When The Visitors Come Inside

One of my first post-vaccination trips was to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The ICA was in a between-exhibition, pandemic-era state, and was showing one floor of work. Fittingly, that work was Ragnar Kjartansson's 2012 video piece, The Visitors.

Over nine screens, a musician sits in a romantically deteriorating room: Kjartansson plays guitar and sings alone in a bathtub, a pianist sits alone in a living room. Together, the nine scenes and musicians perform a 64-minute concert. Strolling around the space creates different mixes: if you want to hear the banjo, move toward the banjo player.

Though the pieces is nearly nine years old, it's impossible to imagine a piece that could more astutely summarize the experience of the Zoom Year: each of us alone, appearing on screens, making our own work in isolation, hoping for some collective resonance.

Lutz Koepnick wrote a lovely (also pre-pandemic) book about the work. It uses The Visitors to explore resonance and hospitality. Koepnick defines resonance as "art's fleeting promise to make us coexist with things strange and other," a condition "in which something is affected by the vibrations, intensities, motions, or emotions of something else." I've explored a similar idea, which I've considered a kinship: In Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta writes about "kinship-mind," in which "every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and context. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated" (2019, 176).

It's helpful to remember that kinship relies on resonance: it's the way we speak and the way we listen. But resonance has a somewhat magical quality, too. There is the sense of an emotional echo between the speaker and the listener.

On a physical level, resonance is a vibration, and the ones we hear are one sliver of the ever-pulsing story. Objects radiate: our wi-fi signals "resonate" somewhere between radio and microwaves. The air moves in waves. Birds navigate by them. What "resonates" with us are the vibrations we find most accessible.

It was another post-pandemic musical performance that brought me back to The Visitors. The comedian Bo Burnham released Inside this week. Ostensibly a "stand up comedy special," in practice it's more of an experimental film about creating a comedy special about the futility of comedy during a terrifying global catastrophe. How do you tell jokes to an empty room? The isolation of Burnham's work is a sharp contrast to The Visitors. It's about the absence of resonance, and the absence of kinship.

Koepnick's book discusses another relevant sound work. Alvin Lucier's 1969 performance, I am Sitting Alone in a Room. For that piece, Lucier recorded a description of his performance on tape. For the performance, he played that recording back in a performance space. That playback was recorded, the room’s slight echo picked up by a second tape recorder. From that point, the two tape recorders take turns playing and recording. Within 8 minutes the sound begins to degrade, and echoes overwhelm the original speech. By 24 minutes, the text sounds like a mangled string instrument. By 39 minutes, it sounds like an ambient soundtrack for a science fiction film.

In his comedy special, Burnham says he had given up on live performances years ago because of panic attacks. Inside documents the unraveling of his mental health and the return of his fear of an audience. Withdrawal into the room, and the Internet, took away the feedback loops he craved and feared.

So I'm thinking about resonance and kinship. When we can broadcast our vibrations without them bouncing back, we can hide from feedback and interaction. But we deprive ourselves of something, too. If the words we speak bounce off our own walls, recorded and replayed like Lucier's instructions or Burnham's ruminations, we turn our minds into overwhelmingly bright walls of sound. It's relationships, coming into lives and listening to one another, that creates "resonance" between us and other people, or us and other things.

In cybernetics, it's understood that equilibrium in a system is the result of maintaining close, but loose, connections. If you keep things too tight, they lose equilibrium, triggering noise: Lucien's loop has no variety, and so it becomes dissonant feedback. Burnham's ideas bounce off tight walls in a similar spirit. Loose connections provide for variation. Too much looseness means distance; vibration without resonance: talking with no one listening. Too much tightness only amplifies a single vibration: talking with no one listening.

But in a way, Lucien’s work is still about relationship. The interaction between his voice and the vibrating response of the walls. For Burnham, the space of the room extends outward, into an astutely observed feedback loop with the Internet. Burnham “room” is the social media feeds and the algorithms that we fuel, alone, through our solitary activities.

These “feeds” promise interaction, but it’s a tight one: In 2006, the Facebook news feed was introduced: transforming the site from a collection of individual pages to a feed, moderated by decisions it made on our behalf, reflecting interests it observed about us, rather than our curiosity. And it is telling, then, that our social media feeds are an echo of ourselves, masquerading as community and interaction.

If The Visitors feels more comforting and hospitable, it’s because — of course — we tune in to the frequencies of music and people much more astutely than to the frequencies of walls and pixels, maybe even long for it after more than a year of screens and walls. The Visitors is a welcome reminder of the pleasure of company, meaningful feedback, and interaction with ideas other than our own.

Things I’m Reading This Week

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Toward a History of Ableness
Beth Linker

Linker brings together threads about ableism, data collection practices, and privilege using a historic lens on slouching. Slouching was considered a “disability” until the 1970s, while nearly 80% of the United States was defined as a sloucher. So, what was up with the other 20%? How did they benefit, and who preserved those benefits for so long?

The fantasy of able-bodiedness is fed by fear and avoidance. As finite beings, we all know that physical and mental impairment is an ever-present possibility, if not an already lived reality. But even if ableness is a fiction, it is one that has a significant bearing on the material world. The ability-disability binary is reified every day in the clinic, in welfare policy decision-making, and in schools. And much like the presumed sunny side of many other binaries—heterosexuality, maleness, whiteness—ability confers implicit and explicit privilege.

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The Tyranny of Time
Joe Zadeh

Zadeh looks at the politics of time and colonialism: how the clock served to regulate behavior, and who decided what time it was. Notably, he points out that the clock is now the foundation of our electronic systems, its invisible assumptions now embedded into the world in complex ways we can barely comprehend.

The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on. … The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.

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A City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences
Shannon Mattern

More in the “Things I am planning to read” category, this is a book review for an upcoming work by Shannon Mattern that looks brilliant.

A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models.