Racquetball Score
Recordings from the performance
This past winter, I created a sound performance titled Racquetball Score, which explores gender non-binary-ness through soundscapes strategically sourced through a game of racquetball using live feedback and embedded piezo mics.
The idea for this performance came from my own personal practice of playing solo games of racquetball at the University of Washington’s gym as a way to decompress. As I was pondering the intersections of sound and gender, I thought it would be funny to source a type of ‘white noise’ from the inseam of my shorts rubbing together as I ran around playing racquetball. I also realized other things could be used to generate sounds such as the walls and rackets. Racquetball courts are also already acoustically rich places full of the echo-y smacking of balls, squeaking of sneakers, the thudding of footsteps and laughter or shouts of people playing nearby.
As for my personal racquetball practice, I liked the meditative aspects of playing racquetball alone — the repetitive yet rhythmically random quality of the ball hitting a wall, the lack of competition, the slow shift from thoughts of the day to being a body running and swinging a racket, trying to keep a volley going, building heat, beading up with sweat. I also felt the court itself was beautiful, the light wood, red stripes, white, smudged, tall walls, bright lighting, and the small, heavy door with one tiny window one must stoop through to enter the court. I loved the idea of a sound performance being held in this space.
This may seem pedantic, but while sports and the surrounding culture are often framed as an antithesis to the arts, I see an aesthetics of sport and a genius and artisanship in athleticism. In addition, sports are pretty fascinating in terms of existing within a set of rules with nearly infinite decisions to be made within those constructs (game theory etc.). Due to the specific rules and equipment combined with a specific space to play within (field/court), sports become a genre or a medium . . . so my piece also began to explore the meaning of taking the genre of sport — the symbols and pieces — and repurposing them for art. (People have probably already talked about this a lot and I just don’t know about it yet (#researchgoals)).
In addition, the structure of the performance was an act of world building and a critique of the limits of the current lexicon to describe gender. I thought of the performance as a system built of symbols and tools which I borrowed, reappropriated, built and acted within, creating a structure I thought of as a sort of a soft, physical algorithm. The first symbol was the pair of shorts I created which would create white noise from the crotch area signaling a disrupted transmission, a blank space, open air, possibility of a new type of messaging — a signal that is disorganized or yet-to-be-filled with media which reveals the materiality of transmission.
Another symbol was the mic-embedded racquetball racket. The racket references a Robert Rauschenberg piece called Open Score, created in 1966 for the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering held at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York. Rauschenberg’s piece used piezo microphones to source sound from a tennis volley held by two people (a man and a woman) playing tennis. By playing racquetball solo, my performance shifts the binary and competitive nature of the game shown by Rauschenberg and instead repurposing the court into a reflective and meditative zone without binary. In addition, while Rauschenberg used radio to transmit sounds wirelessly, I kept my racket tethered to the sounds system with a long mic cable.
Another important moment was the act of laying down the double lines the court, which was an act of world building. Building the court was a way of both noticing the construction of gender binaries as well as suggesting there are other worlds, other systems, yet to be built. The lines, to me, create a third space which could be read as arguing against the one line of a binary. The double line also references a double bar in music which references the beginning and end of musical scores.
Finally, the means of distorting the sound was symbolic as well in that I took the sound from my own kinetic movements and fed it into a delay pedal which was fed back into itself to create live feedback. The management of this system seems to reference the kind of distortion of symbols as ‘pure’ outputs are fed into themselves over and over again into a totally unique sound that only references the original sound as a point of departure. This could relate to Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard while also referencing network theory or assemblages where each element relies on the other element to create meaning and sound and as one element shifts, all of the elements of the network shift. However, in the performances themselves, and creating the performances, the real impact of this system was complexity and difficulty. I was always facing the unknown . . . to a certain extent. I was always ‘tuning my instrument’ — since every single twitch of a knob on my mixer could impact the entire system, I had to try to understand the system as deeply as possible while still accepting the possibility of failure, mistakes, and uncertainty.
I actually tried out two different systems: the first one was so complicated I couldn’t ever quite figure out the underlying structure and ended up making noise scores, which were a template I created so I could quickly mark how each knob needed to be turned so that the correct sounds could be achieved. The second system was more understandable at a systems-level and required less annotation, but was perhaps less exciting to use and had less interesting sonic qualities.
And, finally, I must admit that this project mainly started as a joke to myself, and a rough idea. I didn’t want to know too much and I still don’t. Please check out the recordings and process photos below!
Here’s the sound recording from this performance at Gould Hall as a part of the Design Trouble Symposium along with some of my initial sound experiments experiments.
. . . .