Self Service | Mona Hedayati
Biography
Mona Hedayati is an Iranian-Canadian joint PhD candidate in the research-creation stream of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society & Culture, Concordia University, Canada and the digital arts doctorate program at Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her interdisciplinary research draws on memory studies, sensory ethnography and computation arts. She has a BA in translation studies, an MFA in digital media and an MRes in social-political art and design. Her recent research-creation work has been focused on issues around destruction of material culture due to war and conflict as well as looting, plundering and theft of cultural heritage in parallel with forced migration where she responds through engaging with reparative modes of inquiry by reconstructing poetic spaces of memory and architecture using simulation technologies. Hedayati has exhibited and presented on her work internationally and across Canada at institutions such as Slade School of Fine Arts, University of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery and University of St Andrews in the UK as well as UBC and Agnes Etherington Art Center at Queen’s University in Canada.
Artist’s Statement
“Self-Service” is an autoethnographic video that builds on a prototype I made for my research-creation PhD project that involves recording my personal narrative of forced migration and translating the verbal account into 2 non-verbal outputs: a sound installation that retains the vocal gestures; and a sound visualization that graphs the amplitude of voice to convey the effect within the verbal narrative. The sound piece incorporates the vocal metrics (e.g., prosody, pause, changes of emotional tenor in pitch and volume) while redacting the language and obscuring the voice as the intense dynamism of the graph offers a discomforting visual signifier as an anchor. The aim behind portraying this process of translation from a voice to a noise is to outline the agencies between the human and the machine that interact, get entangled, leak and move to displace the meaning from a verbal narrative to computer-generated signals which taps into an affective attunement with trauma to highlight the shifting grounds from linguistic communication to bodily and affective competences as autonomous and self-regulating functions that sit outside the hegemony of language. My work addresses the key question of this year’s conference: how might sound intervene to disrupt the status quo, the way that things work in the everyday? as it endeavours to hinder firsthand politics of identification (of the forced migrant) as the gendered and racialized figure of ‘the stranger’ that makes up for the consumption of difference as a commodity by blocking the process of linguistic signification.
Biography
Mona Hedayati is an Iranian-Canadian joint PhD candidate in the research-creation stream of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society & Culture, Concordia University, Canada and the digital arts doctorate program at Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her interdisciplinary research draws on memory studies, sensory ethnography and computation arts. She has a BA in translation studies, an MFA in digital media and an MRes in social-political art and design. Her recent research-creation work has been focused on issues around destruction of material culture due to war and conflict as well as looting, plundering and theft of cultural heritage in parallel with forced migration where she responds through engaging with reparative modes of inquiry by reconstructing poetic spaces of memory and architecture using simulation technologies. Hedayati has exhibited and presented on her work internationally and across Canada at institutions such as Slade School of Fine Arts, University of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery and University of St Andrews in the UK as well as UBC and Agnes Etherington Art Center at Queen’s University in Canada.
Artist Statement
“Self-Service” is an autoethnographic video that builds on a prototype I made for my research-creation PhD project that involves recording my personal narrative of forced migration and translating the verbal account into 2 non-verbal outputs: a sound installation that retains the vocal gestures; and a sound visualization that graphs the amplitude of voice to convey the effect within the verbal narrative. The sound piece incorporates the vocal metrics (e.g., prosody, pause, changes of emotional tenor in pitch and volume) while redacting the language and obscuring the voice as the intense dynamism of the graph offers a discomforting visual signifier as an anchor. The aim behind portraying this process of translation from a voice to a noise is to outline the agencies between the human and the machine that interact, get entangled, leak and move to displace the meaning from a verbal narrative to computer-generated signals which taps into an affective attunement with trauma to highlight the shifting grounds from linguistic communication to bodily and affective competences as autonomous and self-regulating functions that sit outside the hegemony of language. My work addresses the key question of this year’s conference: how might sound intervene to disrupt the status quo, the way that things work in the everyday? as it endeavours to hinder firsthand politics of identification (of the forced migrant) as the gendered and racialized figure of ‘the stranger’ that makes up for the consumption of difference as a commodity by blocking the process of linguistic signification.