Thursday, July 2nd at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to stream a new hybrid piece from multidisciplinary artist and 2018 Artist-In-Residence James K, DJ and Vomit Archeologist Nude Volvo : (mutating repetitions) M. E. L. T. [Maybe Everyone Licks Truths]. Welcome to the afterlife, Now. (Dub Mix). The piece is part of the Isolated Field Recording Series, commissioning artists to produce field recordings to be streamed over the course of this challenging and isolated time.
If you are in a position to do so, James K has asked all donations during the event be directed to G.L.I.T.S..
Notes from James K:
"The void is not empty; it is amorphous. Fragments exist in this space, and they challenge the void. We progress. The void is not seen; it exists as a fragment as well. The fragment is small but compact, consisting of dust. The void contains, but is never filled. We feed on the permanently partial. We collect fragments and force contradictions. Opposites are only black and white now. They are the memory and the premonition. We see color. The verb defines.
This piece is a translation of a performance I did one year ago in a ‘black-box’ space, using a multi-channel speaker arrangement, for a live audience. The only light sources present emitted from where I was performing, creating shadowed projections of my body. The intensity of the heat in the room paired with the undulating sounds throughout the space, created a larger physical body - one which contained everything within the space. The idea was to challenge the performer and viewer relationship, dismantling these constructed borders. The larger ideas inspiring this piece, relating to the digital space and reimaging what we think of as isolation, all play into this dissolution. Challenging sight (or symbol, as in, language) as ‘fact’ and isolation as ‘cut-off from.’
Over the past months during the COVID pandemic, I have found myself thinking about this piece, wanting to use the archived footage and sound, to reimagine it into a digital context. The video is a composite of the performance and a video synth patch interpreting the sound into light signals.
This piece is a mediation on the layers that surround isolation. It moves through emotion and constructed history, processing and dissecting them, as an attempt to fully dissolve into the ether and become one. Language and body, the structures we use to contain and make sense of it all, slowly ooze.
LAYER 0: Persona (App): call name/ * NUDE VOLVO
NUDE VOLVO is an archaeologist, studying human vomit. Disguised as a DJ, she travels throughout cities, examining the fragments within vomit. Her parents, no longer recognizing her, would not give her a home or bed to sleep in, but a gang, known as Rinse Dream, understanding her will to pursue the darker, purer, things in life, took her in and sheltered her for thirteen years, which she spent in a dark cubbyhole beneath the stairs, against the gutter, where she studied the vomit of the streets, collecting samples, for further absorption into the system. You can hear these sounds, and many others she has collected on the floors of 7equals5 club, where she plays under her monikers Sisy Gluv and PET.
M.E.L.T.
Nude Volvo brushes through fragmentary personas, sonically, traverses them, through their different genres, or ‘affects.’ An archeology of the self. Field recordings/diaries, cut and pasted, collaged, regurgitated. Nude Volvo is the regulator of the fragmentary histories. This composition takes bits and pieces of my archive of works over the past years, deconstructing them, to create another translation. Nude Volvo processes the ‘vomit’ - my body, mind and soul, broken down and dispersed back into itself. Layered myself via persona, via processing. TV as performer/object feeding me, phone translating my body. My personas dissolving, my face, a white mask, holding projections. Record the performance, rewind it, play back. The verb defines.
LAYER 00: Processing/Masks:
Processing my self, and then dj-ing/dissecting myself. Processing of my body/voice/ identity, existence through applications. Extending my body into these applications, speaking through them. Absorbing into the system. The system becomes the brain. It's also about masks, and the idea of concealing one’s self, from others and from themselves, through applications. Hiding in a sense that it's hiding the physical body and tangible physicality and the limits of that as humans, but in that hiding, is an effort to interface with technology to expand and become something more than what you are physically capable of. Mask: the mask as an object of community and empathy, a symbol of solidarity. We wear masks to isolate ourselves from exposure, but in that we also realize we are the exposers. We wear them for ourselves just as much as we do for others. How can masks be used to actually extend our communal selves?
LAYER 000: Inside/Out, the Abject, Accessorizing:
Applications as accessories. Deny them my body, give them projections, accessories. When the body does come into view, it is only as an accessorized ‘drag’ femininity. The blond wig, the outside breast implant, the chunky heels, these are all the drag turned abject.
