NOMEDA AND GEDIMINAS URBONAS

Provoked by the notion of “the absence of women’s voices”, the Ruta Remake project works to map out relations concerning a politics of identity in the Lithuania of today. It seeks out representations that do not revert to the securities offered by nationalist stereotypes, but are linked to the creation of identities in the search for ways of shaping new options. These are suggested as the interplay between forms, ranging from the remainders of the “Homo Sovieticus” through to the Modern Capitalistic Model.

INTERVIEWS WITH WOMEN

Writers, linguists, semioticians, music theorists, singers and activists joined the Ruta Remake project to investigate the role of the woman’s voice in the construction of a “victim scenario” pertaining to the philosophy of Transactional Analysis. Trying to find the body in the voice and isolating it with a degree of utopian pleasure, they decode the dichotomy between sound and voice, voicing and language, “becoming” and “being.” Through the shared recollections of media they build a pathway to navigate from the past to the present. The resulting “Voice Archive” reflects a social construction and metaphysical qualities, featuring sets of samples ranging from speech and narratives to chanting and songs.

PATTERN

Participants Ruta Baciulyte, a psychologist, and Ruta Gostautiene, a musicologist/semiotician, suggested two methods of re-collecting the voices. These methods lead from two simultaneous perspectives. The first routes from the construction of social and behavioral patterns that constitute the present state of mind of the transition period, whereas the second reroutes the initial search from a discussion on the timbre of the voice to writing and on to weaving, where the concept of a soundscape finally grows into a garden of language.

In this context, Ruta Baciulyte and Ruta Gostautiene suggested a specific weaving pattern named “ruta” (Ruta/rue) that refers to a perennial plant with a strong, heavy odor and a bitter taste; also known as the “herb of grace.” In Lithuania, this pattern was imbued with different meanings; over the course of time it has also routed through gardens and common language to become an icon representing virginity and femininity, despite the reputed efficiency of the plant in inducing abortions.

Lithuanian patriarchal tradition has framed a space for the muting of women’s voices; a space that understands the weaving as writing, followed by singing as a way of storytelling. This performative aspect was employed by ideologies to make the woman’s voice represent the motherland, or later to signify the consumer society. While it can be said today that the contemporary spirit of women producers also focuses on the voice, it is a voice in which the oral works to reclaim meanings occupied by a patriarchal society and liberal ideologies.

The “Voice Archive” is understood to shape a geographical terrain formed through samples. In Ruta Remake, the ruta pattern is selected to provide a system for a sound notation, a shuttle for composing the voice threads of the archive as lines of information and as routes, joined in patterns which unravel the relationships between voice and language.

APPARATUS

The investigation of the voicescape leads to the phenomena of an “ether wave,” as suggested by Lev Termin (1896–1980), who created the Thereminvox in 1921. The Thereminvox was one of the first high-frequency electronic instruments, which generated sounds similar to those of singing voices. The beat-frequency audio box emitted a single tone whose pitch and volume were controlled by the motion and proximity of the performer’s hands over and around a circular wire and vertical aerial. The Ruta Remake project focuses on the voice/vox, and begins by updating the original Thereminvox using a “Theramidi” device. This device is designed for a user’s hand to mediate between sets of acoustic samples by using two light-sensitive resistors linked via a midi-interface.

The hand’s movement within light casts shadows, and these register output and representation, the logic being that of an inverted film. The hands re-collect the absence of voices, shaping and creating in such a way that the hand becomes both a mapping and a notation device. Thus the new theramidi-based navigation approaches the user as a performer, charting through the sound archive of voices in real time to weave the dialogue lines into determined patterns that compose a sound fabric.

CONSTRUCTION SITE

As the term “remake” suggests, the work is programmed to subvert existing narratives to operate within a further scenario. The construction site of Ruta Remake in the Secession provides an opportunity to reconstitute the piece by accepting the challenge of symbolic language inherent in Olbrich’s architecture. Ruta Remake defines its own space as a perceptual model that joins together the grounded symptomatic mechanism of the Secession to breed a new scripting pattern. The victory celebrated by the laurel tree growing into the foliage of the dome over and above the building itself, is undermined by the digital strategy of a feminine Ruta plant. The Ruta grows through the cables and wires to the ceiling of the Kreuzraum to return as a reading of the laurel cupola. The voices that chart the walls of the unfolded notation system perform the polyphonic operation that works through analysis of the institutional architecture.

