Ghosts in the Machine: A Virtual Choral Performance as Hauntological Praxis During the COVID-19 Pandemic

An interwoven reading of the issues surrounding a performance – rehearsed and recorded remotely and hosted virtually – of Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol’s The Gauntlet: Far Away, Together, for 15 voices and electronics (given at New York University Abu Dhabi in March 2021, in which I was choral director), and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993/2006). I examine the impact that COVID-19 had on realising this performance – which had originally been intended for a ‘live’ and fully immersive and interactive presentation – and consider how earlier models of hauntological praxis in works by Karlheinz Stockhausen have parallels with performing during the pandemic. I explore the ways in which working in isolation, with little sense of time or location, foster a sense of ‘aporia’ or perplexity, overturning the binary opposition of time and space, and how the use of the SPAT immersive audio mixing tool to electronically process single voices into multiple, spatially realised echoes (ghosts) of themselves, truly gives us ‘ghosts’ in the machine.

Like a Letter, You

Like a Letter, You is a collaborative investigation focused on the concept of ‘conversation as an object’. Originally recorded as part of a larger self-produced project titled hEar Pixels, this track manifests as an experimental soundbased reconfiguration of an original essay about handwritten correspondence: How might an analog essay be performed as a digital assemblage of sound? In what ways are the methods of a DJ tied to speech, literature, and dialog? The track is composed using a cut-and-paste process of ‘utterances’, which may be described as units of speech distinct from language that may be oral or written and are inevitably completed by a response[1] which inevitably forms a dialog. Further, these speech units may manifest through gestures associated with digital tools as a form of cultural production[2]. Like a Letter, You includes a reading of the essay aloud, snippets of informal spoken conversations between the authors, and musical bits generated with a touch-based audio mixing platform. In effect, Like a Letter, You embodies the concepts of writing, dialog, and gesture within the genre of sound literature, and it also speaks to the unpredictable nature of collaboration and human interaction. [1] BAKHTIN, Mikhail (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.[2] NOLAND, Carrie (2009). Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.