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Notes on SoundBonnie Jones

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Notes on Notes on Sound, July 18, 8:34pm

Isaac Linder

Paul de Man begins his landmark text, Allegories of Reading, with a cheeky epigraph from the philosopher

Blaise Pascal. It reads, "Quand on lit trop vite ou trop doucement on nentend rien " (When you read too

quickly or too slowly you hear nothing). The epigraph is cheeky because in the course of de Man's work he

avoids elucidating at what speed one would one would be able to properly hear the texts to which they areattending. For de Man the force of literary tropesthe way they seduce and structure their multiple

readingsrelies on the intimate proximity of figures and properties in the relational linkages of a text. Textual

spatialization trumps and belies the importance of the tempo and temporality.

Enter the "site"specific text videos by the KoreanAmerican writer and improvising musician, Bonnie

Jones. In these works, unique to the venues that have solicited them, the time of writing is captured and

stored in a complex digital apparatus in the first instance, along with all of the hesitations, repetitions, and

sudden keystrokes attending its production. Speed is proscribedwritten in advanceand the time (five

minutes and sixteen seconds) ofNotes on Soundis spatialized into an affective mesh that ensnares the viewer

in a doppler effect created between the speed of writing and the speed of reading. We're caught in the tempo

of Jones' decisions (that is, unless we fast forward, pause, or rewind the text; unless it freezes or takes

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long to load). We find ourselves subvocalizing along to a deceptively simple prompt ("please now together count

back from one hundred") as the phonetic units that comprise the video permute into polyphony and warp like theminimalist pixelations of a concrete poem into the grammar of the Notes(that is, unless we are reading along out

loud). We are forced to feel our form of reading as it unfolds, in a manner arguably more proliferate and

protocolized than would have been known in Pascal's time. Would he have been able to hear anything?

With its understated use of syntax and short-circuitingNotes on Soundis without a soundtrack, but by no

means silent: Meditation on counting, on the sound of counting, and what counts as sounding; on the way we

count on sound as a pre-text for things to ring true, as they do in the famously less calculable arenas of, say,

emotion and poetry.Notes on Soundis a record of these. If I become more emotional about this it is only because

it forces us to hear her.