Sight Reading

Sight Reading explores the relationship of silent reading and the spoken word, linking sight and sound through interactions of eye movements and recordings of creative writing drawn from the Butler Argus, a literary journal created by patients of Butler Psychiatric Hospital from 1940 to 1945.  These current-day recordings of the patients’ writing were modified via convolution to sound as if they were spoken within the hospital itself.  Built using custom Max/MSP software and a face-mounted webcam, the system detects the user’s eye movements and triggers various recordings depending on the location of the pupil. Closing the eye triggers the sound of the artist’s own heartbeat. Manipulation of both direction and speed of movement results in a spoken-word, interactive sound piece in the tradition of Pamela Z, Imogen Heap, and Clarice Assad, all of whom work with modification of the voice using the body, and Jack Hamill, who specifically uses the eye to control (non-verbal) sound, while the user’s own voice remains silent. Though many of the words in Sight Reading remain intelligible, the overall impact of the piece may also be likened to sound poetry, as originally performed by Hugo Ball during World War I, and more contemporarily by Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin in their audiovisual interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate. 

 Expanding the existing practice of sound and vocal art into the arena of Narrative Medicine, Sight Reading brings to life the writings of mental health patients in a format that itself speaks to the experience of trauma and its treatment, especially EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) as a means for healing. Further, the specific use of the eye as a means for controlling sound recreates the lack of agency and control experienced by patients in a mental hospital setting, as the eye is subject to both voluntary and involuntary movements, and holding the eye steady in one position is physically challenging. Therefore, the constantly changing voices and inability to fully hear any of the recordings in entirety echoes the experience of feeling unheard and lacking full autonomy over one’s mind and body, the bombardment of external sounds and voices one experiences in the hospital, and the internal experience of chaos and overwhelm, perhaps involving internal voices as well. Within the piece, relief from these voices is felt only by closing the eye, which refocuses from the mind onto the body by generating the sound of a heartbeat. In addition to this auditory experience, the screen also displays an extreme close-up image of the user’s moving eye, alongside a camera-generated view of the lighted pupil being tracked. Humans typically do not view their eyes in such close proximity, disconnected from the face and body, nor do the movements of the eyes typically influence sound, especially the voices of others. The unsettling nature of seeing one’s own roving eye, with its movements directly triggering heard voices, in some sense mimics the dissociative and hallucinatory experiences that can accompany mental illness. Thus through both auditory and visual means, using the patients’ own words and the user’s own eye, Sight Reading viscerally recreates the patients’ perspective, enabling those who do not share in these experiences directly, including medical and mental health providers, to better understand and relate to patients.