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Context and research questions >
The needle as the punctum of time taking you back to before the noise cancelling began,
before we rode the filters to a place of calm. To a noisy world, filled with strange and
unpleasant sounds. Exploding motors, waterfalls, garbage doors, insects and air ducts,
blenders and coffee grinders, rubber tire friction, office chit chat, clanking bottles, an old
green house creaking in the typhoons of the catastrophic present tense. Tense, but quiet.
Not a sound except for these four voices quietly vibing.
Our experimental writing process is a nesting of arts-based methodologies and digitally mediated creative practices: narrative futuring3, collaborative writing in digital interfaces4, textual sonification using the Singling platform5, Zoom and Padlet as both collaborative interfaces and performance venues, and The Patch, a collaborative writing and performance workshop6. The resulting text/s, Skunk Tales, provides more of an unbounded futures atmosphere that does “atmospheric things”7 than an enclosed and representative short story with a beginning, middle, and end. This bricolage of arts-based, digitally enriched methods has much to offer the qualitative researcher interested in engaging with the unquantifiable realms of the imaginary, and finding/creating emergent and entangled meaning and insight there. Within this exposition we describe this gathering of methodologies that allowed us to create the narrative atmosphere of Skunk Tales.
1. Narrative Diffraction
Skunk Tales in both form and composition, problematizes temporality, linearity,
authorship, cause and effect, and takes narrative to its Roche limit where it disintegrates and
commingles with poetry, music, noise, and nonsense. We take up story in an expansive sense as
“any account of a series of related events or experiences”8. Our account(s) are collaborative not only between the human authors involved in this project, but also with the interfaces, technologies, and spacetime contexts that constitute and co-instantiate production of
the texts and sounds of Skunk Tales. The events or experiences are related in terms of our togetherness and various simultaneities— first our physical togetherness around a table, breathing in the same air and listening to the same vinyl records, and then later “together-apart”9 at five different tables in five different geographical locations, patchworked together in
virtual space. Like Alexander and Wyatt ours was a kind of virtual “kitchen research practice” in
which:
We wrote. We wrote in response to what we heard, or what we imagined we
heard. We made coffee. We talked. We read aloud our written responses to each
other and wrote again, writing ourselves into each other’s words, and read aloud
again. More coffee. More talking. Repeat.10
This methodology is a writing-as-exploration into the future imaginary11 that is not an attempt at prediction or representation of a unified vision of the future;
Rather, this writing intentionally diffracts the very idea of representation. Van der Tuin’s
description of diffraction is particularly helpful here:
Diffraction is said to shift a restrictive linguisticism. Diffraction is meant to disrupt
linear and fixed causalities, and to work toward ‘more promising interference
patterns’ both between words and things [and here we include sounds] (allowing for things and bodies [and frequencies] to be active in processes of signification)….12
THE PATCH: Stage I state iii -- ireadfast
Participants allow the scrambled input text to wash over their eyes. This is a process of analogue filtering during which participants are encouraged to choose only those words that that appear louder or more visible to their interest than others.
Play with the speed dial to watch the words pass by at impossible-to-read speeds.
2. Collaborative Writing
In many collaborative writing practices, especially in the scholarly context, the
collaboration act is a kind of negotiation of meaning, a braiding together of individual
perspectives into a unified voice, even if that voice is admittedly multiplicitous. Taking up the
first person plural perspective, we become an authorial multitude, like those of Deleuze and
Guattari: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was
already quite a crowd….”13. Textual collaboration can be in the form of a dialogue in which the
individual voice/characters are distinct and attributable, as in the Jonathan and Dagmar
researcher voices in their re-conceptualization of the interview process 14, or
the dialogue format of Gale and Wyatt’s Working at the Wonder15. The text, once written and
especially once published, does not change – the first sentence is composed of the same series of
words though they be read yesterday, today, or tomorrow. For the purposes of this exposition and this
context, we cohere into a concretized form and adopt the pronoun we—but in our collaborative
storying, the pronouns were more complex and various, the texts more mutable and changing,
the sounds and meanings “coupled with the environmental contingencies that are constitutive of
any wave behaviour” and therefore “can never be perfectly reverse engineered from its
constituent frequencies” 16. Our we was voluminous, undefined, and encompassed
many quiet rooms of private thinking made audible. Indeed, it was a kind of chaotic assemblage,
a gathering of subjectivities.
THE PATCH: Stage II state iv--collaborative remix
Participants then create a collaborative poem. In this case, Google Docs was used so that participants could write simultaneously in one collaborative space.
