Developing Empathy Apparatus One: A System for Embodying the Echo
In Empathy Apparatus One: A System for Embodying the Echo, I make myself and my audience stay with incomprehensibility.
To do this, I misused a Talk Box, a vocal effects instrument traditionally used in funk and hip-hop production. The Talk Box is an instrument that sends sound into a player’s mouth via a tube that acts as an artificial larynx, allowing the player to manipulate the incoming noise by shaping their mouth.
On 15th March 2021, during a period of eased restrictions, I recorded the sound of the passionate crowd at the Women’s March 4 Justice on the lawns of Parliament House. I began to think of the empowerment in raising your voice as twofold, both loudness and mass. Volume can be achieved by both a single voice being raised and by a large mass of voices joining together in a chorus. I believe amplification by either method is a political act that can empower the vocalist. Inspired by the idea of embodying speech, in Empathy Appartus One, I sent the recording taken at the Women’s March 4 Justice through the Talk Box and out of my mouth.
Both works document the act of searching for the echo and then embodying it. These attempts to repeat are not concerned with understanding the story. Instead, they force us to stay with the incomprehensibility and embody the echo without analysing its contents.
Product shot of MXR Talk Box Guitar Effects Pedal. Available from: Andertons Music Co. “MXR Talk Box Guitar Effects Pedal.”
YouTube playlist showing the Talk Box being used from 1939 to 2021
The March 4 Justice rally outside Parliament House in Canberra on Monday, March 15, 2021. Photo: Karleen Minney
Magazine advertisement for Heil Sound HT-1 Talk Box, 1974.
Alfred Pearse. The Modern Inquisition, a poster produced by The Women's Social and Political Union during the 1910 General Election., dimensions unknown, 1910.
An early work with the Talk Box, Flesh in the Wires A) The Talk Box, video recording, duration 00:50, 2021.
The Memorising Dress
In August, I began repeating an excerpt of my grandmother conversing with my brother to myself. I found the repetition was the closest I had come to performing a ritualised mourning act. Like a chant, the rhythm of the words made the situation of loss more bodily and real. As previously observed in relation to the voice and cloth, repeating these words felt simultaneously intimate and overt. Consequently, I planned to impress the chant onto a dress to perform in.
Across the unsewn dress panels, I repeatedly wrote the excerpt in lemon juice. Lemon juice can be used as an invisible ink that is permanently revealed when heat is applied. As I wrote on the dress panels, I revealed the text with an iron. The process revealed another connection. I discovered that writing words I couldn’t see was unlike writing visibly, it required me to have confidence that words would eventually become legible and that my sentence would appear. The continual repetition of unseen labour and its reveal aimed to enact arresting the echo and suggest that the voice I am rewriting is unreleased and will cyclically reappear.
The Memorising Dress (details, work in progress), calico, cotton, lemon juice, 2021.