Julieanna Preston, Tryst’s Sympathetic Engagements [plenary performance and paper] LISTENING, SOUND, AGENCY: AN INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARLY SYMPOSIUM (18-23 MAY, 2021). https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/

In 2018, Joanna Lock and I entered the complex maze of Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway. We inhabited a windowless room with two manually-operated ventilators and an endless supply of hoses, couplers, and pure oxygen. Our performance tuned them as responsive instruments sometimes in blissful sinus rhythm, sometimes sounding the alarm as air flow, pressure and pace reached maximum or minimum levels to adequately support the non-existent patient. On the third day we realised that our own heart rates were syncopating with the respiration antics of the ventilators. Tryst emerged out of this experience, a name referencing the duet nature of the performance and the deterioration of breaths the machines sounded in response to our turning of their knobs, valves and bladders. There were moments when we lost our breath; the ventilators exerted their agency and took the breath we thought was just ours alone.

I reflect on Tryst in relation to Jane Bennett’s exploration of Walt Whitman’s poetry, which locates five distinct figures of sympathy (painful contagion, body-part, impartial acceptance, erotic attraction, and gravitational pull) extending beyond moral sentiment to a more-than-human natural or vital physical force that draws bodies together. This vital materialism research invests attention to the receptivity, affectivity, and sociality between ordinary objects, shapes, words and bodies. While Bennett finds forms of sympathy within Whitman’s language, I pursue these sympathies in the materiality of sound that entangles four bodies - two humans, two machines – in an intense, complex respiratory event. https://vimeo.com/309594894