3. Polyphonic Padlet
In our virtual writing sessions, as well as our storying performance for the Arts Integrated
Research Group (AIRG) symposium, we used Padlet to allow each of us to
simultaneously write within the same environment while retaining our individual voices and
styles in separate columns. This is a polyphonic writing and reading space without the uniform
linearity of most word processors. With Padlet, the reader can choose to navigate the page in any
number of ways. One can read down each column from left to right, or flit across the gutters
between columns and between utterances. Each utterance within a single column stands apart,
and the most recent posts are placed on top of the columns so that in reading down the virtual
page, one discovers the narrative consequence before the cause. In a live performance context,
each new post seems like breaking news. When the Padlet environment is output into a document
file, the columns are automatically collapsed into the single logic of a letter-sized page and a
navigation of left to right, top to bottom. While we found this output interesting, we were more
excited by the narrative possibilities inherent in the virtual environment rather than in the
traditional page format.
4. Zoom as Creative Interface
After the COVID lock-down started and we transitioned our weekly meetings and storyjams into Zoom. Suddenly we were faced with the psychic and physical demands created by the minute temporal delays and disturbances that are characteristic of the Zoom platform. As Wiederhold explains in an article exploring what is commonly described as ‘Zoom Fatigue’:
Humans use a range of precisely timed vocalization, gestures, and movements to communicate, and they rely on precise responses from others to determine if they are being understood. Scientists call this synchrony. If a delay is introduced to this system, even if this delay is only milliseconds, subconsciously, our brains still register the issue and work harder to try to overcome it and restore synchrony 17.
This impossibility of achieving true simultaneity (humorously performed by a clapping experiment conducted by musicians attempting to jam together in Zoom— became co-productive of the sounds and narratives of Skunk Tales. As researcher/musicians interested in the meanings and materialities of sound, understanding and working to subvert the stilted sonic environment of Zoom conferencing became our first challenge.
In addition to the minute delays that cause fatigue, the Zoom platform’s automatic settings have built in features that suppress or cancel out background noises and automatically adjust the speaker’s voice and volume for clarity. In this way Zoom effectively erases the speaker’s environment. While Hubert argues that, “[l]istening can be understood as a mutable and immediate encounter that reaches through acoustic space towards encounter” 18, Zoom simultaneously enables and prevents intimacy in the auditory encounter by suppressing the ambient and physical embodiment of the speaker. While this can be useful in allowing the speaker’s words to be audible, the richness of their physical and embodied presence in the world is cut off from the sound of the voice. This filtering, which is an automated boundary-making distinction between voice and environment, is artificial and arbitrary: where does the sound of the voice end and the environment begin? Indeed, as Haraway writes, “[b]oundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not preexist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meaning and bodies” 19.
In a similar fashion to the virtual background option of Zoom in which one’s actual environment can be replaced with any image, causing the speaker to resemble a moving simulacra, the objectified cut-out of the voice becomes a dis-located and dis-embodied signal. Silence, in this transformed auditory space, is a strange virtual deadness, a void-like emptiness that is compressed rather than spacious. Virtual silence is diametrically opposite the richness of embodied silence – which is full of sound – as Voegelin describes here:
The quiet creaks, trickles and gurgles of the house pierce through me. This is not
really hearing but sensing sound. Sounds are tangible in this dense quietness. I
am feeling through my body whole clumps of sense material. The quietness
enhances my perception; I take notice of every whisper, hum and buzz. I feel
them as phenomena filling the room and me, defining our contours as one
without knowing what we are 20.
Interestingly, these virtual silences are so striking because they are heard always from within the embodied silence of a quiet room. In the advanced Zoom audio settings, however, we were able to mitigate against the noise cancellation effect by disabling the suppression options and instead selecting the ‘original sound’ feature. Interestingly, ‘original sound’ is described by Cecchetto as inherently multiplicitous in its existence “among other sounds rather than as a unity of its various overtones” 21.
While ‘original sound’ in Zoom is never quite original, it does produce secondary and tertiary environments with their own original sonic spacetime in the form of a composite. With the settings, what we lost in verbal coherency we gained in visceral intimacy- we were able to play, sound, and speak together in a slightly more entangled way. Latency and delay however still prevented any illusion of synchrony. These settings became powerful thematic considerations in our future narrative, in which space and time play such a
central role.
