In a Queer Time and Space

In a Queer Time and Space (QTS) ¹ is a collection of sound works-in-progress that assembles memories, places and acoustic abstractions while grappling with the impermanence and fluidity of queer geographies. ² It solicits an invitation to listen to space through and beyond the resonances and reverberations of architectures, foregrounding the stories, sounds and relations that forge queer-feminist social and political space. The listener experiences articulations of queer space and time through the work’s playback in a 360-degree diffusion using ambisonic technology. I elaborate on how and why QTS arose, including several technical facets of its creation, followed by examinations on the themes of queer sound, space and time that the piece provokes.

Two significant and concurrent events led to the creation of this work, the first being my move from London back to Canada after seventeen years. This move encouraged me to reflect on my involvement in a queer-feminist community in the UK that fostered kinship and carved space through organising and activism. The second event was being invited to Murmurs, an unprecedented sound arts residency for women and LGBTQI people held in the arts centre of Betonest, Germany. I began work on QTS by making recordings of two sets of group conversations with close friends in London. We shared a meal, discussing what the notion of queer space has meant to us through revisiting our histories and memories. I then brought these recordings to the Murmurs residency at Betonest, at that time a still partly operational cement factory-cum-art centre in East Germany which has since been phased out of use. I played the recordings of the conversations made in London into the cement factory buildings and recorded them again, so they took on the acoustics of their new space. I then played the new recordings and recorded them again, repeating the process five times. Each iteration became more and more abstract as subsequent recordings took on the resonant and reverberant layers of the cavernous space.

Alvin Lucier developed this rerecording technique with I Am Sitting in a Room (1969). When I taught this approach to students, I would mistakenly refer to it as I am a Man Sitting in a Room, subconsciously channeling my experiences as a sound engineer, musician and sound artist wherein the majority of my interactions were primarily with straight cis-men sitting in rooms—the engineers of musicians, sound and technology. ³ Reconceiving the man in the room as a collective of diversely gendered queer people, who are part of an ambisonic sound installation that is engineered and composed by a female-genderqueer person, disrupts the cis-male grip on technology, sound engineering and acoustics. I Am Sitting in a Room is a process composition that evolves in linear time, introducing the listener to the original recording followed by each subsequent iteration of rerecording, recorded and mixed in stereo. QTS extends Lucier’s composition both aesthetically and temporally by seamlessly cross-fading different iterations of rerecordings, allowing some conversations to become intelligible while other sections are engulfed by low frequency resonance and the shimmering, metallic reverberation of the cement factory buildings. Furthermore, QTS expands Lucier’s stereo technique by making each iteration of recording in surround, which provides a more detailed translation of acoustics and a 360-degree listening experience in ambisonic playback.

I had recently been introduced to the surround format—ambisonics—and was amazed at the possibilities it offered for a more comprehensive spatial rendering that could be utilised in recording, composing and diffusion. Having previously composed in surround formats such as 5.1 and an octagon 8.1, I encountered certain spatial drawbacks and limited playback when transferring to other types of systems. The flexible surround playback options and increasing use of ambisonics technology encouraged me to experiment with this diffusion. Ambisonics has existed since the 1970s but did not achieve much commercial notice until recently—once patents expired in 2010 and multiple companies began utilising the technology, reducing the cost of surround microphones. The drop in price and the capacity to facilitate audio for Virtual Reality and 3D audio for video games have led to a proliferation of the format.

Regarding the themes of the work, it is salient to recognise that sound is necessarily both a space and time phenomenon. I first examine the role of space in the study of acoustics in order to clarify some of the compositional dynamics present in QTS. In acoustics, ‘space’ has a specific usage, functioning as a stand-in for a room or specific architectural acoustics. For example, reverberation is the sound that is reflected back to the listener from walls or a natural structure in addition to the direct sound that emanates from a source. Reverberation allows the listener to aurally perceive the materiality of the ‘space’ or architectural acoustics—the size, shape and type of surfaces. Every room or ‘space’ produces resonant frequencies that can result in a boost to a specific band of frequencies that are sounded in that space. In playing back and rerecording the conversations of QTS, the new recordings took on the reverberance and resonant frequencies of the cement factory ‘space’. The resonance is doubled on every playback, resulting in the low frequency droning that can be heard throughout the two rerecording compositions.

