THIS IS NOT MY VOICE SPEAKING
performance/installation
By Ant Hampton and Britt Hatzius
The audience, renamed 'One' and 'Zero', enter a room and find it filled with different devices. To some these may be old friends, to others completely alien: turntable, slide projector, 16mm film... One and Zero - digital tourists in an analogue arcade - are led by a mercurial instruction 'manual' whose identity is split between its eponymous hands and an accompanying female voice. Following the instructions results in the voice jumping from cassette to vinyl and, eventually, being synchronised with what appears to be old 16mm footage of a bearded newsreader.
'...Not My Voice...' moves the audience-performer around within three communicative elements forming an uncanny triangulation: the human voice, the instruction 'manual' language and physically manifest (last generation) recordable media.
A hilarious and impossible relationship is attempted between the empty, outlined hands we know so well (a 'nobody' we often mimic in order to achieve an operation) and the human voice, which by contrast cannot help but leak identity, liveness; a sense of 'someone there' - no matter how poor the sound quality or 'dirty' the image.
Ant Hampton and Britt Hatzius take another look at the phenomenon of recorded voices and images, refuse to take them for granted and ask, implicitly, how our relationship to them is changing as they shift over to a more 'solid state'. In pressing the button 'now' (more or less), in the dragging of a finger to slow the record, a bit, and in the unsettled clatter of so many frames of delicate film passing per second, 'One' and 'Zero' find themselves closer to the clumsiness and steady deterioration of their own not-so-digital bodies.
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Presented at and developed during the festival ALMOST CINEMA at Vooruit, Ghent, October 2011.
