Exquisite Corpse: Cell Tower Trees and the Rhythm of Just Before
This marks the second iteration of Mutamur’s experiment with an audio exquisite corpse game, this time with poet Eddie Shumard. The segment is built by recording segments of philosophy, literature, or sound as responses to small snippets of our collaborators’ audio before us. We only hear the recordings stitched together as a whole at the very end—live on the show with our audience. The completed audio ‘corpse’ spans the uncanny ways that the digital intervenes into landscapes, including descriptions of ungraspable ecological changes to not-quite-real sites in Yosemite, and the history of camouflaged cell tower trees. One limb of the corpse explores the social context of laundry and dirt removal in the 1800s; another: the promise of vibrant matter and how to describe fuzzy, just-before feelings. It ends with an audio clip from Wist’s mom, who is trying to explain what happens in “the ether.”
What can blind collaboration do? What insight can unplanned juxtapositions provide? The unintentional stitching together of nonfiction texts (about climate anxiety, technologic towers, and “dystopian punk”) with poetic texts on affect theory and ethereal experiences formed a new connection to consider—that our reliance on rational accounts of changes in society (current and future) ignores just how much of it is felt, unseen, unsettling, and elusive. Shumard spent three days trying to get ChatGPT to explain quantum mechanics, which made him realize it was the ambiguities the AI struggled with the most. This led him to a more urgent task: getting ChatGPT to write free-verse poetry, which it was unable to do. Even after many patient explanations, the AI couldn’t write a poem for Shumard that didn’t rhyme. His frustration with the AI’s “no feeling” (and the lack of usable poems to read) led him to write his own verse for recording. His and other poetic texts gave a lens to the more historic or environmental readings, and seemed to articulate a kind of contemporary disillusionment with world-building, since our worlds haven’t lived up to their Modernist promises. The audio snippets seemed to return to themes of noticing and nothingness, of exiles and breakdowns in memory. We felt as if we made a movie together, but didn’t work on it together.
Music and sound editing for parts of this show (featuring texts about cleanliness) are by Ricardo Mateus Tovar, a Berlin-based artist and composer.
Credits for the texts included in the audio exquisite corpse—
“A Tree is a Tree” by Bethany Rigby, feeeels Magazine
The Clean Body: A Modern History by Peter Ward
Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas
The Hundreds by Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant
Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World by Daniel Sherrell
Candy House by Jennifer Egan
The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Silence by Martin Scor
Noah by Darren Aronofsky
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakam
The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafó
Poetry by Wist
Poetry by Shumard (and ChatGPT)
Audio from Cheryl Wist
