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Raphaël Bessette – Wee-ou (Walking Home)
About
Part of: Talking to Each Other: A Collective Sounding Project
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‘Weee-ou’ is an intimate and playful exploration of the fleeting nature of listening and interpreting and searches for possible ways to integrate visual and auditive components in a preoccupation for accessibility. The idea behind the soundpiece came from a desire to untangle an apparent incompatibility between the need for clarity in subtitles and closed captions, and the use of opacity as resistance. On one hand, making sound accessible to the non-hearing would entail finding an exact and objective description of audio. On the other, listening is understood as a subjective experience shaped by memory, culture, and body and where opacity can be a form of resistance to extraction. Bringing together both preoccupations for accessibility with possible open-ended forms, the piece is composed of a recorded soundscape, of three overlapping voices that imitate its sounds, and of a video that shows the handwritten subtitles of each imitation.
Captions
[middle-high pitch voice says, “weeeeeeee-ou”]
[wind in the microphone, voices imitate]
[cars go by, voices imitate]
[our steps tread lightly, voices imitate]
[mumbled speech in the background, voices imitate]
[birds chirp, voices imitate]
[keys tingle, voices imitate]
[a creaking door opens, voices imitate]
[we are home]
Credits
[medium-high pitch voice]
This video was made in the context of a two-week workshop for Talking To Each Other, a multimedia project on the topics of access, disability, and collective sound making. The workshop was facilitated by Piper Curtis and Razan AlSalah. The Talking To Each Other project was directed by Simone Lucas with the Access in the Making Lab and The Feminist Media Studio.