Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts (Leonardo)

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.

Norie Neumark的《Voicetracks》受到原住民對於歌線或夢之軌道的理解的啟發，旨在通過聆聽來自澳大利亞、歐洲和美國的各種聲音項目，深化對聲音的理解。作者不滿於學術寫作常見的乾燥語氣，而是採用了一種“遊歷”的過程，將聲音、動物和後人類研究的理論結合起來，以改變我們思考和與我們周圍的生物、事物、地方和歷史組合互動的方式。

Neumark在研究中既援引了字面上的聲音，也援引了隱喻性的聲音，以新物質主義的方式探索聲音，包括人類、動物、事物和組合體。她與從事動物聲音和聲音的藝術家合作；研究裝置作品中的地方聲音、被置放的聲音；探討技術聲音；以及“無聲化”，即圖像/聲音關係和聲音本質的干擾。她寫了關於混音、Barbie Liberation組織和北京的呼吸，關於澳大利亞的貓影片、說話的圍欄，以及一位藝術家如何向鳥類朗讀。最後，她考慮了倫理和政治，並描述了她自己的工作如何塑造了她對聲音的理解和理解方式。