A sustained drop

Sammanfattning

This essay traces how my work shifted from performance and material processes toward sonic, spatial structures and listening. It begins with a sound piece composed of processed recordings of mud being packed, shaken, released, and landing. Cutting, arranging, and spatially distributing these recorded gestures became a way to investigate how persistence and bodily orientation emerge between sound, body, and room. By moving between construction sites in Gothenburg, brick-making, a failing collaborative mud performance, sound editing, the dance floor, and the installation Rubber’s Sole, the essay follows a series of encounters through which experiences of pressure, instability, and inertia recur. As mud, sound, and strain continually reshape one another within these situations, the essay aims to discern how the hesitation that emerges when encountering a heap of wet mud might persist in another form. I explore how this sensation can be rendered into an invisible structure in the room–a sense of strain that is heard and physically navigated in space. To think through these relations and how sound might produce the sensation of contact without physical touch, I draw on Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter and Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action. Their work frames perception as something continuously negotiated through shifting relations–in my case, among bodies, arranged sonic fragments of gestures, and the space they inhabit. From this perspective, matter exceeds the strictly physical, allowing affect to circulate as a force that shifts our orientation. The essay lands on how sound arrangement and installation redistribute force from one material element–or environment–into another. Recorded gestures are cut, repeated, delayed, and layered in ways that retain traces of movement, exertion, and material resistance. Rather than resolving these fragments into a fixed meaning, their relations remain partially open, allowing other sounds and listeners’ bodies to enter the composition. The text culminates in a collective listening situation in which bodies gather around an unresolved sonic structure, continually adjusting their orientation to one another and to the sounds in the room.