Inventions For Radio #8: Matthew MacKisack. In deze aflevering staat de visueel en auditief kunstenaar Matthew MacKisack centraal.
In zijn analytisch werk en met lezingen van Sidsel Christensen, Hal
Silver en David Howells, gaat hij op zijn manier op zoek naar de
diepere betekenis van het medium radio.
Concept.
Announcers Introduction:
Radio’s specificity, as a broadcast medium, is that it presents speech without a speaking body. This is also radio’s power: without a body to circumscribe it, the voice becomes omnipresent, the voice of ‘the invisible master’. Therein lies its potential to effect belief and – both collective and catastrophic – behaviour. Meanwhile, at the level of experience, radio’s ‘visual lack’ seems to force an imaginary re-embodiment, a kind of vision, on the listener. In this way radio brings the borders between social and mental space into question, what Marshall McLuhan saw as its atavistic power ‘to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber’. The following recordings examine these forces and images, coercions and revelations.
The next work, by Norwegian artist Sidsel Christensen, re-stages that authority. In an extract from Christensen’s ongoing experiments in hypnotic regression, the hypnotised artist narrates the rise and fall of a secret cult in ancient Greece. Separated from the video to which it has previously been the soundtrack, the monologue encourages – obligates? – the listener to imaginatively align themselves with the narrator’s psychical explorations. The
psychoanalytical session becomes a domestic reverie, the “voice from heaven” – or at least from "beyond" – showing its residual.
The session concludes with a lecture by David Howells on the very language of force, both
irrational and rationalising. "A Voice in the Dark" considers rhetoric as the political art of persuasion, born out of the need to make laws and customs, culture out of nature, to civilise men, and to civilise the power of the voice, to make it public. Howells proposes that, given the political and economic context which will not leave any public act untouched, artists may be compelled to recognise themselves as speaking and working rhetorically, as operative in bringing, like radio, the psyche and society into alignment.
*Works / Playlist:
Sidsel Christensen, Study for Composition I (audio), 2009 (10 minutes)
Hal Silver, Hal Silver Speaks, 2011 (10 minutes)
David Howells, A Voice in the Dark: Rhetoric for Radio, 2011 (25 minutes)
Matthew MacKisack, afkomstig uit Londen, werkt met bewegend beeld, geluid en verschillende vormen van schrift. Recente tentoonstellingen zijn ‘Cast & Figment’ in Soundfjord, Londen en ‘Before & After’ in Galleria HIT, Bratislava. Hij is momenteel een doctoraal kandidaat aan het Goldsmiths College, University of London.