Framing Statement for 'See What I'm Saying' (self portraits)

A series of 'sonic self portraits'

Working with the Futurist Carlo Carra's manifesto of sound paintings as a base, my 'sonic self portraits' were created with the following ideas in mind

“Abstract plastic wholes, corresponding not to our sight but to the sensations which derive from sounds, noises, smells and all the unknown forces that surround us.

These polyphonic and polyrhythmic abstract plastic wholes correspond to a requirement of inner enharmonics that we Futurist painters believe to be indispensable to pictorial sensibility.

These plastic wholes have a mysterious fascination and are more meaningful than those created by our visual and tactile senses, being closer to our pure plastic spirit.

We Futurist painters maintain that sounds noises and smells are incorporated in the expression of lines, volumes and colors just as lines, volumes and colors are incorporated in the architecture of a musical work”.

The portraits themselves reflect the mood conveyed in each spoken piece and a single piece of text or idea that stood out from each piece as a whole.

The idea of a 'sonic self portrait' was created with the idea of profiling in social media in mind; where one positions oneself in a certain light to a chosen number or unlimited number of people as they wish to be seen. Reflective of the historical self portrait or indeed of the idea of portraiture as a whole, the notion of a 'profile of self' seemed somehow incomplete to me as a sound artist without a sonic tag or statement to underline the individual's identity. While most people are happy to place themselves in these environments with a multitude of textual instances and pictures to affirm the personality and lifestyle they wish to convey, the lack of spoken word constitutes to my mind a true oversight when it comes to expression of the self.

I decided therefore to ask people to consider what they would say if they were asked to profile themselves using only voice. This idea was met with a lot of resistance until I put the idea into the context of the social media profile. Once collected, I used the audio files and some spectrogram software to create a visual of the voices on my recorder. I have not included the audio for the finished products as the participants were so wary of committing their voices at all, I felt it would be unethical and would compromise or undermine the idea of the 'sound images'.