Audius

L.A. Paul writes about transformative experience: that you cannot know what it is like until you have lived it. Specifically, a catastrophic experience that is forced upon one can hijack one's system by its painful memories and the condition to choose rationally breaks. From inside that collapse emerges a particular desire: I wish I do not remember; I wished I had acted differently, to reverse the engine, if only I had known how. It is from this position that the research asks how the body can consciously intervene in its own reconstructive process, and how the structural conditions — spatial, sonic, material and linguistic — make that intervention possible through artistic practice? ​The theoretical questions of this research are grounded in the 7-3 Trilogy, an expanded work across live performance, sound art, and experimental writing currently in development. 7-3-A: Sonic Mourning is the live enactment of the book 7-3-R, a system in which invented vocal and written language inhabit and enact a constructed fictional memory-scape built from psychoacoustic spatial sound and sculptural resonators, and connected visually through language projection. The enactor is simultaneously the author of the fiction and the body inside it, the one who lost, the one who reconstructs, and the one who inhabits the imagined alternative. 7-3-R is the experimental fiction component, a book whose central character has only one day of memory, embedded in an experiment, experiencing memory reset, mental time travel, and dreams becoming realities. 7-3-R inhabits the structural impossibility and navigates what remains of identity and self when the updating mechanism is hijacked. (...)