You are located in the position of the Spectator

realization of Alvin Lucier, I am Sitting in a Room, made in collaboration with Ethan Hayden, as Null Point (2022)

The 1970 score I am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier notates processes for facilitating sonic encounters between speech and indoor space through recording technology. The score specifies that speech featured in the piece might be a reading of a text provided in the score, which describes the process of the piece’s production (“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now”), or “any other text of any length:”

The present project is a détournment of Lucier’s score, for purposes of excavating sedimented regimes of Spectatorship. This realization provides a new spoken text for the score, a text which thematizes the necropolitical work of Spectatorship. Spectatorship, as it developed in “high” art fields in the late eighteenth century, can be positioned within what Kyla Schuller calls a necropolitics of sensation. This politics understands “civilized bodies as receptive to their milieu and able to discipline their sensory susceptibility and as such in possession of life and vitality that required protection from the threat posed by primitive bodies deemed to be impulsive and insensate, incapable of evolutionary change, whose existence was very close to running out of time.” As David Lloyd has argued, in aesthetic writings from Kant to Adorno, Spectatorship participates in these politics by constructing the Spectator’s rational mastery of sensory experience over and against the discursive foil of the sensation-mired Savage.

The present realization converses with how language underwrites Spectatorship’s necropolitical work. In musical Spectatorship, on one hand, exegetical language in the form of titles, program notes, criticism, and post-concert banter plays a crucial role in facilitating the Spectator’s claims of distinction with respect to the Savage, that is, its claims to know the sensory contents of performances. Exegetical language aids this endeavor by turning its focus towards packaging sequences of sensations as Works, while simultaneously turning its focus away from the position of the Spectator. On the other hand, the Spectator’s assertions of mastery over Works depends upon the positioning of exegetical language “outside” of the “purely musical” domain of the Work. Incipient regimes of musical Spectatorship, gripped by Gothic anxieties about reason, understood language within music as a threat to Spectatorial mastery, and in turn favored textless instrumental music. That is, the Spectator’s mastery over the Work-Object depends upon musical material’s docility, a situation destabilized by the presence of language “inside” the Work.