Karin Bolender and Fireball the party pony at last weekend’s Ethnographic Terminalia. Karin and collaborator, sound artist Melanie Moser, performed “Gut Sounds Lullaby” with Fireball. photo credit Jane Dickson

On right now on RTA a live broadcast of a collaboration between artist Karin Bolender and musician Melanie Moser. Their performance of Gut Sounds Lullaby is being done at SOMArts in San Francisco as part of Ethnographic Terminalia. Below is from the ET website:::

“Gut Sounds” is a term with significant resonances in American ass husbandry. Listening for gut sounds, or gut motility, is one of the first and foremost diagnostic tools in equine veterinary practice, where the presence or absence of normal gurglings in a donkey’s or horse’s insides can carry big epistemological, emotional, and economic implications. Indeed, the return of good gut sounds to a beloved equine who’s been sick can make those otherwise vaguely obscene inner gurglings seem like the sweetest melodies on earth. On another and more common level of experience, these thrumming, rhythmic, and liquid sounds of digestive and circulatory inner workings are the first ones we all hear as mammals, as our ears begin to function with months to go in utero and our brains mesh with the sounds of the world, throbbing through the permeable boundaries of our mothers’ bodies.

The Gut Sounds Lullaby installation frames layered sites where gut-sounds phenomena fold in with questions of presence and invisibility in forms of intraspecies being-together. Odd to think that gut sounds are something we seldom attend to, even as their presence signals life and cessation equates to death. Living gut sounds surprise us with their immediacy, bubbling up bigger questions of bodies’ unknowns, along with the ways we manufacture ontologies through the boundaries we draw between inside/outside, human/animal, and self /other. Gut Sounds Lullaby seeks to blur some of these boundaries, pressing our ears to their seams to listen for what hums on the other side. We will invite listeners into the presence of an intricate and intimate auditory mesh, where real-time equine gut sounds are wired into and amplified by the layered resonances of improvisational electronic music/sound collage and an invisible but present human fetus, who we presume will be listening on the other end of the intraspecies transmission wires.

Radio Transmission Ark is on the shortlist for this year’s Ethnographic Terminalia to be held in San Francisco in November. We are so excited about this possibility!

From the ET website: “No longer content to theorize the ends of the discipline and possibilities of new media, new locations, or new methods of asking old questions, Ethnographic Terminalia is working in capacity to develop generative ethnographies that do not subordinate the sensorium to the expository and theoretical text or monograph.

Ethnographic Terminalia is an initiative designed to celebrate borders without necessarily exalting them. Now in its fourth year of exhibition, it is meant to be a playful engagement with reflexivity and positionality; it seeks to ask what lies beyond and what lies within disciplinary territories. Ethnographic Terminalia is an exploration of what it might mean to exhibit anthropology – particularly in some of its less traditional forms – in proximity to and conversation with contemporary art practices. The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border.
It is also a beginning, its own place, a site of experience and encounter.”