In search of Ariadne’s thread: agency and subjugation in the contemporary spectacle

This title of this ongoing research was first used in a recent talk I gave to the Introduction to Sound class in the Media Arts + Practice (MA+P) in the Cinematic Arts program at University of Southern California but is an apt framing device for one of the main areas of research and practice I am currently engaged in. It is particularly concerned with the (in)visible materialities that are leveraged in contemporary media practice—how they either advance or subjugate a spectator’s agency. One such material which grounds my overall interdisciplinary practice, is sound, particularly as it is counter-acted upon by the image and by body. Thus, my work is grounded in the position of questioning, or rather, the questioning of position. My work, both in interdisciplinary installation practice and in cinema (and other contemporary media) is concerned with this sculptural notion of positioning and the role technology plays as a mediator not only within the work itself but in relation to us as spectators both to the work itself as well as to our social (bodily) frames. This mediation and perception of sound begins for me with the, ironically, visual metaphor of a palimpsest, a visual-aural link drawn from the use of palimpsest [Diagram 1 right] as a metaphor for memory which I first encountered in Thomas De Quincey [The Palimpsest from his Suspiria De Profundis (1845)]. Note how the above diagram, a vertical slice through the layers of a palimpsest, also resembles the interactions of ‘lines of sound’ in a composition and thus a compositional ‘score’—could this be a trace-extension in the legacy of Beuys’ social sculpture if it were to both mirror and embodiment of social trace today? A score for a still-unfolding present-tense performance?

What happens when this has folded in on itself many times over until it has acquired an even more contemporary form via the sign of a labyrinth**—indeed a palimpsestian one—to become Diagram 2…? I propose that it is in fact within this new form, and not its predecessor, that we find ourselves today, where our signifiers and signifieds echo and feedback, devolved into safe-guarded corners the way frequencies pile up in certain areas of any architectural space. It is in this new technologically-mediated space—Baudrillard’s hyperreal?—with which we must contend, always in search of Ariadne’s thread.

**It is interesting to note that the anatomical definition of labyrinth is “a complex structure of the inner ear which contains the organs of hearing and balance.” [Oxford Languages]

This overall research has and continues to find embodiments in many material traces across disciplines from the below seminar focused on composition in film and media—Embodied Disembodiments: Semiotics, Composition, Spectacle—to solo exhibitions and installations such as …These Things That Divide The World In Two… at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (2024) and Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances at AOCF54 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome, to the performance piece Mother […] Mother, to artistic collaborations such as circa ten to the ninety with Foad Dizadji-Bahmani and Luc Trahand, and an upcoming essay Who am I then? asks K. …Who are we?: A Composition in Three Movements for the upcoming issue of Spunk Art and Perspectives.

Various Writings

Embodied Disembodiments: Composition, Semiotics, Spectacle

…These Things That Divide The World In Two…

…perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two…: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, relational modularity, and nationalism