Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Vocal Womb and the Ekphrasis Machine (We Die)
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The following text was written as a collaboration between Virginia Barratt and Quinn Eades, as an experimental work of ekphrastic ‘writing with’ or ‘writing to’ (Gale & Wyatt 2018), taking as its subject an operatic performance entitled ‘Vocal Womb’ by Eve Klein, a music technologist, popular music scholar and an operatic mezzo soprano and composer.

'The operatic work, ‘Vocal Womb’, comprised two arias, based on poems written by Quinn Eades and Virginia Barratt, arranged in a ‘post-operatic’ mode, to use a term proposed by Jelena Novak to speak about theorising a body-voice relationship in contemporary, post-dramatic and media-augmented operatic works, ‘where interventions upon the body-voice relation open possibilities not only for expanding the borders of the opera world further, but also for what is considered body and voice in opera’ (Novak 2015).

'The original poems engaged with notions of affectivity, the phenomenology of panic, birthing, the post-linguistic and its role in writing trauma and the body, and écriture matière (Eades 2015), which is writing matter/the material. The poem/arias were arranged within a composition of samples, electronic noise, Eve’s own body sounds amplified by stethoscopes, and live sound and video feeds. The original poems, already products of ‘the remainder’ (Lecercle 1990), were thus further de/composed with the result that the affective ‘noise’ of the texts was amplified.

'The text ’Vocal Womb’ and the ekphrasis machine (we die) was the result of Barratt and Eades writing with and to the live arias in a constraint-based processual performance. In a dialogic relationship to the poem/arias, we were sensing the vitalities of the iterative always-becoming text, and coaxing out the new emergent poetics, feeding back in a spiralling exchange with our poems, and mining the remainder for the refrain.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Axon : Creative Explorations Materiality, Creativity, Material Poetics vol. 8 no. 1 May 2018 14093085 2018 periodical issue

    'Material poetics is not a new concept. The last century has seen the boundaries between creative genres dissolve, allowing attentiveness to materiality — once the exclusive concern of sculpture and craft — to pervade and tantalise less tangible practices. The development of a digital realm has not destroyed materiality, as originally feared, but served to foreground it; and the collaboration that can take place between digital and analogue, verbal and visual, is what drives this issue.

    'Writers such as Kristen Kreider (Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subject and Site, 2014), Lyn Hejinian (The Language of Inquiry), James Stuart (The Material Poem), Astrid Lorange (On Language as Material), and others deal with language, its material properties, its affinitive qualities. Where creative practitioners in general work with physical, tangible materials – everything from paper and paint through to the body – writers typically have nothing but language as their material. However, words, phrases, sentences and lines have their own tactility and affordances, and this is explored in the special section in this issue – ‘The Poetic Line’, edited by Owen Bullock. His introduction provides a context to the line, its property and its potential; and the contributions to that section, as well as contributions by poets Geoff Page and Jackson to the main section, exemplify the material practices of poets.'  (Editorial introduction)

    2018
Last amended 22 Jun 2018 11:17:35
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