a fleshy, entangled voice mean for understandings of self & other? 

* how does this messy, chaotic, contaminated voice sound in practice? 

* how can this messy, chaotic, contaminated voice continue or start to communicate messy, chaotic, contaminated methods? (/how to use the voice in messy ways to reflect the mess of what it is?) 

* is it possible to unmake meaning, or to non-sense-make? Where ‘world-making’ is the process of meaning-making, can we instead just ‘be in the world’ via a process of unmaking meaning in the voice (that is tied up with communication (relation to others) and self-knowledge)?