The ventriloquial voice: Remediating narrative and structuring the archive in artists’ film and video

Experimental artistic practices have used both live and recorded voices as vehicles for activating memory and political agency throughout the twentieth century. Focussing upon the late 1970s and early 1980s, this 20-minute paper explored the recorded and live voice in performance-based film and video practices. Taking into account the ‘desynchronised’ and ‘defamiliarized’ engagement with self and medium observed and amplified by the recorded voice, evident in artworks such as the Mouth Works series by Stuart Marshall (1976/77), the paper contrasted understanding of recorded with live voices, considering the now defunct Slide/tape (or tape/slide), an educational technology, which became a popular artistic medium briefly in the mid-1980s.

Part of a wider project tracing the overlaps between experimental sound-making and independent film and video practices in London, this discussion (of research in-development) focussed upon how the voice was important to the emergent expanded performance practices of the late-1970s, exploring why Slide/tape as a simultaneously archival (pre-recorded/photographed) and live (performed, played, vocal presentation) had resonance for feminist, Black and activist practices in the UK (such as Marshall; and Black Audio Film Collective). By unpacking the ‘defamailiarsed’ dynamics of the sounded voice – with a focus upon the act of speaking as opposed to the medium-specific materiality of technologies – the paper asked how such actions, which used now non-existent and/or immaterial artforms, relate-to (and are remediated-through the different contexts in which they are shown.