LAYER 0000: Vomit/Venom/Goo/Blackness/Void
Destratified matter, matter in movement, in flux, in variation. Meta matter—primal ooze, which suggests that the laws that govern physical reality are malleable. Diving into the void. Sound as an amorphous body contained in the blackness (void). Vibrations, which, at our most basic molecular level, is what connects all. Sound, as an action of the body and of all other sound and movement, entering back into the diaspora. Sound creating one body that is not a body at all, but blackness. The movement of the body turns into projections through light, the sound translating into light signals, undulates throughout the blackness.
LAYER 00000: Dispersing the body, dispersing performers: Disembodiment:
Speakers as performer, screen as performer, projections/light as performer.
LAYER 000000: Revealing and concealing: Audience as voyeur:
In recent years I have felt at odds with my body being present and performing sound. I feel as though my body becomes a wall, or a mask—It is charged too deeply with associations. I wanted to create an interface which has multiple vantage points and layers of opacity, to construct a physical representation of my approach sonically, forming a layered landscape. The lights reveal projections of a disembodied body. My body translating into light, as it is translating into sound, gives visual representation of the body being processed. The voyeurism of people watching this process, having a desire to see behind, aware of the events inside the interior space, which is only exterior to them- a flat screen of distorted projections, veils, which turn to blackness.
*the isolation in light can cause this voyeurism. We want to see and understand something that is invisible, we peep through light screens to find understanding. Personally, I find the answers in this darkness, in the darkness of isolation, where seeing isn’t possible, where our other senses can intensify and connect us in ways our eyes deceive. Although we may find ourselves displaced, we are never truly isolated. It is the mythology of isolation which informs the mind and therefore the body. Close the eyes and enter isolation- the multi connectedness of everything.
LAYER 0000000: Collapsing time: Translations:
The edit, the loop, sampling, digital fragmentation, digital time stretching. Moving through textural genre fragments, shared histories. Performing live translations-of movement into light. Of body into machine.
LAYER 00000000: DUB: Double: Distortion/degradation of the first hand:
(Quoted/paraphrased from Erik Davis’ Nomad Codes) [Dub arose from ‘doubling’ aka remixing, stripping music down to bare bones of and building it up again through layers of inhuman echoes, electronic ectoplasm, cosmic rays. Good dub sounds like the recording studio itself has begun to hallucinate. Dub destroys the holistic integrity of singer and song. It proclaims a primary postmodern law: there is no original, no first ground, no homeland. By mutating repetitions of previously used material, dub adds something new and distinctly uncanny, vaporizing its loops into doppelgänger. Dub swoops through space empty space, spectral and disembodied, dub opens up the inner door. Etymology of dub - duppie (Jamaican patois for ghost) - ‘ghost in me coming out.’ The multi-layered effect. Use technological effects to thicken the sound and stretch and fold the passage of time.]
LAYER 000000000: Everyone a DJ/The narrative:
DJS as archaeologists of sound, using the past to create an immersive ‘present’. DJs tell stories through histories of sound, cultural fragments. DJing is an approach to collaging narrative.
LAYER 0000000000: Trauma:
The violence of the gaze on the body, desire to extend myself into the digital, to make my body malleable, to dissolve borders by turning into the digital. The layers allude not only to the digital space, and the degradation of that space, but also to trauma cycles, and how these are repeated and distorted over time. The live recording and then play back of this performance alludes to the cycling of histories, the ‘performance’ on loop.”
James K is a New York native multi-disciplinary artist who has honed her peculiar aesthetic to include a fusion of visual and sonic elements. Deeply rooted in a conscious art practice and a mythology of her own, her sound, equally organic and electronic, is a combination of odd dreams, hybridizing enchanted samples, ripped, broken and morphed rhythms, and vocals, both incomprehensible and appealing -- forming a multi-faceted identity. She received her BFA in Printmaking from The Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Bard, where she developed a critical multidisciplinary art practice shaped by feminist theory and writing. She has established herself within the Providence, New York, and Berlin scenes of experimental artists and musicians. Since 2012, she has been represented by Loyal Gallery, where she has exhibited solo work in both their Malmo and Stockholm locations, in addition to showing at Miami Art Basel, NY Frieze, and LA Art Contemporary. She has released her music with labels PAN, Dial, 1080p, UNO NYC, and her own label, She Rocks!, and has released collaborations with artists such as Drew Mcdowall, Yves Tumor, Mykki Blanco, and Gobby, as their band SETH. She has toured through the US and Europe extensively, performing for a variety of audiences; from underground spaces, established galleries, and museums, to well established venues, festivals, and theaters.
