Capture All: A Sonic Investigation

Editors: Laura McLean and Mehak Sawhney

This collection of writing and artistic works was conceptualised as part of a broader project called Capture All: A Sonic Investigation, initiated as a collaboration between Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, and Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, in the midst of the pandemic. Capture All responds, albeit indirectly, to this crisis experienced in asynchronous waves across the world that closed borders, isolated individuals, and radically reconfigured patterns of life and death — conditions which prompted an acceleration of the mediatisation of interpersonal relations, and a consequent, curious collapse in subjective experiences of time and space.

It was under these circumstances that that we first came together from four different time zones with Uzma Falak, Shareeka Helaluddin, Joel Spring, Suvani Suri, and Aasma Tulika for a series of intensive online workshops, to consider how experimental practices of sound and listening may be mobilised as resources for understanding and intervening in forms of capture, extraction, and governance that haunt and influence life in settler- and post-colonial Australia and India.

In the midst of the radical reconfigurations taking place globally, we wondered if this was a moment to critically analyse the recursive colonial patterns and infrastructures that permeate contemporary life across contexts. Could we use this break in business-as-usual to intervene in and resist perpetual patterns of capture that are increasingly abstracted, automated, and blackboxed beyond reach? Through creative and critical conversations with guest artists and scholars spanning over a year, the workshop intensives focussed on sound as a form of knowledge and expression, as an object that has been archived and datafied, and as a situated sensory experience. Many of these themes and enquiries make their way into this collection of work by the Capture All cohort.

These works variously plumb the past, present, and future — accessed as an archaeological site, audio archive, earwitness testimonies, instructions, stories, and databases of desire and affect — to dwell upon some of the contradictions that characterise the phenomenological and situated experiences of listening. In this collection, sonic time is decompressed, disrupted, revisited, and restructured, as forms of knowledge-as-archive are retrieved, examined, reworked, renamed, and renarrativised. This temporal decompression relates to a more fundamental concern about sound art, that sound and sonic objects — music, voice, echoes, radio, records, loudspeakers — are stable and complete in themselves. John Cage’s canonical 1952 work, ‘4’33”’, set grounds for understanding sound as a ‘natural’ phenomenological object, a thing in itself that does not always have to be performed or created.

This collection attempts to destabilise this purist notion of sound and sound art, and lay bare the fragmented nature and multi-modality of sonic thinking and making. In that sense, we address a foundational question for sonic creative practice — how can artists move away from an object-oriented and unidimensional understanding of sound to create works that reflect the complexity of the spatio-temporal and geopolitical contexts from which they emerge? Scholars of sound studies have delved into the socio-cultural specificities and multiplicity of sonic experiences across questions of race, class, colonialism, gender, and disability. The works collected here, in a parallel and connected artistic endeavour, reveal a variety of formal and aesthetic choices made by the artists to represent sonic situatedness in all its intricacy.

By centering various episodes in Australian and South Asian histories, presents and futures, this issue foregrounds sonic thinking as a fragmented and archaeological process that cannot be tied to a singular and stable sonic object or experience. It presents sound art as a relational medium beyond sound, and as a mode of thinking by blurring the divide between theory and practice. In other words, it demonstrates how sound art can be fragmented and archaeological, non-sonic and multi-modal, analytical and theoretical. All of the aforementioned attributes form the premise of creating situated soundworks that steer away from stable sound objects and universal listening subjects. Each of the artworks is thereby a scaffold, held together through image, text and sound, and woven together to aesthetically perform and reveal the politics of sound and listening in various contexts.

Shareeka Helaluddin’s layered piece, ‘Echoic Memory Song: Listening for Loss, Grief and Possibility through Keeladi Objects’, works across historical erasures and their extant ramifications, fleeing from one place and settling in another, as well as the personal and the political by sonifying memories of grief and loss on the one hand, and possibilities of recovery on the other. The layout of the work is inspired by grids used by archaeologists to map objects on a dig site. Fractured in this way, her essay demands a non-linear reading. As a diasporic Tamilian residing in Australia, Shareeka begins with her familial lineage of loss and erasure due to the Sri Lankan ethnicide of Tamilians, while evoking, in form and content, the extraction of Tamil artefacts at the archaeological site of Keeladi in Tamil Nadu that visiblises occluded Tamil histories. An echoic, elongated, and ambiguous sound piece plays as we read through Shareeka’s performative text and stumble upon artefacts and stories about oppression. She calls it an echoic memory song that sonifies Tamilian memories stretched across generations as they recover their past. But to rejoice in this recovery is also to fall for an overtly nationalistic and patriarchal Tamil identity, to forget that historically the labour of grieving and lamenting has been delegated to female and lower-caste people in the region. The ambiguity of Shareeka’s echoic memory song is a queering of this patriarchal, nationalistic, and casteist reality where one community’s grief is donned and performed by another.

