Victi-ry of Will, the Deafthetics of Bias

Deaf, the victinnitus grey between white sound and black silence and sound and silence, draped in the grey coma-flage of a deaf clef where there are no choices but only the victintinnabulations of realities thought better left unsaid as histories, told and read in black-and-white, say their piece in the ‘technicolor’ that is the black and white of only black or white.

Victi-ry of Will’s source material includes rare found audio of all that which remains of a film entiteled  Sieg des Willens (Berlin circa 1944/45) based on the autobiography, Nun Erst Recht, by one of Germany’s most interesting, interwar operatic performers.

Kammersaenger Fritz Schaetzler achieved success as a stage performer in spite of physical disabilities which remained for years hidden from the public.  Schaetzler’s was life dumbed by the deafening greys of camouflaged disabilities, dislocated identities and hidden messages and remains shrouded in the muted grey of history’s pursuit of the clear cut, the black and white.

A guide/mother video, inspired by and appropriating violent images by Goya, was created and  then destroyed after a seed/child sound file had been generated. This file was then passed sequentially among three sound artists. Employing the inherent deafness of a Chinese Whisper, each artist worked independently, and un-hearing at his respective aesthetic location, progressively distorting the seed/child file according to biases. This skewed sound file was then edited and configured by further dislocating the final seed/child sound image through various types of spatialization (swastika traceries, automatic calligraphic patterns, arabesques, spastic gestures, violent jabbing, etc.) into an eight channel environment.

This work is made up of four stereo tracks played simultaneously into eight speakers. Live diffusion on the mixer is possible as a performance option. There is no preferred ‘sweet spot’ for listening. Listeners will receive different biased experiences depending on their locations:

Deafnesses as partial understandings;
Deafnesses as biased dis-locations;
Deafnesses as disguised depths;
Deafnesses as camouflaged identities;
Deafnesses as aesthetic deaths reborn;
Deafnesses as powerless information redacted.

(MLuM)