tekhnē

Bonnie Jones: I think it would be great to start our conversation by talking about how our personal and artistic backgrounds have shaped TECHNE. What drove us to start an organisation that is focused on the empowerment of young women, and what made us believe that combining technology-based art making, improvisation, critical listening and community collaboration would engender this empowerment?

Suzanne Thorpe: I was motivated to make available the different choices and perspectives of other people’s expressions of music. When I began to experiment with electronics, I felt like I was working on instinct, feeling around in the dark, so to speak, because I was unaware of a lot of innovation and expansion in the electronic music world. Admittedly my entry point was from the classical music and alternative rock worlds. I began to play classical flute at the age of 9, and when I became interested in playing other forms of music I didn't want to play another instrument. But if I wanted to play in a noise band or alternative rock band, I needed to figure out how to be audible in those environments, and so, amplification came into my life. Once I figured out that I could amplify the flute it was a natural progression from there to expand the instrument with electronics. But I didn't see anyone modelling that. I was operating through trial and error, which is how it goes, but it would’ve been great to know about the people, especially women, who had done this before me, while I was learning.

Not only did I not have the role models, I was trying to build an instrument in an all-male environment. This is what TECHNE’s radical approach is, creating a space of experimentation and expression with technology, and doing that in an environment of mostly women. I was in a domain where I had little agency, as far as societal structures go and the rules of engagement were always the men in that scene. I had to fight. Or subvert.

BJ: Like you, I was interested in offering different voices access to technology and art tools and learning what those voices had to say. I was curious, and acting on an intuitive understanding that there could be something restorative and revolutionary about being part of something that could give rise to these voices.

I had an uncommon upbringing, being part of a transracial family, we were three non-white adopted girls with three white brothers and white parents, living in rural New Jersey on a multi-generational dairy farm. Given that environment, and what it was like growing up never seeing any Asian role models on TV, or having much context for Asian women culturally, in retrospect it seems inevitable that I would gravitate to creative work.

As an adult, I’ve met a lot of Korean adoptees who grew up in transracial families usually with white parents and siblings and most were involved in creative arts, poetry, music, visual art. To me, this was compelling evidence that people who may be dissonant to their cultural or familial racial makeup, will instinctively seek methodologies, strategies, and forms that are flexible enough to express that experience authentically. These forms also point outwards towards alternatives and escapes from this conflicted space.

ST: I've been thinking about that a lot recently. How art is a very effective methodology for this kind of expression and experience.

BJ: I think aesthetic decisions can be shaped by being an outsider in general, not just by gender or race. Think of all the great music that arose from opposition! Situations where musicians had to push against the status quo to express authenticity in their art. For me, discovering electronic instruments was like finding a sonic voice that felt like my own experience of the world. Present, fluid, capable of being outside of time and history while also being physical and spatial. I resonate with composer David Tudor’s approach to electronic instruments when he notes, “I try to find out what’s there – not to make it do what I want but to release what’s there. The object should teach you what it wants to hear.” This act of offering agency to material and object, and this ability for an instrument to become a collaborator was very motivating for my artistic practice.

ST: Yes, the position of being an outsider and my choice of instrumentation shaped my aesthetic development. As a woman in a society that is constructed to mute my audibility I had to look to tactics that would achieve audibility. I think I developed a contrarian aesthetic, where I would create sonorities that contrasted with those around me, which is one way to be heard. That impulse also led me to expand my instrument with electronics, enacting an endless bank of sounds to be heard through. These tactics could be identified as gendered, because of my social and cultural experience as a woman, but are they innate to my biology? I don't think so. It’s a complex interweaving of conditions related to my socially constructed experience, which in turn defaults to my biological self.

BJ: Right, and if you were a person who was functioning largely at the periphery of cultural production, and for reasons like race, gender, or class were being overlooked or ignored,” audio unheard” as it were, then I can understand a strong desire as an artist would be to define yourself within that situation. To become more audible. It’s not as if we assume that there are artistic characteristics that can be assigned to different types of people, but we do recognise that a marginalised artists’ experience may inevitably create differences based on the artists desire to speak from their cultural position as outsiders.

ST: Exactly. When I was riffing on what motivates me to do TECHNE, I realised that I’m less interested in the female/male dichotomy, and more interested in diversity, because diversity has such depth, and realms of possibility. I’d like to think that TECHNE is about making that diversity audible, and that can only be done by engendering diverse bodies with the agency needed to enact themselves. This also involves flipping the script as to who an authority is.

