Exploring the Nearness and Farness of Intimacy: Being "In It Together" in the Sonic Radiator-Cathedral

• In Event: Impersonal Intimacies: Rethinking Relationality in the Ontological Turn

Abstract

Objectives
The sound when we move the stethoscopes over the wire conjures a vast space.
A cathedral
An aircraft hangar
We are in it together
Neither of us describe it so I cannot be sure she perceived the same
We are both smiling and checking and looking at each other
(Researcher’s notes)

The construction of identity-based difference is described by Deleuze as ‘shrill particularities’, and, blanket ‘inclusion’ as ‘spurious universalities’ (Windsor, 2015). Two artist-researchers from a three-year interdisciplinary project, Odd: feeling different in the world of education, worked with children to explore their relationship to the school environment, seeking ways to generate intimacy without molar constructions of identity (Windsor, 2015). We explored how sonic instruments (parabolic dishes, tin-can phones, stethoscopes) might unsettle or rephrase the spatial and temporal delineations between school, body and environment, and children and others.

Perspective
Rooted in new materialisms (Barad, 2007), we take the sound instruments to be inseparable from any phenomena that are produced. We are informed by Bonnet ,Senday and Mckay’s (2018) 'sonorous archipelago', and John Durham Peters’ (2001) interest in communication as waves of excess. New geographical methods of spatial analysis inform our experiment with bodies in movement (McCormack, 2013).

Techniques
We established an open-invitation after-school club as a kind of ‘slipped space’/parallel reality/’upside down’ where the environment and materials are the same as the classroom but where different processes of engagement can unfold. We mobilised activities where the gap between our plan and the children’s responses allowed tangible forms of desire and resistance to emerge.

Data sources
The experience was held in time across a variety of partial sources, forming a body where unexpected connections can be sensed. Experiences were recorded in research notes, and via hand-held cameras and digital audio recording devices by the children.

Conclusions
Working beyond a delineated starting point of object ventriloquism, the children delighted in the temporal and spatial splitting of voice from body, and the way the instruments changed timbre and muffled meanings. Some children combined instruments, making assemblages that moved sound through tubes and bodies, generating long eye and touch contact.

An audio recording of a game of seeking and hiding captured reassuring whispers and bursts of discovery. The children’s voices, and pace and rhythm of movement intertwined with the volumes and materials of the social and spatial environment. At the same time, occasional profound one-to-one encounters spoke of the effort of deep listening.

Significance
The sound instruments simultaneously move the listener close and far from others, drawing attention to the flattened and/or vast space of communication and bodies. The paper articulates a potential for empathy, communality, and attunement to space, atmospheres and events that arise through sensing and making sounds. It builds an argument for experiences or events that resist interpretation, but where children’s and researcher’s actions ebb and flow like a malleable form. These ways to be intimate dissolve edges and standard frames of performance and identification, potentially enabling encounters that can ripple from children and researchers to carers and school staff.

Authors

• Jo Ray, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Becky Clair Shaw, Sheffield Hallam University