5. The Sounds of Singling
Sound plays a crucial role in our creative process. During our virtual storying sessions, we simultaneously sonified the emergent narrative data using Singling, a Text-to-MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) linguistic data sonification software developed by the DLC for
qualitative research and textual data analysis. The Singling interface allows users to listen to specific syntactic features and general semantic characteristics of the input text. Singling transmediates discrete characters, symbols, and punctuation, as well as more complex word
attributes such as class (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), length, sentiment, or lexicogrammatical category (LGC) (e.g. verbs indicating feeling, nouns indicating weather, and so on). Singling thus transforms texts into user-determined soundscapes that highlight particular forms and
meanings. As we wrote Skunk Tales, we invited the emergent Singling soundings to permeate our imaginations and become entangled with the movements of the narrative. As Cecchetto argued, “It is precisely the forceful quality of sound that makes it an agent of modulation that can
help to amplify certain elements of narratives of human-technological coupling, making them audible” 23.
Singling enables a different sonic encounter with a text, one that accesses “the invisible dynamics that are hidden beneath a visual perception and its linguistic organization” 24. This program provides the qualitative researcher and analyst many analytic affordances 25. Here, however, we take up the platform in a more visceral, improvisational, and arts-based approach to sounding language. Each of us had the program open on our laptops and had prepared a unique set of text-to-sound transformations. The possible combinations of transformations in Singling are virtually endless. The same text can produce radically different sounds when played with different settings, just as the same sounded text can produce radically different visceral experiences within different listeners. To illustrate the evocative generativity of a Singling composition, we recorded our storying performance for Connections, the Artful Inquiry Research Group's virtual conference in October of 2020.
7. Mutating representations: The Patch and StirFry
Gathering together the sounds and texts of Skunk Tales into a finalized output was contrary to the methodological processes of the storying. We desired to facilitate generative engagements with our narrative imaginings. The Patch is a writing and data analysis workshop in which participants are led through a series of creative collaborative engagements with textual data. Due to lack of space here, we cannot explain the rich digital and analogue processes of the Patch Workshop. We wish to briefly mention the creative students in a graduate course, Digital Methods in Literacy Research, who contributed their poetic interpretations of the textual data of Skunk Tales. In a virtual workshop with these students, we took up the text of Skunk Tales, scrambled, mixed, and remixed the narrative thus obliterating any semblance of linearity, and facilitated collaborative poetic interpretations of the data. The resulting collaborative poems and collaborative performances are another chapter of Skunk Tales, thus extending the nexus of our compositional intent.
To continue confounding static representation, we took the words of our original composition and entered them into recombinant format called a Stir-Fry text, authored by poet/programmer Jim Andrews. In this hyperscript, the reader’s cursor triggers the replacement of one selection of text with another. This seemed like the perfect solution for nonlinear and non-hierarchical text compositions, providing a nuanced assemblage of text fragments that vary for each reader depending on their individual interactions with the text, adding a “liveness” to the reading reflecting the synchronous simultaneity of its composition. Naturally, this became another chapter of Skunk tales, one in which the individuality of the reader becomes a compositional agent in the recounting of the tale. This exposition of Skunk Tales is an attempt to gather together our various lines of flight into one representational space.
They are hear together. Here. Together. And the books, and the discs, and old boxes with armatures and moving parts.
Individualized fragments of datasets that are deliberately encrypted and
differentiated from a collective pool of quantum data collected via BMIs (brain
machine interfaces). You are we, but humans decided to keep the illusion of
individuality to an extent that they do not allow conflicts to arise – the world cannot
afford such human stupidity anymore, anyway.
Music moves in your hand, and technology still can’t catch up with the feeling.
Everybody moves around the professor’s museum of old music, walking with
respect
On a full stomach and with nothing better to do and driven by curiosity the skunk
makes his way slowly, cautiously, meticulously towards it.
6. Poetic Sentiment Analysis
For the conference, we performed our futuring method live - writing and sounding a chapter of Skunk Tales in the Zoom conference room with the audience present and allowing their presence to permeate the narrative. In returning to this performance later, we sought to find meaning and emotional resonations within the sonified textual and performative data. We sought to respond to the sounds in a collaborative and methodological way and were guided by an arts-based poetic sensibility. Sonification as a methodological tool for textual data analysis is in its early stages. This is experimental arts-based investigation into the meanings and uses of sonified data that may point to future uses and methods.
We each listened to the collective sonification and responded freely using poetic imagery. We then ranked our poetic responses on two scales: Activity (extremely active = +1, extremely inactive = -1) and Pleasantness (extremely pleasant = +1, extremely unpleasant = -1)
Our poetic and evocative responses are shown in this visualization which maps a wide territory of imaginative and visceral meanings. This poetic sentiment analysis has become another poetic chapter of the story.
As Voegelin describes of the implications of sound:
Listening generates place, the field of listening, continually from my hearing of myself within the dynamic relationship of all that sounds: the temporary connections to other listeners, thing and places, as the contingent life-world of my listening intersubjectivity that hears the actual, the possible, and even the impossible participating in the ephemerality of the unseen 22.