User:Jen Rabon

Name: Jen Rabon

E-mail: jenrabon@artchemical.com

Website: http://www.artchemical.com

Major: New Genres, MFA

You Used to Find A Bug in a Box With Fade
10-19-2005

Project:

A box that gives the viewer/listener access to a crossfader to control two tracks of sound distributed to two small speakers. Sound content will be from my final project "Hearing Color"

Where I Is? - Linking Identity to Art and Commodities
09-14-2005

Project - 1-5 minutes of digital sound that explains your past art history.

The criteria for the project solicits a description of identity based on previous exposure to cultural iconography and objects. In the process of thinking about this project it struck me that what I was trying to do was attach my identity to artists, art movements, and art objects. This parallels a trend in advertising to link cultures, and specific cultural identities to commodities. The reasoning for this seems to be to add a certain historicity to a product to make people identify with it and then want to purchase it.

For this project I have used the Boost Mobile ad campaign, “Pivotal Moments: Where You At?” (http://www.boostmobilepivotalmoments.com/index.html), as a basis for exploring the various ways we envision our past and construct our identities to communicate who we are. The original ad campaign creates fictional scenarios in the lives of popular hip-hop icons, in which the Boost mobile phone “chirp” sound alerts them to an event which altered their lives and set them on the path to their current career. At the end of the ad you hear the “chirp” again and the stars inquire in colloquial speech, “Where you at?”, effectively attaching the tag-line, to the logo, to the product, and then to the consumer.

This sound piece takes that “chirp” sound and punctuates the song “ Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey .” by Sly and the Family Stone. The significance of the song is that it describes my personal focus regarding race as it relates to cultural products, iconographies and commodities. I chose to represent my art history in this way as opposed to cataloguing influences because I believe it says more about my personal identity and the particular lens through which I view the world.

The “chirp” sound is present throughout the piece suggesting a continual moments of significance.

Hearing Color: An Exploration of Racialized Sound in Pornography
09-12-2005

Final Project Outline

“Victorian morality and racist perceptions die hard. But more and more white Americans are willing to interact sexually with black Americans on an equal basis- even if the myths still persist. I view this as neither cause for celebration nor reason for lament. Anytime two human beings find genuine pleasure, joy, and love, the stars smile and the universe is enriched. Yet as long as that pleasure, joy, and love is still predicated on myths of black sexuality, the more fundamental challenge of humane interaction remains unmet.” -Cornell West, Race Matters, (1993)

“If pornography is the realm where nothing impedes the immediate enactment of easily achieved and multiple forms of sexual pleasure, then erotic forms of pornography are those in which taboos and prohibitions limiting pleasure are at least vestigially, in force often in order to enhance the desire that overpowers them. Eroticism in pornography thus depends on the continued awareness of the taboo. This is one reason why interracial pornographies can sometimes have an erotic charge that other forms of pornography do not.” -Linda Williams, Porn Studies, (2004)

Interracial pornographies rely, not only on the visual display of racialized bodies, but also on the verbal proclamations of racial difference, to sustain the eroticism. My final project will explore these erotic dialogues in an attempt to discern how race operates sonically when it is employed to both reinforce and transgress a taboo, namely interracial sex between black males and white females.

The project will reference the historical premises on which this particular taboo is based by pulling examples from pop culture which have served to consistently reinforce the myth of the hyper sexualized “other” and in turn provided ample material for the eroticism of interracial lust.

In exploring this subject I hope to highlight the complexities of interracial desire.

Questions of Importance:

-What is the historical basis for the taboo of interracial lust? How can this be represented through sound? I believe that this taboo is well represented in the audio of popular film. The concept of the unspoken fear of the rape of white women by the black savage, (or in Hollywood Westerns, the native savage), has been well established and those films will provide rich resource for material.

-Whose desire is prominent in the racialized dialogue of interracial pornography?

-Does gendered dialogue ever trump the racial dialogue? How does this work to focus ones attention?

-Is interracial pornography an impediment to Cornel West’s challenge of developing “humane” interracial interactions?

-What constitutes humane interracial interactions?

-Linda Williams posits that there is an unseen presence of the white male, or white male fear of black sexuality, in interracial sex scenes between black men and white women. “…The interracial recognition taking place never occurs only between two figures present in the scene - [the] mutual but unequal recognition is animated, in different ways by the desire and jealousy of an absent third person.” (p. 298,Porn Studies ) Is this absent third person tangible in the audio?

-“If black sexuality is a form of black power in which black agency and white passivity are interlinked, then are not black people simply acting out the very roles to which the racist myths of black sexuality confine them?” (Cornell West, Race Matters, 1993)

-Given that during interracial pornography, racial taboos are being transgressed as they are being reinforced, does porn offer a unique position from which to examine and deconstruct these taboos?

Sound Artists
'''What's in a name! Seeing sound art in black visual traditions - Responses - using sound in art - Brief Article'''

Art Journal, Winter, 2001  by Keith Townsend Obadike

Race in Digital Space – Art Exhibition & Conference

Presented by University of Southern California and Massachusetts Institute of Technology In conjunction with University of California-Santa Barbara and New York University

This exhibhition and conference featured works and speeches by contemporary artists exploring the subject of race and ethinicity in digital environments. The sound works and the conference speeches are archived on the site above.

Featured Sound Artists & Works:

PAUL D. MILLER aka DJ SPOOKY (THAT SUBLIMINAL KID) "Selection from Federal Entertainment Era, Volume 2 (Synchronia 001 Mix), 2001"

OLLY WILSON "Cetus, 1967"

GEORGE LEWIS "Selection from "The Phoenix," 1978 "

GEORGE LEWIS "Selection from "Charon," 1978"

KEITH OBADIKE "Automatic, 2000"

PAMELA Z "Regular Verbs: An Introduction to Ebonics", an excerpt from Parts of Speech, 1998

BETH COLEMAN AKA DJ M.SINGE AND HOWARD GOLDKRAND AKA MCVERB "Say My Name, 2000"

GEORGE LEWIS "Selection from North Star Boogaloo, 1996 "

"Selection from Voyager, 1987-1995 "

VIVEK BALD aka DJ SIRAIKI "Selection from Free Markets/It Takes a Pillage, 2001 "

What experience do you have with sound software and what kind?
standard sound edit/loop software

What experience do you have with programming and what kind?
none

What do you know and how interested are you in Free Culture, Open Source, and Programming?
don't know much... am interested

What kind of experience with building speakers and external sound hardware do you have?
I have never built hardware but have used it in my work as an audio/visual technician - I have basic knowledge of typical live sound systems.

What type of installations / performances have you done?
My final under grad project was the creation of a "Phunhouse" installation involving film. still work, and live dj performance.

Which aspects of audio interest you? (recording / performance / sound installations...)
performance and sound installation

Do you play an instrument and what is the instrument(s)?
no

What do you want to get out of this class?
I am hoping to use the tools in the class to further explore my concept of how race operates. I think that it will be interesting to move out of the visual realm with race-based work and into the realm of sound. Specifically I want to remix existing sound that has racial content.

Do you take another sound class this semester and what is its name?
no

What kind of music are you into? Art, pop, whatever...
almost all electonica - Ghetto-tech, Jungle, psytrance & breaks specifically.

What field trips would you like? (studio)
Our class should go to Decompression.

What is your secret weapon?
color