2022-ongoing / multimedia
Hidden Labors and Sonic Tensions is a collaboration between Abram Stern and Dorothy R. Santos. The correspondence format is presented as an accordion booklet that includes research documentation, archival fragments, and reflections on methodology and creative practices.
This work is at the intersection of Stern’s work in obfuscation and unintelligibility and Santos’s research in voice recognition and assistive technologies. Together, they explore themes related to sound, voice, distortion, and disintegration. Their correspondence allows for interventions on how one’s research and creative practice might incorporate lightweightness, investigating the smallest carbon footprint in our respective research, and ways of encoding in and outside the image that go beyond mere transcription of language. For future sonic reflections, the two are hoping to experiment with an analog format that plays with musical notation inspired by Guillermo Galindo’s acoustic and electroacoustic scores. This work serves as an introduction into an ongoing collaboration. Intentional points of opacity (e.g. experimentation with obliteration of sentences or personal identification, redaction of characters, etc.) are included throughout the work and related to a sonic experience that will link to various recordings and found audio.
The content is also an expansion of Stern’s and Santos’ ongoing conversation of the hologram as a fiction of presence, their hope is to expand upon the idea of the gaze that requires a looking at. This work seeks to have the reader engage in thought experiments of seeing through. From a radio signal to a sonic fingerprint of a mediation to transmissions through antennas and sound bleed, the project will play an integral role in how opacity and transparency are translated into text, print media, and audio.
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 