specimen daze
// sound performance w/ Catlin W. Kuzyk, 2017 // presented by The Boreal Electroacoustic Music Society (BEAMS) at The Works Art & Design Festival (Edmonton, 2017) //
Debate, discussion, dialogue: these communicative practices are often celebrated for their ability to develop consensual accords — for their power to produce some sort of common sense. The notion of a common sense, however, assumes that the heterogeneity and diversity of the human faculties — what I hear, what I see, what I feel — can be subsumed under the banner of some form of unified or totalizing consensus, that sense can, and should, be communicable.
But this is not the way the world works.
Where the real always exceeds our conception of it, where everything flees, where our perception of the world is but a sampling of “specimens” — specimens of cases, specimens of views, specimens of sounds — things don’t make sense, they make sensations.
In this audio-video performance, we draw on a range of visual and sonic specimens in order to explore the limits and potentials of dialogue through common-sensing.