The weaving structure of the Ruta pattern instigates and controls the behaviour of the notation system that transforms the space into an informational model. The script-based logic operating through a midi-controlled apparatus replants the roots of the organic world to transgress the hallucinatory scenario suggested by the underside of the laurel leaves. The control apparatus of the dome is superseded by a set of mechanisms performed by film light, theramidi device, and computer-generated audio pattern as agents which deconstruct the cinematic apparatus from the inside out. A user’s hand moving up into the light and down into the shadows turns the narrative into the script and the place into an operation.

PLAYING RUTA... AND LISTENING

Otto Kränzler

The two sensors of the Theramidi produce 2 MIDI signals: Note-On-Events, conceived as vertical, and volume values, conceived as horizontal (controller 7). Since the incidence of the light and the sensitivity of the sensors are analogue, these tend to be fluctuating and unstable values. A script for Macromedia Director by Steven Greenwood calibrates the Note-On-Events in 13 half-octave steps, corresponding to the 13 layers. The volume values are calibrated to correspond to the spots in the weaving pattern. Allowing for some practice and careful attention to feedback, this makes it possible to perform in a reliable and reproducible way.

Since the weaving pattern involves the representation of a plant, the 63 sound mixes are selected and arranged in such a way that a movement along the plant produces what is perceptible as an auditory process of growth. By means of a dense layering of sounds from each of the 13 categories, the semantic content is suppressed or cancelled out, thus intensifying the phonetic and onomatopoeic mood. This can easily be appreciated by traversing the “empty” parts of the pattern, which correspond to the pure background texture. The lowest layer consists of very breathy, consonant-laden language. Layers 2 to 5 range from poetic language, recitation and bright and excited verbal sounds through to cries without recognizable verbalization. Music is added from layer 6 upwards. The highest level of mixing is reached in layer 10, where the original sound already contains a considerable element of reverb. The final layers consist solely of music, for the most part songs sung by female voices with various accompaniments. After the incessant flood of stimuli of the middle layers, the ultimate layer, 13, involves a return to a gentleness similar to that of the first. In this, something suggestive of a blossom, or of many small blossoms, becomes apparent. The theme of “growth” is handled not so much

associatively or in terms of content, but rather formally, by means of condensing and loosening the fabric of sound. In the word Ruta we hear echoes of the French ROUTE (= road), the English ROOT, and also the German RUTE (= rod), a further reference to the process of weaving. These conceptual associations become programmatic, especially in the context of the suggested method of interweaving. In this case, in contrast to the mixes of John Cage (Fontana Mix, Rozart Mix), the algorithm is no longer used when it comes to performance, since it has already served its purpose in the process of sound composition. Thus, despite various acoustic parallels to aleatoric currents in contemporary music, e.g. in the handling of the parameter of “density”, there is arguably a greater kinship here with the simultaneous compositions of Charles Ives. And aren’t there already some presentiments of sound mixing in Gustav Mahler’s use of off-stage orchestras, cow-bells and other acoustic moods, presentiments that go far beyond older concepts of orchestral mixtures, sound paintings and sound poetry?

The essential difference that sets this apart from reproduced musical works, however, is the fact that in this case the visitor can personally attempt to make the plant grow by playing with the interactive arrangement. For experience, practice, communication? As a question, an experiment, a game? That is up to the individual. The sensors are hardly more difficult to handle than a computer mouse, but they give a clear sense of manually controllable malleability. By gesticulating a sound sculpture in the air, one is playing with the very same medium that carries the sounds to the ear. But it is not a step towards the oft-cited theory of music controlled by the mind (whereby brain signals produce music from a computer). Rather, it is music making with both hands. Not IT plays, but I play. The listener can either make his/her selection with a greater or lesser degree of skill and care, or rest content with what is given by chance. Far away and uninvolved, for periods one feels perfectly content, but one still cannot resist the urge to get involved. Some are lucky, and deliver parcels of precious virtuosity to their fellow beings, parcels consisting of constantly fluctuating, changeable, partly anonymous, partly pseudonymous substance. Others just pass through listening with no particular intentions, as if stroking the surface with their ears. The perfect audience? The performers are our best audience!