I just came across this website, advertising LyreBird, a contribution by product designer Jessica Corr, to the Conflux festival in New York last September.

Like its organic counterpart, the digital pendant registers its sonic surroundings with small solos that it repeats in other, new surroundings. Corr has designed a small USB digital recorder necklace that records 1 to 2 minutes of sound randomly as the wearer walks around in the city/festival, up to a total of 60 minutes. These soundbite recordings can then be uploaded and listened to as - the designer proposes - souvenirs of the city experience.

It seems like a playful parallel to Deleuze & Guattari’s quirky ponderings on birdsong and territoriality in ‘the music chapter’ of Mille Plateaux, namely, ‘1837: de la ritournelle’. D&G go into the territorial aspect of birdsong at some length, starting with “the role of the refrain has often been emphasized: it is territorial, a territorial assemblage. Bird songs: the bird sings to mark its territory” and moving by way of the 18 birdsongs in Messiaen’s Chronochromie, through the wren’s “music box refrain”, functions of nesting, courtship and pairing, via Australian grass finches and chaffinches, to the stagemaker*.

Whilst they acknowledge that “many birds are receptive to the songs of other species, if they are exposed to them during the critical period, and will produce the alien songs later on”, they don’t cite the example of the lyrebird. But as with most concepts in French post-structuralist thinking, the Deleuzian motif of territorialisation is linked by a nice dichotomy to its opposite, deterritorialisation. This seems to be neatly manifested in Corr’s LyreBird, where the main outcome is the take-away aspect of the recordings, the fact that they can orientate one’s memory of a specific urban area, and a specific festival experience, through repeatable soundclips.

Indeed, the Conflux festival is partnered with rhizome.org - an arts network that’s about as Deleuzian as it gets - so this is probably not too much to read into Corr’s audio-souvenir pendant.

*I only have D&G’s book in English (’A thousand plateaus: capitalism & schizophrenia’), so I have no idea what the level of wordplay is in the name of “the stagemaker, the magic bird or bird of the opera”). Does anyone have the French word for this bird, or an alternative English translation?

Dette indlæg blev skrevet fredag, den 14. december 2007 kl. 16:41 og er gemt i sonic postcards. Du kan følge kommentarerne til indlægget via følgende feed RSS 2.0. Du kan efterlade en kommentar, eller sende trackback fra din egen side.