Is it possible to separate our thinking of sound from the ear? If the ear is not experiencing all of the sonic spectra how can be understood that the human body and the cyborg body can be resonators, captivating vibrations that communicate sounds through a distributed nervous system? I am looking at the digital devices that we are using in our daily life and all of those have a “silent mode” turning sounds into haptic responses. Little bells grayed out logo or crossed out speakers. Still, those feel loud, vibrating, calling for our attention.

Understanding the sound beyond the ear made me think of disappearance at first. Then I started to reposition my ears on the other parts of my body where I am experiencing sound. Exposing ears all over our skin to remind each other that is not only the tympanic membrane that understands sonic space. Ears all over the body, it is a cyborg’s proposal.

I am quite unhappy with the first sketches but I wanted to be transparent with the process, I am going to work with different outlines.

This is a proposal for a podcast series conceived as a meeting point for non-hearing and hearing communities. It can be seen as an attempt to open space to communities that have been excluded since the early development of radiophonic transmission and long-distance voice-based communications. While writing these notes, I cannot stop ruminating about the historical intertwining between the invention of voice-based long-distance communications and the efforts that some of its pioneers dedicated to affirming education models today described as oralism and their eugenics roots. Another stream destabilizes my thinking, its banks I try to summarise as an understanding of progress impossible to tear apart from a general cult of profit and its pervasive spread controlling mass media. I have memories of radio broadcasting being dismissed in my childhood as a historical heritage in favor of television. Now that the internet has created a favorable momentum for digital radio, I must admit that the absence of advertisements relieves me. Nevertheless, my comfort is often unaware of hidden profiling techniques, whose consequences we experience beyond marketing purposes in unprecedented political persuasion.

Is it possible to imagine a podcast, a digital radio, as a welcoming place to share and an enjoyable zone where the agency of the community is perceived outside the systematic targeting of consumers? And how should this place be? I must write that I am feeling many biases while formulating a proposal from my subjective position to imagine a collating space for communities that have been systematically separated during the consolidation of liberalism’s political imaginaries. I can only find myself on an experiential threshold between hearing and non-hearing communities, with an unbalance toward the hearing group having received only an oral education. Somehow I hope this idea will be seeded by collaborative thinking, crumbling this early individuality exercise and taking it to a format that feels more representative of both communities involved.

Please allow me to approach world-building in radiophonic space as an embodied methodology, for the now, starting from the user’s access needs. A radio station conventionally offers a stereo channel audible mix, and the mixer is in the hand of the producer. I am suggesting offering part of it to the folks that will tune in; this digital radio can be a six channels stream with: 

1 – music stream;

2 – metadata stream, with lyrics, info on the tracks, and descriptive captioning;

3 – oral-based broadcast;

4 – oral full transcript and captions;

5 – sign language based streaming;

6 – sign language full transcript/captions.

I see the imbalance in my proposal where four channels are reserved for creating access-centering oral and hearing-controlled discourse; as anticipated, I am preparing to rework this in the context of a collaborative thinking exercise, inviting d/Deaf broadcasters to articulate this idea better. I can imagine a parallel sign-language-based channel for streaming poetry and storytelling and experimental artistic expression, but I am not taking authority to define a sign-language space; I only feel how much this is needed, along with captions and transcripts to make these contents accessible to the non-signing audience.

Until now, this proposal encompasses a technical format because it aims to dismantle the ableist power of a technologically exclusive medium. I feel this operation is valuable only in the context of curating practices that aim to address ableist circuits of power. I suggest looking at the “working definition of ableism” published and updated on Talila A. Lewis’ blog and “developed in community with disabled Black/negatively racialized folk.” TL helps us see ableism beyond the disabled community, within a proper intersectional approach that is a much-needed filter to explore solidarity around the curatorial thinking of contents to share in this broadcast. As mentioned at the beginning of this proposal, this radiophonic space can exist only if a collaborative thinking exercise happens. I hope this exercise will produce a curatorial kinship in preparing each chapter that does not repeat the usual and unnecessary institutional pledge of creating access to interpreting unidirectionally created content. This is extremely important to me, and I hope it resonates with the title of this proposal. “Mixed feelings” is also underling the necessity of a choral practice where dissonance must be welcome, operating an attunement that does not seek homologations nor blanket agreements.

I hope I will soon have the chance to tune in to a music stream while reading captions from a signing artist, exploring thresholds that aim to bring solidarity across existing cultural barriers.

This was in the early ‘digital days’. I was outside the frame of this image but I was too young to remember what was going on in the moment. It wasn’t her final day (or year), but we all knew the process had begun its course. Although I don’t remember, internally I feel relieved I could be there and that I still have a connection to these moments captured. It’s agonising to rewatch these videos and feel the emotional atmosphere through a lens but then this happy accident happens in the video where one of my cousins covers the frame for the rest of the video completely unaware. I appreciate the sudden invisibility, not just because of the relief, but it’s in that moment I’m reminded that my grief for her is physically embodied and no longer attached to the visual medium or its definitive capture of her.

