Voice and uncertainty: processes of voice in artists’ nonfiction moving image

Abstract

Voice is an inconstant yet constantly performative material; it is our internally-housed, liminal technology. ‘Processes of voice’ is the term I develop throughout the text of this thesis to articulate materialities of voice and methods of address within processes of practice in artists’ moving image that ‘give voice’ to material and non-material forms. I interrogate this in relation to key concepts in Philosophy of Mind to address the complex ways in which bodily skills and action inform perception and thought to explore an account of perception and process in relation to voice. I examine the liminal, inconstant, and uncertain in subjective experience, and the ways in which this is extended into the social through a politics of embodied practice harnessed in moving images. I make a case for the uncertain I-voice, which engages the fully embodied and openly subjective, to challenge established narratives and conventions of address, and the power and knowledge dynamics that structure them. I come to focus on the uncertain acousmatic I-voice in moving image, which through its presentness, intimacy and acknowledgement of uncertainty relinquishes the acousmêtre’s threat of control to share a liminal territory of destabilized authority with the viewer. This is also explored in and through my own moving image work, A Desire For Organic Order (2015), a single screen video, which contributes to the overall thesis.