Welcome Back!
miranda firmston
ECU Award Recipient
Winner, Basically Good Media Lab/New Media & Sound Art Student Research Award. Honorable Mention, The President's Media Awards for Excellence Media Sound Arts.
“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).