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

BJ: I think in our workshops we shift the roles of teacher and student, where authority and agency lie, opening the possibilities for learning. This has resonance with young women, who I think come to these workshops with very entrenched ideas about what they can learn or what they cannot learn and who can teach them these skills.

ST: I often think about the young girl in our Baton Rouge workshop. She was soldering, making a contact mic, and was so amazed that she could do it. She said "I didn't think I could do this, I never do anything right at school, and teachers tell me I can't do anything right" Maybe that impression lasted, maybe not, but in that instant, there was a shift. She just needed the right opportunity, moment, or challenge to recognise her own abilities.

BJ: These are the most profound moments for me when we’re teaching. We start with a somewhat unknowable and sophisticated space - DIY electronics, soldering, making your own circuit, and we make that knowable and known for these young women so quickly, naturally, and pleasurably. We provide a way to interface with something that is a lot bigger than they are through non-didactic approaches. We bring them into the technology and the musical practice with their bodies and their intuition and this dissolves the fears they may have about the subject matter.

ST: Part of that is not separating the technology from its broader context. We embed the technological learning in the context of musicking, a concept where music is an active process not a fixed result. Something we realised early on in developing TECHNE is that anyone can teach a goal-oriented skill, but framing it with other musicking activities is where the deeper exploration and impact takes place. We combine the electronics making with improvisation and critical listening, entwining the technology among several different musicking activities.

I’d say that since we started collaborating as artists and as co-educators, our experience of aurality and sonority have been our guideposts for pedagogical choices. Our relationships to material, sound, and our bodies and how they have historically co-formed each other has been significant. We’ve arrived at a curriculum that provides an entrenched awareness of the material, that, when commingled with bodies and sound triggers an intense affect. This affective space shines a light on our entanglements with each other, and the material world, highlighting a fluidity in our musicking and instruments.

BJ: It’s the way our pedagogy emphasises relationships between body, sound, and identity that underscores the ideas Chela Sandoval outlines in "Methodology of the Oppressed" and “Third World Feminism”. The concept of “oppositional consciousness.” I’ve been thinking of how we’ve developed our TECHNE pedagogy from this position. We’ve created a workshop space that already tries to dispense with typical authority structures, we enable personal physical relationships to making and musicking, we encourage difference, sociality and collaboration, we provide instruments that are not embedded in a history or “right” way of playing, and we allow the voice of the instrument to echo the identity of the musician.

ST: Yes, it’s something that I’ve started to call a pedagogy of "flow." Rather than seeking to define a singular identity as artist or person, our project emphasises our active making, of ourselves and each other. This posits that identity is in motion rather than a fixed definable point, or goal to achieve. And that identity is entangled with whatever bodies and materials we are musicking with, emphasising the relational. I'm less interested in defining identity, I'm not sure that's even possible. Furthermore, seeking a definition can run a danger of reinforcing the binary of self/other.

BJ: That seems to be the place where Donna Haraway starts from right? Examining how processes of identification in any fixed way are problematic. Haraway seems to push back on this binary of feminism - the “self” ad the “other.” She seems uninterested in the reaffirmation that we often engage in when we define ourselves as “other” or “othered.” I think Haraway and Sandoval have much to say about this intersectional approach for contemporary feminist theory.

ST: Haraway invokes Sandoval in her discussion of affinities in A Cyborg Manifesto.¹ Sandoval's concept of “oppositional consciousness,” and the idea that there is a multiplicity of identities at any given time.

BJ: Right, and some of these identities are potentially in conflict with each other or at least have different sets of conditions and needs, and our task is to engage them, host them, listen to them. In some ways, I think certain types of people naturally end up living, surviving this way. However, what’s new for me is engaging in the practice of making and teaching art from that point of view. Finding ways to validate these multiplicities in myself and others.

ST: Sandoval resists binary categories of identity by the disavowal of essential qualities, which I’m particularly interested in, and I think what we’re getting at here. There is no essential identity, no essential self. I’m also drawn to Haraway’s resistance to origin stories of original unity in ACM. Haraway’s cyborg doesn’t have a singular essence. A cyborg lives in the margins, much like our own experience has been. It constitutes and reconstitutes itself in relation to its surroundings, at any given time, like sound and our musicking. This is why I believe working with sound so effectively transmutes a way of being that resists borders and binaries. If a sound has an essence, it is momentary, and eventually moves to another.  

