Stereo or Quadraphonic Sound Installation for 100 Voices and Laptop
Dimensions Variable
Duration: 40 minutes: 15 minutes (duration) x 30 minutes (silence)
Link to Stereo Realization: https://soundcloud.com/jacksonrandall/warm-light

Artist’s Statement:
The language of my body is home, but the shape of my body is constantly changing, its extent unclear, aliased: here a hand, a mouth, a glowing screen; here an avatar or simulacrum has my face, has my words, has my Likes. I am not in the cloud, but to you I am always cloud-like, extensions of my nervous system appearing here in the shape of an idea, in a sound resonant in my body, in these copies of my voice. I am singing into my laptop on an island in Washington. The body of my laptop makes sounds I must train myself to hear. Its body holds part of mine.

Every acoustic sound is the inside of a body made sensible, a delicate intimacy of resonance and structure. Sound moves only from interior to interior. An invisible body replicates the sound of my inner body resonating, my closed palate, my open MacBook.

Every digital sound is a reduction, a Boolean apparition, an electric mirage. The mirage succeeds because our discernment fails: from a distance a desert seems a constant color. We cannot see that each grain has its own history, color, and trajectory. Every time we remember, we re-write.

I am singing into my laptop in a borrowed bed on an island in Washington; there is a fierce rainstorm, the wind blares forty miles loud. I have been here a long time. The house groans above its cliff, the trees hiss, their bodies cut shapes in the air, shapes I recognize. Already the ghosts are replicating: an invisible melody becomes a chord. The body of my laptop carries the body of my voice across a valley of resemblances, it carries me to distant spaces. I am 100 unmatched cycles, 100 voices, magnets moving in an electric field. In the morning the pools of water are as clear as a sound, the wind is still and blue and warm. I ask whose body I am today, and where my copies end.

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