October 12, 2015 - 15:52
I. Jess on "making silence communicative"
II. 2:45-2:55: coursekeeping
* Sunday night posting: mid-sem eval
* Monday night dinner before Joel's class
* Tuesday's class: come prepared
to work on your research project
* Sula up then for silence
reminder to Julia & Riley to post
on what they did/had us do,
Shira to find a companion to do this...
III. today we welcome Jess Libow, to help us think about the expressiveness of sign language poetry:
I asked you to watch a range of performances, and to read two essays,
Benjamin Bahan, “Upon the Formation of a Visual Variety of the Human Race,"
focuses on the activities of "people of the eye," the differences between doors and windows...
Brenda Jo Brueggeman's "Words Another Way"
puts some of the sign-language poems into words and analyzes them;
she describes the "outlaw ontology" of deafness,
sees sign language poetry as emphasizing presence:
participating communally in antielitist, antiauthoritarian, anarchic practice
that is stepped in immanence, simultaneism and impermanence
it uses space, and cannot be disembodied
The "Voice" of "Vision": sign language asks us to consider the poetic tradition from the angle of de-voiced bodies…the distinctiveness of ASL is rooted in …a radical visuality, which sets it apart from any spoken tongue. For deaf people…vision is voice…"I listen with my eyes"....silence here is not the absence of voice but the foregrounded presence of body and image...
when silence signifies a choice, not a default...it questions ascriptions of disability and pathology
[her footnotes apologize for creating written versions of the poems, making them sit, static, on the page...]
Notes from Christine Sun Kim's visit to this class (and to HC gallery) two years ago:
she said, "silence is very imposing;
it's not about hearing nothing, but is very energy producing"
she spoke about currency (the value of sound/oral language), ghosts,
and ownership ("I have no access to the files I make; if I am
making sounds I can't hear: do they belong to me?")
she shared some performances, including
Feedback: Now Hiring (building on the concept of the
hired "wailer": balloons commemorating loss), and
Face Opera ("my friends were like my choir")
calling herself "a collaboration whore," she asked also questions
about sound translation/negotiation/collaboration/creating a "global voice"-->
where then does the voice come from?
and she taped us together and asked us to collaborate on writing
Dan: "I am really interested in Christine Kim's work….examining the physicality of sound….
sound does not belong to hearing people. Sound can have a physical form, a body in the world.
It can vibrate. Or mediated through an amplifier, can create shapes – can move a paintbrush…
Sound can have texture."