BJ: I know that personally, I have always felt that I can barely contain the number of selves that I feel like I inhabit at any given time. My identities have always felt so multiple, and I could never imagine being defined by just one of them.

I do think that we all hold so many selves in our beings and when one of those multiple selves is codified and controlled outside of ourselves - by culture and society - woman, Asian person, black person, poor person, then those particular identities within ourselves are foregrounded and become sites of conflict, but also potential.

In some ways, multiplicities of self are sort of glorious, and this is what my interpretation of Sandoval's work is, that these ways of knowing and ways of being are our path towards the future. People who know how to do these things and live these ways are the people who have strategies, future-thinking ideas, who can make decisions that have never been made, create art you've never seen before. They can essentially shake the foundation of power.

Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognise alliance with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, and class justice, when their readings of power call for alternative oppositional stands…. As the clutch of a car provides the driver the ability to shift gears, differential consciousness permits the practitioner to choose tactical positions, that is, to self-consciously break and reform ties to ideology, activities which are imperative for the psychological and political practices that permit the achievement of coalition across differences. Chela Sandoval, US Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World

ST: So it seems fair to ask what makes up a pedagogy of flow? And what is the role of sound? I think a pedagogy of flow awakens students to their be-ing, and the be-ing of the world around them. In a TECHNE workshop, a pedagogy of flow is activated by the making of an instrument, the listening to an environment, and musicking with self-made instruments in collaboration with peers.

A pedagogy of flow recognises the vibratory in all things and beings, and sound is a particularly effective tool to emphasise that state of motion. Sound moves, and gains substance and significance in relationship to other sound and material it encounters. A sound wave intermingles with bodies, its molecules vibrating us and our surroundings. It highlights our interbeing, and illuminates the simultaneous similarities and differences among us. We can hear our “oppositional consciousness,” as it were.

Defamiliarisation plays a large role in this pedagogy. Most students have little or no orientation with the activities they are about to engage with. They are asked to build instruments that are free of cultural codification, and make music without pre-defined boundaries. This creates a zero-gravity space where intensities act as guideposts, and powers of imagination are employed as students are catapulted into a series of new figurations.² But if there is to be an alternative subjectivity defined, it is one of shifting shapes, co-constituted in the making of relationships with other shifting shapes.

Most music curriculums, and electronic music curricula, are built on a singular narrative formed out of the Western music experience. This points to a “right” and “wrong” way to music, and by extension, a right or wrong way to be as an artist and musician.

BJ: Exactly. I think the traditional pedagogy and historical approaches have reduced the ability for us to be able to “listen” to these other voices throughout the history of electronic music. The particular nuances and gestures of female artists throughout history, are not given the context in which to read and understand their contributions. As we move towards a teaching space where there is an emphasis of the materiality of sound, it’s relational qualities, and the principles of critical listening, we are better able to understand a pedagogy of flow. By framing education and history as having multiple perspectives and positions, we validate artists who conceive of themselves in multiple instead of singular identities. I think culturally we are moving towards linking individual authenticity and history, experience and knowledge, as a basis in which to understand contemporary sound practices. This opens a space for those who have been ignored in history, a rupture in that Western ideology of progress and linear time.

Right now, it feels like a crucial task for humans to start thinking this way about ourselves and each other. I would even suggest that this clumsy medium of the Internet has contributed to this idea of rooting knowledge in the individual experience, or at least positing individual experience as a valid ontological reference point in which to consider art, culture, education, politics etc. I mean there is a real concern that any methodology posited seems too narrow these days - that the library of human endeavour that is the Internet - does often provide all these forking alternatives to whatever is being established. It’s kind of amazing how quickly a position can move and shift now.

To me this becomes the responsibility that teachers, curators, artists and humans must undertake, to balance the need to curate and focus what we pay attention to and share with others with the flexibility and porosity to move and develop any position. To nurture the possibilities of these subjectivities born in multiplicity and to encourage the work that these viewpoints might create. I think that’s what attracts me to the thinking of Georgina Born, Donna Haraway, Chela Sandoval, a belief that this movement may be restorative, radical, more inventive and more human that we have ever seen before. I think about what it might mean that TECHNE is giving permission for every young woman to go ahead and reinvent the wheel. That there is a need to validate that way of being in the world.  To me, that feels like what liberation in the arts, culture, and society looks like.