In a Queer Time and Space pushes beyond acoustic understandings of space to contemplate spatial practice and lived space, highlighting how queer space is complicated by its inherent impermanence. Due to gentrification and changes to squatting laws that have criminalised much of squatting in the UK, the number of dedicated non-commercial and commercial LGBT resource centres, social spaces, bars and nightclubs is dwindling. They are significantly less available to women, trans and non-binary people, and even less available to queer and trans people of colour. Queers often need to temporarily make use of straight nightclubs or bars for one night a week or month, which comes with negotiating straight club promoters and bar staff. Sara Ahmed (2006) describes how bodies gain their orientations through the repetition of acts; they are encouraged in particular directions socially and through habituation, reinforcing particular orientations while simultaneously delimiting what is out of reach. Spaces give shape to the bodies that inhabit them, and ‘… bodies are sexualized through how they inhabit space’ (ibid., p. 67). From this understanding of orientation, we can examine how the social and familial influence of heterosexuality produces normative behaviours regarding sexuality and gender identity. At the same time, we see the tremendous value in spaces that afford place for people to form non-cis-hetero orientations, meet with other queer people and find respite from assessing the potential danger of demonstrating public affection or simply being a visibly queer person existing in public. What are the impacts of a liminal existence? What is lost when communities are forced to form themselves online and less in person? How does online activism transition to physical collective organising when there is a lack of physical spaces to congregate? How does this impact on our interactions from the social to the political? One of the pieces of QTS, entitled ‘Elcot Avenue’, is named after a collective queer houseshare and community hub of five years. One of the conversations recorded in London was with my former housemates of this Peckham home that held benefit cafes, parties and political meetings, as well as hosting touring bands, people in between homes and visitors. A lack of meaningful legal tenant rights in the UK meant we were forced to vacate the property due to exorbitant rent increases demanded by the landlord in efforts to capitalise on the upcoming arrival of new transit connections. People disperse, time passes and queer space continues to be troubled by ephemerality.

As sonic theory and discourse are heavily skewed in favour of space, I want to deliberate on the theme of time that the work stimulates. Two of the pieces of QTS centre on collective remembrances that are resituated (or cross-faded) across different time periods (or moments of rerecording), allowing for aesthetic and temporal shifts in the sound that result in an increase or decrease of the intelligibility of the voices. This induces an examination of queer pasts via non-linear means, formulating reconfigurations that allow the past to take on new forms and meanings as they intermingle with the present. This engages J. Halberstam’s (2005) theorisations of queer time as non-linear and not tethered to reproduction, a friction to progress narratives that opens possibilities of new ways of being and living. Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman’s (2017, p. 113) queer-feminist, anti-colonial approach to walking methodology ‘considers how the future is implicated in the past and the present, through different conceptualizations of time. Here time shifts from heteronormative colonial chronos, to vectors, hauntings, spectres, regions, and relations’. Echoing these framings of queer time, I experienced circular relationships to memory and temporal rifts while composing this work. Time was continually folding in on itself across locations: memories from more than a decade ago recounted in a London kitchen in 2017 were made all the more poignant as I was formalising my plans to leave London; the London stories resounded in the cement factory, each iteration comprised of the sound of the proceeding recordings; my formation of new bonds during the residency and reconnection with an old friend; and finally, by the time I began composing with the sound of these compounded memories in Canada after having lived away for so long, time was spilling everywhere.

In addition to liminal time and space, QTS is also concerned with liminal sound. It asks us how we can conceive of sound queerly, beyond only the strange. To address this, I return to ambisonics and the modes by which sound can be diffused for the listener. Unlike stereo and other multichannel surround formats, ambisonic channels do not carry dedicated speaker signals such as Left, Right, Rear Left and Rear Right, but rather encapsulate the total sound field as positions in a WXYZ configuration, offering axes of height in addition to width, depth and pressure. To reconceptualise sonic diffusion queerly, we could equate a stereo diffusion of left and right both to the rigid gender binary of male and female, as well as to normative conceptions of sexuality as exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. Bisexuality functions as the phantom centre position where audio is diffused equally out of left and right speakers.

LGBTI identities and their respective understandings of gender and sexuality could be likened to surround formats, such as 5.1 or 7.1, where there are multiple speakers, each with its dedicated channel, with options to diffuse sound on spectrums between these positions. As sound may be diffused out to any position between two or more speakers, this offers clear distinctions between gender and sexuality, mirroring the possibility that someone may be gay as well as transgender. It should be noted that most common surround formats prioritise the front speakers (left, centre, right) and assume the listener to be facing forward. LGBT+ identities also prioritise concerns centred at the ‘front’ of the acronym—those who are easily identifiable as gay or to a lesser extent lesbian—while simultaneously reinforcing privileged gender, race, class and (dis)ability positions. Typical surround formats do not encompass height, and folding these kinds of surround formats into other types of diffusions is usually a complex and somewhat unsatisfactory process.

As ambisonics eschews rigid speaker signals, it operates queerly—offering modes of recording and composing with sound that can be decoded or ‘performed’ to suit any listening experience: stereo, binaural, quad, 5.1 or any other customisable arrays including those that involve height. Differing from cinema formats like 5.1 and 7.1 that prioritise sound as coming from the front, ambisonics allows for sound to be diffused both vertically and isotropically, inviting a remarkably immersive sound experience. Ambisonic’s 360-degree diffusion parallels the queerness of the multifaceted and interdisciplinary qualities of sexuality that Roderick Ferguson (2004) illustrates as a network of relations. Sexuality becomes understood as ‘a variety of deployments in which we might observe its constitution through discourses of race, gender, and class’ (ibid., p. 99). Ambisonics offers possibilities for sound that echoes queer concepts of gender and sexuality that may be identified not only as fixed points or as fluid, hybrid and non-linear but resoundingly also as coincident to other aspects of identity. Queer activism advocates for systemic change and the forging of solidarities through listening and acting beyond the kind of LGBT rights-based activism that ends with inclusion and representation.

