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ISSUE's online commissions are FREE to stream. In lieu of purchasing tickets, please consider making a donation of any amount that you feel is meaningful in support of ISSUE's 2022 commissions. Enabling the fullscreen function is recommended. The length of the full presentation is approximately 33 minutes.
ISSUE's online commissions are FREE to stream. In lieu of purchasing tickets, please consider making a donation of any amount that you feel is meaningful in support of ISSUE's 2022 commissions. Enabling the fullscreen function is recommended. The length of the full presentation is approximately 33 minutes.
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The accompanying visual portrays blurred moving images and textural screen captures of the lines, curves, and light patterns on an LCD screen. It also includes closed captioning describing the noise, as well as bits of original text (re-written below*), which flash very briefly on screen in an Old English font style.
If utilizing a volume control we recommend leaving it at a moderate level, or adjusting it as feels most comfortable throughout the work. Audio-levels vary widely between the beginning and end of the piece, starting very low and gradually intensifying. The end is the noisiest. (If you enjoy this we recommend, alternatively, blasting the sound on your monitors.)
The work is approximately 33 minutes in length, including a very short intermission.
We would like to thank the anonymous peers, co-workers, researchers, mentors, collaborators, and laborers (waged and unwaged) who contributed their responses and field recordings to this project.
*"Toil doeth wondrous things"
"Toil is the highest good"
"Roses are red violets are blue praiseworthy toil I’m in love with you"
"Roses are red violets are blue at least toil gives me something to do"
"Roses are red violets are blue I do more toil-hours per week than you"
"Toil and I were made for each other <3"
"Toil is teleological (toil-as-telos)"
"Toil is sooooo beautiful"
"A toilsome existence is an aesthetic existence"
"Toil is a manifestation of pure will"
Thursday, May 5th at 8pm ET, ISSUE presents Place of Toil, an online piece building on a method of harsh noise-based research, facilitated by artist and researcher S. Warren and 2021 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Sami Hopkins. Drawing from S. Warren’s installation work assembled in 2017, Place of Toil presents a combination of qualitative research and noise to explore possible connections between sound art and knowledge production concerning (dis)ability, space, and labor.
Opposing hegemonic logics regarding sound and ability, Warren and Hopkins developed the concept of “noise positivity” to characterize research methodologies that involve a normative and aesthetic valuing of harsh noise. This methodology asks: Is it possible to cultivate and historically document experiences and perceptions of emotional wellness, (dis)ability, labor, and social movement work through the processing, combining, and dissemination of oral history and environmental audio data of noisescapes?
In this program, Place of Toil—which formerly existed as a text-based art installation occupying a student workspace—turns to the virtual workspace. Through harsh noise-based research, Warren directs and produces a noisescape on toil. Using interviews with laborers who report on their subjective emotional and bodily experiences related to work, the application of harsh noise-based research in this program seeks to mirror (and offer some agentic collaborator control over representing) the pressure of remote workplaces to share one’s private life digitally.
This is the fourth program in Sami's Propositions from the deadWIP, a multidisciplinary performance series that balances considerations of knowledge and fallibility launching from the premise that creative knowing imbues the process of making as much as a work’s eventual presentation or future iterations. By never claiming to reach finality, the works in this series accept the condition of being always “in progress,” with the potential to reimagine the status of a work-in-progress (WIP) altogether.
S. Warren is a musician, researcher, and sociology master’s student at the Free University of Berlin. Warren has performed at DIY spaces across the US, Canada, and Europe, including past and upcoming invited presentations of harsh noise-based research and sound art for the Society for Disability Studies, Freetown Christiania’s Researcher-in-Residence program, the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, and the American Geographers Association Sound Geography Group. Warren’s work is situated within the content analysis of anarchist/squatting movements and (dis)ability in social movements, with particular interest in participatory and arts-based research.
Sami Hopkins works as an artist, musician, and writer based in New York. Across projects, Sami explores how experimental practices and pluralistic forms of knowledge might attend to the relationships between political/social context and subjective experience. Recent work includes the Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship at ISSUE Project Room, and Critical Writing Fellowship at Recess. Sami Hopkins was recently supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and ISSUE Project Room in order to attend New Music Focus 2022 a festival in Lyon, France that fosters professional exchanges and to create opportunities for new international collaborations.
Image: Rectangular frame filled with moiré patterns (repetitive fine lines and waves on a computer screen, captured by camera). In the center of the image is a semi-translucent off-white text, stylized in Old English font. The text reads: “Toil Is The Highest Good.”
