Chaotic Conflations by Tam Lin
Here, I composed a series of audio feedback experiments at Goldsmiths College, London. I set out to explore the concept of cybernetics through relationships involving the body, architecture, electronic media, and sound. By generating an audible feedback loop in a noisy and reverberant space, and processing that sound with a modular synthesiser, I created chaotic sound ecologies which developed organically as the parameters of the space changed.
Borrowing a term from the composer Agostino Di Scipio, I ‘composed interations,’ finetuning the environment to generate interesting soundscapes. This approach to composition shifted the focus from individual performers. Instead, the piece incorporated and reacted to the ambient sound in and beyond the space as well as the noise found in the synthesiser.
Informed by Donna Haraway’s writing on cyborgs and the queer potential of integrating oneself consciously with technology, I inserted my body and voice into this sonic ecology, entangling my socially-coded voice with the machine and the space. My voice transformed the sound and was itself transformed by it. As a result, the act of entangling my ‘self’ with the ‘other’ of the machine ecology, resulted in a potential de-gendering of my voice.
Credits
License
All rights reserved.
digitally degraded oversharer.
clumsy physical thing.
Inhabiting the anxiety of our split existences, Tam Lin steps between the contradictory planes of this networked life, morphing to the required shape: distant and refined, or bristling with monstrous energy.