Queer political commitments emerge when listening to and with the margins—to the human voices that are attenuated because of structural oppression and to the margins of sonic environments—of the human and more-than-human—that go unheard by many people or require specialist microphones to hear. I am drawn to the non-normative ways a sound can be transformed, performed and heard, especially in the recording process, which is frequently mistaken as an objective or neutral process. QTS stresses these processes in its queer approach to recording through the use of specialist microphones and extended techniques to record the walls, surfaces and buildings of the cement factory, as well as the queer collective living and cement-making work undertaken on-site.

The almost post-industrial setting of the cement factory of Betonest and the seemingly pastoral East German countryside were sure to become integrated in the work. I spent many hours listening to and walking through the factory grounds, a window into the industrial economy of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), now very much assimilated into the unified, capitalist Germany of today. Layers of intricate histories arose in conversations with Miriam Schickler during and after the residency:

I felt very ambiguous about the whole thing, like we were gentrifying the place, but then again when I think of East Germany I quickly think of Nazis and right-wing populism, so I loved the sight of bare-breasted queers sunbathing outside, it was glorious! Though then again, nudist culture is very GDR. Anyhow, lots of interesting connections and ambiguities there. ⁴

Inspired by my introspective excursions around the cement factory and a teenage encounter with Einstürzende Neubauten banging on cement piping in a tunnel on Canada’s music video channel, I spent time consciously activating the cement factory space with my voice and the many discarded pieces of scrap left lying around. The result of this, ‘Glass and metal’, took as its sound source these very materials. Rather than recording them in surround, I used spatialisation plug-ins to position the stereo recordings across the ambisonic field, making use of the 360-degree axes, to add movement to the sounds in the composition.

In addition to the overarching themes of the work, I gathered inspiration not only from shared time with my loved ones but also from Halberstam (2005) asking us to think beyond queer as subject to a queer relationality, offering possibilities for new understandings of time and space. Gender and sexuality are often relegated to the personal realm of identity politics rather than engaged at the global level of political economies. Halberstam (ibid., p. 6) looks beyond local queer place-making activities to ‘the production of queer counter-publics’, troubling local and global binaries of place and space. A queer counter-public is at the heart of QTS, and though its political affiliations are not presented, at least so far, in easily digested sound bites, political discussions haunt the work, emerging periodically in fragments. This can be likened to the effects of activism, the impacts of which are not always immediately transparent but then gradually we see a shift in discourse, public opinion or a political turning of tides. As political resistance often feels buried in media noise, I wanted to make apparent the political dynamics of the community(s) I have participated in. Over the last two decades, most of us who participated in QTS were part of radical queer and political circles in London. A radical queer politic emerged as a critique of the mainstream lesbian and gay community’s shift to a rights-based discourse comprising struggles for: gay marriage, gays in the police and gays in the military. Jasbir K. Puar (2017 [2007]) describes these rights-based discourses as contributing to homonationalism, the manner by which the state absorbs the concern of minorities such as homosexuals for political gain in order to consolidate a ‘liberal’ nationalism. This ‘liberal’ nationalism often is wielded at the expense of ‘illiberal’ nations and their citizens, with no contextualisation of the histories of homophobic colonial laws and Christian missionary evangelism that imposed European sexual morals onto colonised peoples.

The people with whom I made recordings are not only very dear to me, but they have also been inspirational in their activism that cuts across identity politics, making the links that capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy and the cis-hetero patriarchy leverage each other to further amalgamate power and resources. This activism was manifested in resisting the commercialisation and co-option of Pride events and offering alternatives; fundraising for and solidarity with marginalised LGBT communities globally; mobilising against austerity, racism, police violence, immigration detention centres and the prison industrial system; organising grassroots trans-inclusive feminist healthcare; advancing labour rights including sex worker rights; and attending demonstrations along with working the olive harvest in Palestine. And we could also throw a great party! Moreover, in rethinking hierarchies of activism, I want to acknowledge that much cooking, cleaning and caring was done to facilitate these activities, and I want to make a special mention of everyone who has supported movements by contributing ‘care’ work. Also, in resounding the activism of these communities, I do not mean to obscure their failings. Political organising is equally susceptible, as is any group of people, to interpersonal struggle, hierarchy and bias despite fighting against structural oppression. Ultimately, I would like to think that much has been learnt amongst us and within groups with which we have worked. Most certainly, reflection and time simultaneously offer hindsight and foresight that are valuable gifts we carry into the future.

In a Queer Time and Space expands sonic boundaries in its use of surround technology and extended recording techniques while raising important questions related to space and time. At the heart of this work is how these themes encourage us to contemplate our relationships and the state of being in relation. Perhaps more than ever, it is important to acknowledge that the connection between transformative change and strong communities is both contingent and reciprocal.