Faculty of Art

Integrated Media

Aliyah Aziz

"Everything Has a Voice" - Multimedia Performance

Multimedia Performance using: Video Signal, Cassette tape, Electromagnetic frequencies, Looping, and Spoken word poetry.Full duration: 7 minutes and 14 secondsThis is a clip of the documented score “Everything Has a Voice”, which is part of a larger mulitimedia performance series titled “Sandpaper Hammock” in which Aliyah plays improvised sound compositions of technological artifacts. The series consists of seven performance scores, each with different parameters and original poetry recitations.

“For this work, Aliyah has designed instrumentation techniques and built “Listening Gloves” which contain probes that allow her to utilize sounds from old CRT monitors, a camera, and other electric signals in a process of amplification; tuning into technology like she is listening to its pulse, as though it were a living being, not to be controlled, but to be experienced– inviting audiences into this act of deep listening through confrontation. Aliyah channels static as noise of resistance; a sonic reminder of the friction that exists between the surface and depth of our technological interactions.Using audio as a material for storytelling, Aliyah invites embodied feeling rather than centering language to explore sound as an alternative form of relationality and presence. By using sounds associated with discomfort as a medium for the narrative structure, she interrogates the violent ‘sanding down’ of the racialized ‘Other’, a reductive ‘smoothening’ of racialized pain that is perpetuated through our technology and media. Aliyah connects to sound as a ghost: not as a dead static force, but as a living archive of its source, a haunting extension of a voice that can be felt.”