Norie Neumark – författare

Perspectives on the voice and technology, from discussions of voice mail and podcasts to reflections on dance and sound poetry.

Voice has returned to both theoretical and artistic agendas. In the digital era, techniques and technologies of voice have provoked insistent questioning of the distinction between the human voice and the voice of the machine, between genuine and synthetic affect, between the uniqueness of an individual voice and the social and cultural forces that shape it. This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on these topics from history, philosophy, cultural theory, film, dance, poetry, media arts, and computer games. Many chapters demonstrate Lewis Mumford''s idea of the “cultural preparation” that precedes technological innovation—that socially important new technologies are foreshadowed in philosophy, the arts, and everyday pastimes. Chapters cover such technologies as voice mail, podcasting, and digital approximations of the human voice. A number of authors explore the performance, performativity, and authenticity [(or ''authenticity effect'') of voice in dance, poetry, film, and media arts]; while others examine more immaterial concerns—the voice''s often-invoked magical powers, the ghostliness of disembodied voices, and posthuman vocalization. [The chapters evoke an often paradoxical reassertion of the human in the use of voice in mainstream media including recorded music, films, and computer games.

ContributorsMark Amerika, Isabelle Arvers, Giselle Beiguelman, Philip Brophy, Ross Gibson, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Levin, Helen Macallan, Virginia Madsen, Meredith Morse, Norie Neumark, Andrew Plain, John Potts, Theresa M. Senft, Nermin Saybasili, Amanda Stewart, Axel Stockburger, Michael Taussig, Martin Thomas, Theo van Leeuwen, Mark Wood

The affects, aesthetics, and ethics of voice in the new materialist turn, explored through encounters with creative works in media and the arts.

Moved by the Aboriginal understandings of songlines or dreaming tracks, Norie Neumark''s Voicetracks seeks to deepen an understanding of voice through listening to a variety of voicing/sound/voice projects from Australia, Europe and the United States. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories of sound, animal, and posthumanist studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with the assemblages of living creatures, things, places, and histories around us.

Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works she examines—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing human, animal, thing, and assemblages. She engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. She writes about remixes, the Barbie Liberation Organisation, and breath in Beijing, about cat videos, speaking fences in Australia, and an artist who reads (to) the birds. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.