One small step - for Nina Katchadourian - Sound Recording Review

The...uh...like the uh...of my...uh...this is Houston we're copying...the uh...the uh...the uh...do uh...it's a...we're uh...uh...I can see uh...there uh...but uh...o.k. we're ready to uh...duh...uh...uh...duh...and uh...the...uh...the uh...uh...and uh...

Nina Katchadourian, Indecision on the Moon (1)

The notion of the extraterrestrial has always been close to the inexpressible and the incomprehensible. Beyond mythologies of lunacy, the technical idea of going out from Earth vividly suggests the problem and the possibility of a foreignness too vast to bridge. Already in the seventeenth century, the English writer Francis Godwin proposed that an extraterrestrial language might be made entirely of melodies, and a few years later in Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage to the Moon, space is a place where animals and objects speak for them selves, where language is detached from that which is human. (2) Here, the problem of the extraterrestrial externalizes and allegorizes questions of distance and difference. In the fantasia of Cyrano, space is the perfect linguistic no-place or u-topia.

But times change and utopias do too. And somehow, by the late twentieth century, the gorgeously baroque fantasy of space flight turned out to be a technical possibility. Somehow it has come to pass that a world public can listen to real spacemen live on air. So what happens to the imagination under the pressure of the literal? In the official version of the story, this union is the very definition of progress: "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." And in this light, the event of the first moon landing in 1969 is staged with excruciating precision and broadcast live as testimony to the art of the technological, bureaucratic state.

On radio and television, the experience is amplified by a secondary stagecraft. The CBS television network gives us the politicians, the talking heads, the scientists, the wives, the reporters on the scene--at a "soul festival" in Harlem and on the banks of the Danube in Budapest. It is an opera of self-congratulation. In the TV studio, the announcers themselves begin to sound like antennas channeling voices from the ether ...

Boy, what a day....Man on the moon!...Oh, boy!...Whew! Boy!...Boy!...My golly!...The way it's gone, they certainly have built our confidence in these machines....Neil Armstrong, a 38-year-old American standing on the surface of the moon!...Oh, thank you television for letting us watch this one!...Isn't this something! 238,000 miles out there on the moon and we're seeing this....Gee, that's good news!...Oh, boy!...I sure hope there's no area in this world that's blacked out from television right now.... There it is, a little U.S. flag on the surface of the moon!...Look at the powder come up there.... They're beginning to get pretty frisky up there....

President Nixon himself gives definition to the event when he tells Armstrong that they are undoubtedly having the most historic phone call in history. Mission accomplished: speaking human being on the moon. (3)

Few artifacts in our aural history have the immediacy of these first moments of lunar experience, and few seem less subject to decomposition. But this is what Nina Katchadourian explores in her striking sound installation Indecision on the Moon (2001). The piece, which is entirely composed of sound, plays in a room darkened to pitch black and screened off like a gauzy maze. Entering Indecision is like falling off the edge of the world. Every sound in the piece is extracted directly from the audio of the Apollo 11 moon landing. But in Katchadourian's version of the event, two hours of sound have been cut to 28 minutes, transforming the uncertainties that haunt the recordings into their dominant feature. With perfect fidelity to rhythm and order, Katchadourian has reconstructed a lunar soundscape out of the material of indecision: out of confusion, miscommunication, repetition, ellipsis, interjection, and the many noises, vocal and otherwise, that populate the lunar transmissions. In short, she has faithfully r eproduced the lunar broadcast while omitting everything that the broadcasters intended for us to hear, down to and including Armstrong's "immortal" first words.

In Indecision on the Moon, the soundscape of Apollo 11 is a mass of fumbled communication and machine noise--weeds among the semantic paving stones. (4) What is strange is that there is nothing mysterious here at all. What's more, we know this jumble intimately--so intimately that it is worth asking whether we were ever really listening for words in the first place, or whether the power of our shared auditory memory of this event might not rely more on the dense drama of the sonic background than on the thin surface of language in which it is clothed.

In Indecision, the story of the lunar lander detaches itself from the history of exploration and conquest and descends toward a much more equivocal history of noise and language. In this history, the key event is not a breakthrough in propulsive power or guidance technology. Rather, the new age dawns when Alexander Graham Bell first successfully stages a long-distance shouting match with his assistant, demonstrating the possibility of nearly limitless transmission of mechanically reproduced noise. (5) At the same time, he demonstrates the affective value of combining aspects of noise and language. There is a wealth of sound in his first, distorted, barely audible "Come here," a wealth that translates into distance and time and art. The very act of Bell yelling into a funnel focuses our attention on the acoustic character of language. It marks out utterance as something other than saying, as a material event.