Never let it be said that Torpedo the Ark doesn't encourage alternative perspectives ...
Here's a thoughtful response submitted by Jennifer Davis Taylor - an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who was present at the Sophia Space Agency audio event at Kings Place that I wrote about in a recent post: click here.
She writes:
Dear Stephen Alexander,
Like you, I attended the launch of Melpomeni Kermanidou's debut album released under the name of the Sophia Space Agency, but I noticed entirely different things about both the staging and the spatial audio playback.
For me, the theatre space was defined by its intimacy - just right for twenty or thirty people. We weren't overcrowded. I liked the proportions of the room and the ratio of space to people because I didn't feel unnerved by the energy around me. The stage was bathed in blue light. The three empty chairs, with ferns interspersed between them, gave me a sense of anticipation. The eye masks we were handed at the door heightened this feeling for me. It felt as if there might be a party game, with some slight unpredictability that would enhance the fun.
What initially strikes me about your post, Stephen, is that you understood the event as a scene before experiencing it as a playback. That feels right. Meni's white dress and boots were not incidental decoration; they communicated that the event was a kind of carnivalesque space - theatrical and operating slightly outside the normal rules of social interaction. Her appearance gave us permission to expect the unexpected. She appeared to have dressed not only for the event but for the imaginative space the work itself asked us to enter: retro-futuristic, feminine, controlled, luminous, slightly alien. Because she appeared after the playback, her appearance also felt like a validation of our varied internal imaginative responses to the experimental soundscape.
The contrast of her appearance with the two men on stage may well have been a failure of individual sartorial taste. However, accidental as it may have been, I also found it to be an effective foil. Meni was easily able to hold the visual and conceptual field of the event almost by herself. At the same time, the men's presentation demonstrated an asymmetry of cultural permission. Male authority is often allowed to arrive uncomposed, rumpled, ordinary, even careless. Female artistry in dress, because it is more expected, also has a kind of privilege in public. Women are allowed to carry atmosphere, beauty, and coherence, even though they are also often expected to enact that symbolic labour.
That imbalance became part of the performance, whether anyone intended it or not. The stage picture quietly exposed who is permitted to appear as an expert without adornment, who needs to dress up to be received as one, and what that dressing up costs. Meni's costume was beautiful. However, it also leaned into her identity as a performance artist rather than only as a musical innovator. I was reminded of Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, whose technological inventions anticipated later developments in wireless communications. Even today, that far more significant contribution remains overshadowed by her glamorous persona. In this case, had Meni not performed sartorially, she might not have carried the evening so successfully. Could she have appeared in rumpled clothes and smeared makeup? Would that have drawn more attention to her genius? I suspect not.
Further to this, I was also interested in your argument about spatial audio producing a kind of cathedral effect: immersive, beautiful, technically pristine, but finally perhaps too complete. That seems to me the strongest critical idea in the post. The problem is not that the music is beautiful, or even that it is overwhelming. The problem is what happens when a work leaves no remainder - no gap, no exterior, no accidental birdsong, no human roughness through which the listener can breathe.
While I was experiencing it, however, I wasn't disturbed by the rules of the space or by the idealistic premise. Perhaps this was because the experience was finite for me. I didn't worry about its implications as a large collective movement or as a mass vehicle for a set of values. The producers admitted that this style of music does not lend itself easily to mass consumption. The technological setup for enjoying it is prohibitive and inconvenient. Therefore, I could contemplate beauty and accept transcendence as a gift that Ms Kermanidou and Martyn Ware were trying to offer, without feeling that I had to buy into their idealism wholesale.
More troubling, for me, was the clash between the themes of the work - planetary destruction - and the medium itself, which relies on cyberstorage and power centres that may also be environmentally harmful. Even though I was struck by that potential irony, I also saw how the music fulfilled some classic roles of art: to be of its time, to generate new forms, and to make visible the contradictions of the present.
It was a rich and enjoyable experience that gave me a lot to think about. I learned a lot. I took away questions that will help me to be a better thinker and artist.
Notes
Jennifer Davis Taylor appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.
As stated, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who holds a PhD from The Warburg Institute (University of London) and specializes in seventeenth-century French art and literature, women's studies, and material culture.
Her forthcoming book, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault (Peter Lang), reframes Perrault not merely as a fairy tale author but as a theorist of design whose collaborative studio practice staged radical allegories of female agency.
Readers are encouraged to visit the website: jenniferdavistaylor.com for further information.
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