In ‘The Search for Hassaina’s Song and Other Phonophanies’, Suvani Suri delves into and détourns the audio archive of the Linguistic Survey of India, an ambitious colonial project led by Irish linguist George A Grierson in early twentieth century colonial South Asia. Initially, Suvani could not access the digitised recordings of the Survey online, which led her to imagine what the recordings might contain, and what circumstances may have surrounded each of them. The resultant work is an essay recalling the history of the Survey’s audio archive interwoven with a series of ‘micro-fictions’ — stories and voices she describes emerging ‘from the depths of the hisses, fuzz, and static’ of the recordings. Through these micro-fictions, Suvani blends fact and fiction to audiblise the politics of recording and the multiple inequalities that define such processes. The disembodied voices in the Survey were after all once embodied and located, and hence impacted by both caste and gender politics. Within the macro-infrastructures of colonial linguistic surveys and natural language processing, Suvani weaves micro-fictions about the people who participated in these processes — Grierson; a Brahmin speaker and a lower-caste mlechha gramophone operator; a taxi driver in Istanbul; India’s first woman sound engineer; the beloved singer Gauhar Jaan; and more.

Taking the form of a court transcript, Uzma Falak’s ‘Echoes from an Anechoic Chamber’ presents earwitness testimonies from Indian-occupied Kashmir, which provide a visceral record of what it means to live and listen under occupation. We would like the readers to know that this piece contains testimonies about state and military violence in a conflict zone that might be distressing for some people. The twelve testimonies recall the soundscape of terror and violence inflicted on communities living near the India-Pakistan border. They recount the sound of different rifles, the screams of a man being tortured, and the blast of the landmine that finished him. They relate memories of the army’s Psychological Operations that sought to terrorise residents with the sound of ‘ghosts’ jumping from rooftop to rooftop with springs on their shoes. They describe the sound of a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) and the cries of torture being relayed through loudspeakers. We ‘hear’ gunshots, ghazals, jeep honks, military whistles, screams, blasts, ambulance sirens, slogans, crackdown announcements, Bollywood songs, azaan — the list of sounds is unending. By separating the immediate experience of listening from sound, Uzma’s work presents sound as traumatic memories, and the readers listen to earwitness testimonies through textual echoes from the anechoic chamber that is Kashmir — occupied, censored and silent for the world outside. As noted by Disclaimer’s editorial associate, Joel Stern, in one of our conversations, Uzma’s work transcends being an artwork or a piece of creative writing — it is journalism, testimony, and political theatre, all at the same time.

Aasma Tulika’s video brings together two hands crocheting in the foreground, a screen playing the business reality television series Shark Tank in the background, and a voice — her voice ­— narrating instructions and stories. ‘Listening to Success Stories’ sets out to explore the impact of instructional speech and how it elicits an action from the listener. As her hands crochet in accordance with her instructions, recursively, on a loop, they not only mirror the techno-political logics of computational instruction that control our world today, but also seem to control the technological entrepreneurs that appear on the screen behind. The instructions gradually turn into domestic stories about the casteist and gendered oppression of other bodies. As instructions change to stories, her crocheting also transforms from a recursive to a therapeutic activity. The refrain ‘the rest is recent history’ appears after every story and points both to the recent history tab in her browser that chronicles the reading and thinking that has gone into creating the artwork, as well as to the throughline of influence that mythical and moral stories have on people’s behaviour in the present day. For Aasma, the piece is not about crocheting, but about the power of linguistic instruction as her fingers listen, and by extension about our bodies as they crumble under the ever-growing force of the instructional.

Thomas Smith’s ‘Narrative 001: The Things We Like’ presents us with a guided demonstration of computer-generated 3D landscapes from an Automated Personalized Video Narrative set 120 years in the future, on the world’s last remaining multimedia platform, ‘Worldio’. Amazon Polly’s text-to-speech (TTS) service narrates the speculative history of how the shifts in the global economy have led platform capitalism to the logical conclusions by the year 2142, following current technological progressions. We begin to understand that humans have become not only consumers, but the main fuel for media production, where entertainment experiences are generated by data derived from the profiles of discrete individuals. Ultimately, Smith’s ‘Narrative 001: The Things We Like’ brings us back to the unsettling questions and concerns simmering today — are we on a path to such entropy? What does one do when living itself becomes a form of capture?

The artworks presented in this collection reflect on past and ongoing conditions of coloniality, technological capture, and modes of statist and corporate governance. By revealing the poetics and politics of listening — through echoic memories of grief, lost and retrieved colonial audio archives, sounds and violences of occupation, governing logics of the instructional, and speculative futures of platform capitalism — they further break open possibilities for creative analysis, intervention, and resistance to these conditions. The performativity, non-linearity, and multi-mediality of these works is symptomatic of the complex sonic and political situations that they aim to represent, and testifies to the need for sonic creative practices to defy the existence of any singular or stable sound object or experience. Today, perhaps, the task of the sound artist might be to scaffold the sonic archaeologically, multi-modally, and relationally, since those seem to be the most generative modes to artistically represent and grapple with the many situated and varying colonialisms that capture life today.