[ISEA98] Panel: Andrea Nagy – Technological Embodiment of the Female Body and Voice via Radio Transmission

Panel Statement

Panel: Bio-Architectures, Virtual Cities: The Revolutionary Human-Machine Community

This paper’s aim is to comment theoretically on Andrea Nagy’s performance art practice and its delivery is as a sound installation. It explores sound’s ability to diffuse through boundaries; either material or abstract and to enter a space where physically the human body is restricted. It acknowledges that sound is both produced and received by the human body and includes arguments surrounding the location of power systems within an electronic culture and the creative attempts of performance artists to address such issues. The author considers how these principles of sound may be of advantage to western women. How can a woman use her body, her voice and sound technology; in a time-based art form without relegating her body and voice into the realm of the pre-symbolic (as defined by Lacan) and so into the realm of non-meaning? By analysing the way the female voice is and has been portrayed through recording and live radio transmission, the author will discuss how recording speech is a way of immortalising. A form of eternal life through the continuum of replaying the recorded voice and attempt to show how such a representation always falls short of being.

  • Andrea Nagy (UK), Artist/academic