Boom

Abstract

This thesis is about my relationship to technology through the medium of my body. By implication it is about how our culture and society view and interact with technology's various manifestations. I use my voice as the medium of this exploration. Boom is a sound and video insertion embodying and re-presenting my vocal arguments and mergings with the machines of a cement pour at the Big Dig in Boston in the spring of the year 2000. Boom offers noise, physical auditive immersion, and hopefully a provocative and meaningful perspective on relating with machines. It creates temptations and in draughts of air around the metaphysical ideas it conjures with the humor and poetry of anarchy. By merging and falling out, struggling and capturing, losing and regaining, the machines and I are negotiating our relationship, our take on each other, our roles, our positions relative to each other. Each machine becomes an extension of my body, as I am resonating within its cavities and it is resonating within me. There is a constant arbitration of who is driving whom, my voice driving the machine's motor and/or the machine's vibrations moving my body, feelings, and perceptions of self within space. As I follow a machine's vibratory lead, try to keep up, to match, to catch, through matching vocalizations, I access previously unacknowledged places within myself. Something like the mantras of other cultures - magical brutal mysterious consonance expressed in broad daylight. Communication occurs through the correspondence of internal and external vibrations. Emanating and absorbing. The tones have an acupunctural precision, able to vibrate certain organs, interstitial tissues, cells, thereby accessing the body's warehouses. The performances of myself with the construction machines in the city throw new perspectives on how we conceive of not only the gigantic machines in our environments, but of other elements of technology as well, such as the intimate integration with small electronic devices being cultivated everywhere within our reach.