Excerpts from Review of
Shock in the Ear - the installation
"You
are in an intimate theatre of displacement, a contemplative, stylishly
fashioned space yielding to alarms, clocks that lie and multiply, a
phone-call, an ice-flooded mouse-pad, a chorus of voices recollecting
losses of memory and tongue, an elderly voice reliving the shock of
endangered hearing in 1944. You are the performer, Kafka-mode, silently
acting out a scenario of someone else's inventing....You could keep
subjecting yourself to this dark pleasure, never sure if you've heard
the whole story, played every delicious, anxious word....It's nice
to experience an interactive work with sound at its shifting centre,
with inventive mousing, with physical requirements for the performer-user
beyond the mouse, and a fine sense of theatre and collaboration."
from Keith Gallasch, "Condition: Shock of the Ear" RealTime
19 June-July 1997.
Excerpts
from Reviews of
Shock in the Ear --CDROM
"Esthetiquemnt, c'est une des plus belles experiences visuelles de toute la programmation" Michel Belair,"Derives, delires et paranoia", Le Devoir,18 Octobre, 1998, Montreal: review of Media Lounge of Montreal international Festival of new Cinema and new Media (Montreal, October)
"The project ... places sound into the frame for careful scrutiny as the under exploited medium amongst the multi media. Not the sound atmos' afterthought, but the core sound of substance, which attempts to reach the core of your body and your mind with deep vibration and shrill fragment-ation, moving the senses that have become dulled if not entropied." Mike Leggett, Mesh, (#11,1997). Mike Leggett, COFA, (curator of Burning the Interface).
"Nowhere is [the] solicitous openness of virtual affect better demonstrated than in Norie Neumark's CD-Rom, Shock in the Ear....Upon first visiting Shock in the Ear... I was struck by how profoundly Neumark's piece provides a material ground or support for comprehending the digital horizon itself not simply as artistic material but as concept. Digital aesthetics, in this context, is foremost an interval of becoming.... "The CD's lyrical and melodic sound tracks of beckoning whispers, synthesized chords, and natural sounds work wonderfully in situating the retroactive experience and thought of shock in a curiously soothing kinesthetic environment.... Equally striking about this piece, which could lend itself so easily to sensational visceral display, is the artist's intelligent placement of the "the strangely dislocated time/space that is shock" within the appealing surround of a subtly fluid two-dimensional painterly ground. The CD's ever-changing tableaux of paintings and designs by Maria Miranda playfully solicit the spectators with softly contrasting textures, loosely penciled figures, and abstract color fields that literally embody the digital sound tracks... "Neumark's artistic emphasis on the soft stillness and eery tranquillity of time's suspension contributes to a digital environment in which the retroactive experience of shock can be thought along the divide of its divergent manifestations in culture and history." Timothy Murray, "Digital Incompossibility: Cruising the Haze of the Electronic Threshold," Fundacio "la Caixa", Barcelona, October 1998. Professor Timothy Murray (Cornell University) is the author of Drama Trauma, Like a Film, and Mimesis, Masochism and Mime.
List of reviews:
Michel Belair, "Derives, delires et paranoia", Le Devoir, 18
Octobre, 1998, Montreal: review of Media Lounge of Montreal international
Festival of new Cinema and new Media
Timothy Murray, “Digital Incompossibility: Cruising The Aesthetic
Haze Of The New Media”, Fundacio "la Caixa", Barcelona,
October 1998 and reprinted in Ctheory, no, 78, Jan. 00 (CTheory
)
'Shock in the Ear', excerpted on Arts Today as part of review of techne,
Radio National, February 18, l997
‘shock in the ear', geekgirl, no 10. Geekgirl
“art & technology: web journal" in Itau
Cultural Revista Electronica
Mike Leggett, "Norie Neumark’s Shock in the Ear” Mesh,
#11, 1997
Keith Gallasch, "Condition: Shock of the Ear" RealTime
19, June-July 1997
Mike Leggett, "techne cultures", RealTime 18,April-May, l997
“AFC Multimedia Report: Shock in the Ear”, AFC News, 158/159,
March/April 1997
Deborah Durie, "Norie Neumark’s Separation Anxiety",
Mesh, #10, October, l996
