// [o_Ó]<<

When the amplification between input and output breaks down, there is a brief moment of anxiety. Suddenly the clarity of the message traversing from input to output is disturbed, splintered and made suspect, overshadowed by an unknown interference, or glitch. Cast across the one-to-one equation of input-output, signal to message, word to definition, the shadow of the unknown unsettles intentionality - for meaning stumbles. Against the grain interference appears: from an unknown source, within the musculature of the body, inside vocal chords that strain to speak, to draw up the proper words, from inside the very instruments and machinery of culture and technological networks. The body is punctured by interference, set off balance, plunged into vertigo and chaos; however momentary, chaos is cuse for alarm, for the order it disrupts dies a reluctant death. These conflicts of order and chaos occur as territorial challenges - between regions of meaning that slip against the tectonics of coherence, along fault-lines of noise and silence, grating along the edges of harmony and discord, through the conduits of social interaction.

Interference here is akin to a parasitic invasion: “para-Site” being a space unto itself, a space occupied by the ill-defined, or the grotesque. Isn´t the monstrous defined by its endless need to prey on the healthy, as an “other” who nonetheless craves to enter properly into the normal? yet as a condition the parasitic occurs as the very living with an alien presence that is privately one´s own - a personalized other constituted by the very stuff of one´s body; for the parasitic feeds on the material already privately cultivated. In other words, the parasite is secretly what one desires. This makes the parasitic, as a pathological alternative, a kind of inverse of oneself, a haunting doppelganger that exists up close - too close - as an underside to every gesture and impulse. Interference too is up close, on the border, in the wings, emerging inside the conduits of cultural production, infringing on the wholesome perfection of proper recording, of a clean signal or spoken word, It lashes out, at the instance of performance, in milliseconds of time, inside the movements and mutations of identity, within the negotiations of social display: from spit in the corner of the mouth, persistent hangnails, or a loose zipper to harder disfunctionality, the spasms of “incomplete” bodies, all of which add up to undo the subject, as a minor movement leaking from the whole.

On the other side of this divide - this opposition between the normal and the pathological, the site and the parasite, clarity and interference - is the cultivation of the parasitic as a productive model, as a norm or paradigm framed not by the antagonism of its other, the proper, but by anxiety itself, yet anxiety without its medicinal prescriptive, its remedy, its therapeutic imperative, but anxiety given free reign. This region here is psychological, social, and spatial - from identity to interaction to buildings - and the parasitic an alternate “site” defined by interference, as a shift in cartography, an expansion and contraction of view.

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Brandon LaBelle - Etcetera: Acoustical Parasites

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