Infrasonica is a digital platform of non-Western cultures. We record, analyze and debate the eeriness of sound and its auras, linked to the world with the audible, the hidden and the sensitive. Infrasonic waves operate at a frequency that is undetectable by human ears even though they are often generated by massive ecological phenomena, such as the movement of tectonic plates or the deep currents of the ocean. Infrasonica aims to be a catalyst for those vibrations.
The platform includes archives of experimental sound and visual artists, as well as theoretical musings on contemporary critical thought. By relying on a borderless network of collaborators, Infrasonica blends essays, conversations and speculative works that encourage critical curatorial and research projects.
- Voicing Abstraction / Wave #9
October 2023 - 7
Voicing Abstraction / Wave #9:
The publication of our 9th Wave also marks the end of Voicing Abstraction, our third Current. Voicing Abstraction aimed to confront and explore the potentialities inherent in the poetics of spoken language: is it possible to name a shapeless thing? How can we address something beyond communication? Can we breathe life into that which has no concreteness? In doing so, do we risk birthing a monster, a golem; that Talmudic being formed of clay who, due to its voicelessness, has nefarious intentions assigned to it?
In many versions of tales of the golem, the creature received its ruach, its pneuma, its vitality, with the carving of the word emét, or truth, into its forehead. The way to kill it, then, was to remove the first letter, leaving the inscription as mét, changing the meaning from truth to death. But is that carving, even of the word death, not a way of safeguarding memory? Wouldn’t it be true then that the chiseling sound, the sound of erasure, is an act of utterance, the emitting of a sound resistant to that which is trying to silence it? Even if that being already lived a silent existence?
Every act of translation is either an act of creation or of suppression, and as the golem seems to remind us, even a silent existence makes utterances in the liminal space between truth and death. With Voicing Abstraction, we aimed to explore other possible meanings beyond literal representations of the self, which tend to be absorbed with more efficiency by the politics of representation. Voicing Abstraction invited artists working with their voice, music, and poetry in ways that complicate liberal semiotics of cultural identity and that introduce us to worlds that are loaded with polyvalent meaning, fugitive languages, and desire.