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georgiahoulihan · 7 years

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Assessment 2 - Concept Statement

Um. Uh. Ummmm. Uhhh. Erm. Eh. Uh. Um. Um. Um.

These are the sounds of our brain glitching. The sounds of language breaking down as the road between our brains and mouths is suddenly blocked. Of struggling to find what to say next. Of stumbling, hesitating, reconfiguring. Glitching.

Pay attention to these utterances in your conversations and you’ll realise we use them more than you think. But nobody wants that. Why would you want to sound like you don’t know what to say next in a conversation? Why would you want to verbally express your glitch? You can teach yourself to prevent it, to sound more eloquent, to eliminate the vocal glitch. One step closer to perfect, right?

But I don’t suggest you do that. Listen more closely to the ‘um’s, the ‘uh’s, and you’ll notice how important they are in our communication with each other. They convey emotion that words on a page or a screen cannot, that a perfectly thought out and carefully considered speech cannot. They convey that you are thinking. They convey that you are human.

In my video work “What Is An Um?” I archive the feeling of the ‘um’ and ‘uh.’ As Hal Foster writes in his 2004 article ‘An Archival Impulse,’ “archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaces, physically present.” And similarly, I want to make the lost and displaced importance and value of the ‘um’ physically present, using both sound and archival film.

My work seeks to simultaneously explain what the ‘um’ feels like inside our brains, a metaphor for the glitch in thought and language, while also referencing the archive. Just like the ‘um,’ the archive carries meaning. It asserts a certain history, ascribes value to something. It documents and preserves. The archive categorises and stores information for future generations. I wanted to reference this in my work by both using archival film footage, and also creating a work that playfully suggests a future where the glitch of the ‘um’ and ‘uh’ no longer exist. Although I’m quite sure the ‘um’ and ‘uh’ won’t be disappearing any time soon, I can imagine a future where we communicate purely through the digital, through computers, and the nuances of spoken language are a thing of the past.

This is why I chose the robotic voice of the computer to dictate the various ‘um’s and ‘uh’s in my work. It suggests the future, in which human voice is no longer used, and my artwork is thus an archive of the ‘um,’ explaining to future generations what the vocal phenomena of the ‘um’ was, visualised through a series of metaphors.

Inspired by the art of David Gordon, Fiona MacDonald, and Anne Ferran, who all use archival images and footage in their works, I wanted the footage within my work to be cropped, edited, reversed, etc. Taking archival film footage, I cropped scenes, extended some, paused, rewound, and edited speed in order to transform this footage and render new meaning. My work is not only creating an archive, but editing another archive, glitching it to create my own version of the preserved.

Similarly, I was inspired by the sound art of Bruce Nauman, who employs repetition of human voices in his work. I recorded four sounds: two variations of ‘um’ and ‘uh’ spoken by my computer. I wanted to just use four repeated sounds so that they almost become meaningless and begin to sound completely alien. I played with the timing of these noises in relation to the actions within the videos, the utterances corresponding to a glitch in the video, sometimes layering and sometimes distant, but always anticipated and understood to be the verbal expression of the metaphorical glitches.

My artwork itself is an ‘um’: an attempt to explain, stumbling over thoughts, repeating, struggling to articulate meaning. It is an ‘um’ trying to make sense of something.

Bibliography

Herbert H. Clark and Jean E. Fox Tree, ‘On thee-yuh fillers uh and um,’ http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15718

Richard Nordquist, ‘Filler Word Definition and Examples’, https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-filler-word-1690859

Paul R. Timm and Sherron Bienvenu, ‘Straight Talk: Oral Communication for Career Success.’ Routledge, 2011

William Safire, ‘Watching My Language: Adventures in the Word Trade.’ Random House, 1997

Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’. The MIT Press, 2004.

Ben Borthwick, ‘Bruce Nauman: Raw Materials’, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bruce-nauman-1691/long-read/raw-material

Emily Lonie, ‘Artists and the Archives’, http://www.thingsimfondsof.com/artists-and-the-archives/

Jane Birkin, ‘Art, Work, and Archives: Performativity and the Techniques of Production’, http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/art-work-and-archives/

Sue Breakell, ‘Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive’, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/09/perspectives-negotiating-the-archive

Joan Kerr, ‘Universally Respected 1993’, http://www.fiona-macdonald.net/index.php/artwork/universally-respected-1993

Martyn Jolly, ’Big Archives and Small Collections: Remarks on the Archival Mode in Contemporary Australian Art and Visual Culture’, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj/article/view/3823/4605

Guggenheim, ‘Douglas Gordon’, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Douglas-Gordon

All film footage accessed from archive.org

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