I saw this residency as an opportunity to create a follow up to my 2021 “Thought Experiment”. I started with these rough sketches, my approach was to just put pencil to paper, work off instinct and see what comes on to the page. My thinking was what the subconscious comes up with will always be more interesting to me then any idea or subject I could consciously come up with. I called the artwork “In Limbo”, looking back I think this was manifested from the feeling of worldwide uncertainty since 2020. But realised during this project it also related to the creating process itself, hitting on that mid point in creating something that I think many artist can relate to. When you’re unsure which direction the project is moving or if it even makes sense, like you’re just hanging in limbo to see if things will come together or just fall apart. Being dyslexic i’ve always had a love hate relationship with words, in a lot of my artwork I like to play with words and images and the relationship between the two. Which got me thinking about the word “limbo” and its two meanings, one being hanging between life and death and the other being a party game. I liked this huge contrast between the two meanings and realised what they had in common was an element of balance. Like a train of thought the word balance led me to thinking about a number of other concepts that I ended up exploring throughout the artwork: The balance of digital and traditional art I focus on in my work and how it relates to how I always try and balance and bride the gap between “high art” and “low art” to make artwork that feels less exclusive. The balance of skill and creativity artist use to create, and even more personally the balance of being mixrace and how it means simultaneously being two things and neither at the same time. I wanted every part of this project to reflect that process of creating embracing how erratic and messy it can be.

I had some exchanges about my work lately, which made me think a lot about the language we use. I feel it is essential to avoid using categories like “visual art” because the comfort zone these words secure is rooted in some profoundly excluding average agreement. Whenever we repeat “visual arts,” we are not communicating any precious information about the artistic practice or the subject of the research; we create a perimeter that bond a conventional understanding of sensing with the privilege of having access to the specific creative experience. It feels like an exclusive category that only announces who will be admitted to the experience of art.

I doubt that the normative understanding of our senses in most European languages is exhaustive so that we can define artistic experiences with those words. The long literary exercises we regard as ekphrasis express this struggle to translate the senses. There must be more if so much effort has been put into describing the experience of a painting in words or music beyond a simple equation of the normative understanding of the sensing.

Most of us are familiar with feeling the sound in haptics. It happens with low frequencies and subwoofers, our stomach and lower belly eat the frequencies, and our breath becomes a continuum with the sonic frequencies. I am sketching ideas to explore the thresholds of the sonic experience, the visual, and the haptic. I am looking for the uncanny territory where I am not finding the right words to describe the knowledge that is materializing; a questioning space where allegories may comfort us and doubts may guide our un-learning.

After the process of drawing/painting on paper I upload each individual drawing and puzzle them together using photoshop. In the video I place the central figures of the artwork in place and make markings of where everything else will go so I can have a rough idea of how things will fit together. While the process before this feels really organic and working with hand drawing, paints and watercolour. This digital art side of things, while still needing to be creative, feels more like a task of editing all the pieces and seeing how they fit together best.

Here is some documentation of ideas and research I’ve been dabbling with. Thinking about the machinery of tech, a lot of the profit derives from aspects such as facial recognition, proliferating social partitions such as race, clothing, age, location, and so on. I’ve been wondering how one’s remembrance online could be continued without Big Tech profiting from our online existence. Perhaps removing the actual person gives one control over their spirit and soul, so that they don’t continue to feed AI data processors and recognition development. Maybe those who really know you will remember the memories from online images. Or maybe this makes the memories of these figures more tangible and relatable. Or maybe it could be completely meaningless.

One of the main themes that kept coming to mind creating “Thought Experiment 2021” was the feeling of being unbalanced, like I was living in the past and future but just drifting in the present. Which is where the design for the central character of the piece came from. Being split down the middle half his body being black and the other white. Which also related to my own mixed black Caribbean and white European background. To me being mixraced Is both a balance of two things, but also feels unbalanced in the fact that the word “half” is used to describe me, suggesting I’m not fully anything. I don’t personally find this offensive, just interesting (I intend to explore this more in my follow up piece over the next month). Elsewhere in the artwork another character is half black and half white and quite literally stitched together, referencing Frankensteins monster. Which I always felt was such a perfect character that’s aged so well in terms of identity and question whether we are how people see us, how we see ourselves, what it says about society of how the “monster” is treated. And I was always inspired by artists taking a conceptual idea and turning it to an extreme literal idea, the same way Frankenstein is exploring the concept of identity, then literally making the main character made up of different people. This almost cartoony comical exaggerated approach is something I love to explore throughout my work. This central character I created felt to embody the uncertainty I felt at the time. He is depicted above frozen in contemplation holding a broom, referencing the way I was using my craft like a groundskeeper to tidy my state of mind and the mess of notes and doodles that would spill across the finished artwork. 

Above can also be seen a photo I took of a mask that has hung in my home as long as I can remember. I have vivd memories of me and my older brother being both fascinated and frightened by it as children. It’s burned into my memory as one of my earliest experiences of something evoking so many emotions at once. From curiosity and wonder to terror and playfulness. This became the face of the opposition to the central character in the artwork. I created this shapeshifting mask character as a reminding symbol of how I want my artwork to feel (the world through the eyes of a child). In the artwork it’s both a guide of what I want my own art to feel like. But also an obstacle and opposition in terms of the fear of never being able to reach that goal, or even worse having already peaked as an artist. At the time I was always in competition with myself and every time I finished a piece was met with this weight of anxiety of never being able to create something as good as the last thing I had done. Doomed to repeat myself with watered down versions of what I had already done. These characters feel more personal every time I draw them, and their story will continue in the next artwork I’ll be creating over the next month.