- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
Not-noticing is an adaptive necessity of twenty-first century life. In order to make it through the days, we have to not notice so much. This is true of many things, sounds among them.
Two recent examples:
I needed to record the sounds of a forest at dusk. I went to a forest I have gone to many times over a handful of years, one that has always felt quiet and renewing. As soon as I listened through the microphone, however, all I heard was the nearby highway. When I took the headphones off, my mind immediately re-mixed the ambient sounds: the birds and stream and soft leaf rustle were in the foreground, and the highway faded away. With the flattening effect of recording, however, the highway overpowered everything.
And the second: A friend recently joined me in New York. He has lived in many cities, on several continents. We sat down in a tiny intersection park for a break and to decide where to go next, and he said, "I had forgotten about the hum. It's everywhere here." I realized I didn't hear it. When he pointed it out, of course, I heard how loud, how pressing it was. But it's one of the many things I have unconsciously trained myself to not notice.
Samita Sinha and Brian Chase’s This Space slips into the tiny gap between noticing and not noticing and asks us to wait there, to rest there, stay. It opens the border space in consciousness between what we hear and what we sort as inessential, what our minds put in the "harmless background" of the cacophony of our lives. Unlike John Cage's 4’33”, This Space does not ask the background to be the center, it doesn't ask for a full shift of focus to the often unnoticed. Instead, it listens with us in a shared space, and opens up the gap between the heard and unheard for us to step into, to inhabit. In many ways we are relieved of the burden of being an audience, much like the performers are relieved of the burden of performing; we join each other as listeners to or at a specific site.
The present bodies of the performers alert the audience that something is happening. The sounds made by percussion and voice, however, remain on the auditory level of the background noise, though their quality is different. We begin to listen because we see something; as we do so our listening is dispersed evenly over the performers and surroundings. Once I noticed I had been hearing a sound for a while because I heard an echo of it in the percussion; once the voice made a call and response with a young person in the room, weaving his voice into the intentional space of the piece.
This kind of subtlety, the liminal space of existing on and in the borders between what we habitually ignore and what we acknowledge as worthy of our attention, is an essential skill to develop in our increasingly fragmented and excessively globalized lives. One of the ways that systematic or normative difficulties persist is that so many can sort these issues into the "harmless background" category. A great number of the troubles of contemporary life that we relegate to that category determine our position within complex and ugly systems of power. The skill of slipping between, re-mixing the soundscape to be fully heard, is an abstract means to practice the radical act of fully noticing the world.
R. Armstrong is a semi-nomadic artist and writer with roots in both rural Pennsylvania and New York City. Work explores the taut boundary between what is known and what is unknowable, and the labor involved in shifting this boundary, through sound, objects, text, video, performance, and illogical and futile experimentation. Alluvial detritus can be found at rarmstrongworks.com.