THINKING OF HISTORY

2022

sound composition for earphones or sound speakers (site-specific variable number of speakers)

projection of a silent black moving image

duration: 10 minutes 40 seconds (looped)

Credits

composed by Monika Weiss

speaking voices: Kurt Gottschalk, Tyler Krszjzaniek, Jeremie Lambert-Delhomme, Sharlene Lee, Ming-Yuen S. Ma, Neha Naraya, Nicolas Reeves, and the artist

opera vocalist: Anna Wasilewska

piano: Monika Weiss

sound mastered by Adam Hogan at Experimental Media Arts EMA, University of Arkansas

Artist Statement

Thinking of History was commissioned by media art historian and author Ming-Yuen S. Ma. For this sound composition, I chose one sentence from his recent book, There is No Soundtrack: Rethinking art, media, and the audio-visual contract. I created this piece with, in response to, and by dismantling the words in the following sentence: “Thinking about history, through different notions of time, opens us to considering ancestral time, cyclical time, looping time, resonant time, and other new ways of listening to, thinking about, and recording history.” Thinking of History is composed in three movements. Through layers of drone sounds, the first movement evokes the space of an ocean, perhaps an ocean of history. A female voice sings without words, we are hearing her as if arriving from a great distance. For this part I wrote a short melody for a voice a cappella and it was recorded by Polish vocalist Ania Wilkiewicz. I composed the middle movement based on the recordings of a number of invited individuals reading slowly the sentence, according to my directions, and in several languages. From those recordings I created a tempest of voices, collapsing layers of voices into one sonic field. Throughout the piece we hear underlying drone sounds which are based on my piano improvisations, later transformed electronically such that the piano is no longer recognizable. In the third movement of the composition, the piano is now fully recognizable. I finished Thinking of History on February 23, 2022. The day after, on February 24th, the war against Ukraine began. This piece is accompanied by a moving image projected onto a large screen. The projected moving image is completely black, composed of 10 minutes and 40 seconds of blackness.

- Monika Weiss

Essay Excerpts

Can I suggest that in such a Benjaminian dialectic the artworks of Monika Weiss creatively transform our sense of history, or shall I say the historical moments she selects for our prolonged attention. Her medium for making us experience them affectively; as well as inciting us to reflection, is a synaesthetically-crafted experience of duration […] Her artworking is a rhetoric she has created for a continuous present that is realized in a formalized, aesthetically intense, audio-visual musicality that, even as its chosen terms are body, sound, gesture and movement, avoids all melodrama in its gestural form, refutes all hystericization of the body, and does not silence language. Hence it does not still thought.

- Griselda Pollock in Monika Weiss-Nirbhaya, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, 2021 (to read full essay click here)

The transition takes place through the act of deep listening, a concept inspired by a connection between music and meditation in a work of a composer who is Weiss’ major influence, Pauline Oliveros. Deep listening requires inner silence and concentration, similar to meditation, when the consciousness and awareness is centered into inward presence.

- Izabela Gola in Monika Weiss’ Lament as an Act of Protest, Polish Cultural Institute New York, 2023 (to read full essay click here)

Exhibitions

To Freedom, Furlong Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Stout, Mnemonie, 2022

This is not a reading / Ceci n'est pas une lecture, online, 2022

Live premiere of Thinking of History was part of a series of remixes and conversations, This is not a reading / Ceci n'est pas une lecture, for which Ming-Yuen S. Ma commissioned artists discussed in his book to create new works (to listen to the program click here)