Shock in the Ear

About the work

‘Shock in the Ear’ is a remarkable sound-led artwork dealing with various types, effects and after-effects of shock. Neumark offers the following contemporary reflections on the intent and making of the artwork.

‘Shock in the Ear’ was developed in 1998 to explore the potential for sound in CD-ROMs and to offer the audience a way to explore the shock experience, and its memory, through the senses. The paltry presence of sound in interactive works at that time was striking. It was one of the motivating factors for making this work. And I was troubled by the way that deep cyberspace was so non-corporeal. Even ‘shocking’ cyberart seemed often to represent the body rather than remember or evoke it, to display wounds rather than etch along their kinaesthetic, physical, memory pathways. This may be explained by their dominant aesthetics that seemed techno-centred—driven by the machine possibilities rather than trying to de-centre and de-fetishize them. Because the shock experience is bodily, an intimate visual and sound based work seemed to me to offer a way into a more bodily approach to interactivity than was usual with CD-ROMS at that time. In short, ‘Shock in the Ear’ aimed to offer a sound-centred, sensual and disruptive experience for the audience/user.

So, looking back at a time when CD-ROM art was at an early stage, one of the crucial questions was how to retrain the ear and the hand in the computer era in the way that cinema retrained the eye in early modernist era —to answer the need thrown up by computer culture to undo the already moribund habits of hand/eye/ear control. Rather than the usual click-through, goal-oriented experience, I wanted to make a work that offered a more bodily experience. I wanted to explore an interactivity where the movements and perceptions provoked were disorienting, disrupting — ‘shocking’ — to the usual CD-ROM aesthetics and kinaesthetics. I wanted instead to make a work where the invitation is to an intense experience through their senses, especially hearing. The aim was for the audience/user to experience the after-shock, the time of decay after the intense attack of the shock moment—both in an indirect way through hearing stories from those who have been through it and directly through being themselves dislocated from their usual bearings in interactive cyberspace. At that time, their accustomed location in computer space was one where they are emotionally/psychically immersed but physically and sensually distant as they carry out a quest or play a game, voyage into the future (into the machine) space or descend into a stacked, fact-laden encyclopedic ‘past’ space. In ‘Shock in the Ear’ they found themselves somewhere else.

My initial work with shock had been for a radiophonic work, ‘Shock’, commissioned by the Listening Room (ABC) and New American Radio and Performing Arts in the US. It came about because of my own shock experience of a car accident where my sense of time was stretched and space was disoriented. I became intensely aware of an attack and decay aspect of the experience, an aspect that I wanted to explore in the sound medium of radio art. In making that work, I had interviewed a range of people who had had shock experiences as well as producing sound for the evocative space of radiophonic art. I noticed the strangely distanced quality of the voice of the interviewees, which made me think about the way memory works with such dislocating and intense experiences. The radiophonic work opened a lot of questions and I was excited to see where I could go with a new and different medium.

Sound includes voice (both performers and interviews), music, and sounds, all of which work in non-conventional (for CD-ROMs) ways. Music (from music by Richard Vella) counterpoints as well as providing emotive/sensual effect and a sense of dis/location in time and space. Sounds evoke space and sensual responses more than operating as literal fx. The aim was to provide a way into the body of the audience/user, and sound was crucial to do this. Sound did not work as background or filler, nor via short repeating loops; instead, it works physically to provide the shifts that are part of a shock experience.

The visuals were created by Maria Miranda in response to the sound—not the usual production model where visuals drive sound. The visuals are nonetheless integral to the experience and aesthetics and their character is intense and textural rather than realist and 3d. They worked to invite a new kinaesthetic approach to interactive sound—inviting a move around and as if into the screen. This movement allowed the audience to create a live sound mix – one which was never the same. The layering feeling of the visuals echoed and provoked a layering of sound and both, in turn, evoked the layering of memory typical of the after-shock experience. The artist’s concern with the visuals was also to counteract the dominant technophiliac approach in new media art and avoid the unquestioning approach to technology that underlay it.

Voice performances work in ‘Shock in the Ear’ as texture and rhythm as much as for content and evocation. Performance was one of the sonic aspects I wanted to explore further with the CD-ROM, to explore the performativity of memory and story, through working with voice. Since working in radio, I was enthralled with the power of voice, the way it conveys intimacy and intensity, and connects to the body of the listener. I wanted to play with the way memory is ever shifting and there is no one single telling of an experience. Even if not consciously, people would, I hoped, sense this as they interacted and heard the ‘same’ story fragment performed differently – the original interview and the two performances, which I called ‘attack’ and ‘decay.’ Attack was the intense moment of shock and decay was more distant, evoking the melting of the numbness of shock. I say ‘numbness’ because of both my own shock experience and because I noticed a certain numbness in the way the interviewees told their stories. I wanted the performances to convey the attack that produced that numbness and the decay of its aftermath, its ‘melting.’ To work with the attack and decay moments of the shock experience, I had one actor perform the story in an intense way (attack) and another actor perform the decay version, more distant, to evoke the melting of the numbness of shock.

The making of ‘Shock in the Ear’ involved a two-stage process, beginning with a physicalisation, through an art installation and moving on to a stand-alone CD-ROM. The CD-ROM-based installation (made initially for Artspace in Sydney and later exhibited at Artemesia Gallery in Chicago) created and operated in a theatrical space with various experience points/stations. By moving around the space and engaging with different objects (such as a telephone), people accessed a different aspect of, sense and sensation of shock kinaesthetics and aesthetics. They also “triggered” and experienced a different aural perspective as well as shifting and disrupting the flow of the sound material. The interactions did not just bring in new “set” sounds but actually altered the sounds and their perspectives. The second stage, the stand-alone CD-ROM, was not intended to be a documentation space, documenting and re-presenting the installation space; rather it was a way to work with some of the material to construct a space inspired by the installation as an experience of movement in a physical art/theatrical space.

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