Forget the Labyrinth

Forget the Labyrinth, performance-lecture, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

Scott Benzel, Kathi Schulz, and Alan S. Tofighi

Forget the Labyrinth essay on Substack

From Forget the Labyrinth:

ITC, EVP, Spirit Box, Voicebox, Vocoder, Autotune

Every medium opens up a continuum from technology to magic and back again. Magic is just another name for a future, an as-yet unknown medium, a logic identified by both Arthur C. Clarke — ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic’ — and Samuel R. Delany: ‘At the material level, our technology is becoming more and more like magic.’ — Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun, Adventures in Sonic Fiction

Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) is a rebranding of the earlier parascientific/paranormal research methodology EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomena, which searched electronic signals for communications from the dead. Popularized by Konstantin Raudive’s book Breakthrough, the idea of electronically communicating with the dead surged during the last third of the 20th Century and has recently had a minor resurgence due to television shows featuring the technological investigation of the paranormal. The best known ITC devices, Spirit Boxes, are essentially radio scanners that skip through radio bands at a user-selectable speed.

Per Raudive, electronics signals, especially those on the the radio spectrum, are employed by the dead to communicate with the living. The degraded quality of many of the communications and ‘voices’ were believed by Raudive to be the result not just of the difficulty of communicating from beyond the veil, but also of the degraded, literally dehumanized quality of the dead.

"…Roger Troutman’s voice is all vowel, an eesysquezy squidge of phonoglutamate, voco-concentrate. The synthesizer passes through his vocal tract. […] The vocoder generates a menagerie of machine voices, nonhuman subjects. These voices aren’t anempathetic or robotic. Rather they are disconcertingly oral, larynx machines, synthetic pharynxes that stretch the vowels into plastic."

— Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun, Adventures in Sonic Fiction

The Voicebox, the Vocoder, and Autotune all render the human voice uncanny–robotic, alienized, sometimes angelic. Thenexaggerated use of Autotune in popular music renders the singers’ voice somewhere between Raudive’s dehumanized dead and superhuman. The human voice, the earliest, most basic, universal musical instrument, is transformed into something more or less than human. This technological ‘dehumanization’ or ‘superhumanization’, judging by the popularity of Autotune in popular music, triggers a sort of technojouissance in the listener, whereas its more jarring use–roboticizing, alienizing, or rendering the voice nearly or wholly unintelligible–results in a sense of alienation/alienization that mirrors the claims of ITC/EVP and Raudive’s contention that the dead are literally dehumanized.

Alan S. Tofighi’s Mind Game’d, 2023

Alan S. Tofighi’s performances are “carefully constructed formalizations/realizations of ongoing investigations into anomalous, epistemologically marginal phenomena and the subcultures/epistemic bubbles surrounding them, often punctuated by strange personal experiences and anecdotes, highly subjective accounts, obsessions.”¹ Mind Game’d, 2023, filters Tofighi’s research into predictive technology and the 20th Century “Psychic Cold War” between the U.S. and Soviet Union (including Operations Grillflame, Stargate, and other “remote viewing” projects, Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Lab (PEAR Lab) etc.) through a variety of voice-altering vocal devices–primarily a vocoder and a noise-gate–to startling, sometimes near-unintelligible effect. Tofighi’s conflation of voice-altering electronics and Cold War-era state-sponsored psychic experimentation is apt. Per Helen Sword:

Numerous scholars have noted the historical and thematic parallels between the rise of spiritualism in the late nineteenth century and the simultaneous development of new communications technologies, including mass-circulation newspapers, the telegraph, and wireless radio. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded by scientists who hoped to find material explanations for spiritualist phenomena, and spiritualists typically employed (and employ to this day) scientific, highly technical language to explain the mechanics of spirit communication.

The video accompanying/augmenting the Mind Game’d performance is punctuated by diagrams and film clips illustrating Tofighi’s semi-intellible speech. Throughout the performance, he pulls objects related to the subject at-hand from from his coat pockets: a laser pointer, various unrecognizable eletronics, culminating with a random-number generator which he contemplates momentarily and unceremoniously discards…

As Time Splinters into Zero and One, 2023, Kathi Schulz’ performance Therianthropy / Web Archeology

ANTHROZOOMORPHIC IDENTITIES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, Venetia Delano Robertson:

"Cultures worldwide have shape-shifters in their mythologies: the kitsune of Japan, the selkie of Scottish and Icelandic legend, the nahual of Mesoamerica, the Norse berserkers or úlfhéðnar, and of course the lycanthrope, or werewolf, from Europe. In addition, Paul Christian, without much explanation or ceremony, lists the werejaguar and werealligator of West Africa, the weretiger in India, the werecoyote in America, the werejackal in Egypt, and the weredingo in Australia.

Modern Therianthropes reference the mythical figure of the animal-human shape-shifter by calling themselves “shifters” or, sometimes, “weres,” evoking the most famous transmogrifying creature in the Western imagination, the werewolf. The recurring motif of cross-species transformation is found in the oldest recorded story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, fragments of which date as far back as 2150 BCE.

The label “Therianthrope” and the Therianthropy movement are first and foremost concerned with identity, an identity that is particularly complex because it is both hybrid and protean. The Therianthrope is a “beast-human” but also a “shifter,” which suggests a state of flux. This fragmentation of identity is one of the “dilemmas of the self ” that Anthony Giddens feels late (or post) modernity has instigated.

The Internet with its expressive capacities, according to psychologist Sherry Turkle, is “contributing to a general reconsideration of traditional, unitary notions of identity.” The complex nature of the Therianthrope, so often mediated online, is indicative of this shift towards the fragmentary self, but Therians seem to revel in the faultlines."

Kathi Schulz’ As Time Splinters into Zero and One suggests Turkle’s “general reconsideration of traditional, unitary notions of identity.” through the use of Snap, Tiktok, and Instagram filters and the still-accessible “voices” emanating from “dead” websites — sites built on dead platforms, employing outdated protocols, sites that haven’t been maintained or updated by their authors in decades…

Throughout the performance, Schulz live-swaps Snapchat filters, assuming a staggering variety of personae while scrolling through an array of “dead” websites – all locked into the aesthetics, concerns, and protocols of bygone web eras. The fragmentation is furthered by her poetic, sometimes ‘disconnected’ speech. Schulz — covered in a blanket, clutching a phone– lies on the floor in front of the projection screen, her filter-altered face projected above her prone body, while her strangely disembodied voice resonates through the speakers.

Per Venetia Delano Robertson:

Fragmentation is translated into liminality, making the Therian not just a shape-shifter but one who is, as Victor Turner said, “betwixt and between,” a walker between worlds, or as Therian writer Quil muses, with “one paw in the galaxies, one paw on the earth.”