Welcome Back!
miranda firmston
“Where is the background? Is it absent? No. Rupture, split, the opening makes absence emerge—just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence.“1
Welcome Back! is a sound, performance, and electronics piece that examines the gaps between words as raw sonic material for composition. Using custom software and a wearable interface, pauses, hesitations, and breaks in speech are sampled, manipulated, and made audible through spoken-word performance.
As the performance unfolds, the system listens to what slips past the boundary of language: fragments that fall below articulation, yet remain structurally bound to it. These gaps accumulate into a shifting layer that sits alongside and against the voice. What is usually discarded as background begins to assert a presence of its own.
There is always something obscure in repetition. The more something is repeated, the closer-further away it becomes—infinitely near, but never quite there. Something else is at work in this speech: an excess that exists within language, but cannot appear as such. This work engages that excess—an unknowable “something else” produced through the very limits of the language it operates within.
1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978).
