Black Visual Sound

This piece explores the associations between the metaphysics, materialism, potentiality, and limitations of blackness and the everyday. Blackness becomes a proxy for the object, material, and aesthetic; most noticeable is the transatlantic slave trade in the United States. The black body, brain, spirit treated as an object, currency, aesthetic, and material used for labor. I’m trying to simultaneously combine and deconstruct this very notion with music, the idea of visibility, and its use-value. What can these same material things mean less physically? The symbol, the metaphor, the signifier are ways to consider this idea. I use the split-screen to introduce abstraction as representation and representation as abstraction, which speaks to the obstruction and refusal in the spatial imaginary and what W.E. B Dubois calls the Double Consciousness. These ideas of blackness are both things. As the subject of both concepts, it expansively impacts space, pushing the ordinary into the extraordinary, making blackness more than a cultural, social, and political act of being. It creates an unnoticeable space. The same space it occupies creates an opposite space that it also occupies. But this space is not its physicality. It is its non-physical space and sometimes very hard to describe. Blackness is not the result of its own doing; instead, it highlights the actions that attempt to reduce or rid it from existence. The very ironic thing is that it’s always existed but rarely recognized. For example, blue as a color has always existed, but it wasn’t visible in the everyday language until Egyptians acknowledged it and gave it a name. Blackness, in this context, is the same thing. This film tries to wrestle with that notion.
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