In 2015, Lightspeed magazine published a special issue called ‘Queers Destroy Science Fiction!’, a follow-up, of sorts, to their previous celebration of the destructive capacity of others: ‘Women Destroy Science Fiction!’ The titles of these special issues (and the many that have followed them, including ‘Women Destroy Horror!’, ‘Women Destroy Fantasy!’ and so on) are a play on part of a speech that Pat Murphy gave at WisCon15 in 1991, during which she talked about the widespread (mis)understanding in the science fiction reading and writing community that:
women don’t write science fiction. Put a little more rudely, this rumbling says: “Those damn women are ruining science fiction.” (cited in Yant, para. 1)
The speech was Murphy’s Guest of Honour address, during which she announced the founding of the Tiptree Award. The award, now in its 27th year, celebrates works that explore and expand our understanding of gender. Both WisCon and the Tiptree Award are active, exploratory, open-ended and evolving interventions in the world of science fiction. Interventions that, alongside many others, have persistently attempted to destroy, or perhaps de-story, the ongoing socio-cultural, critical, and publishing practices that seek to limit science fiction to a singular set of narratives, images, and aesthetic turns associated strongly with a white hetero-patriarchal way of imagining either the future, or an alternative past or present.
This issue of Writing from Below is another small contribution to the ongoing insistence that queers, and their writing, are not only an essential part of the strange machinery of science fiction, but also an essential part of the ongoing de-storying and re-storying that is part of the broader genre’s fantastic history.
In putting together an issue that engages with the intersections and overlaps between science fiction and queers, I didn’t want to proscribe how the writers who contributed understood the label science fiction, or the label queer, though I might offer that—for now, and for here—what I refer to when I use the term science fiction is the full spectrum of non-realist or anti-realist narrative practices that persistently destroy reality. Perhaps that will do as momentary definition of queerness, too, a definition that identifies queerness not as a state of being or an identity, but as a set of practices that persistently and rudely undo, or destroy, what we think we know about desire, pleasure, bodies, identities, selves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the writers and writings here explore narratives and narrative practices that trouble at the boundaries of genre and gender.
Holly Voigt’s ‘Sad puppies and happy queers: Vibrations along the insterstices in NK Jemisin’s The Broken Earth’ provides a passionate and thoughtful critical engagement with Nora K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and in particular the ways in which the works in the trilogy queer the tropes of science fiction. Voigt demonstrates the ways in which Jemisin’s work opens ruptures in genre, defies tradition in her text and her success with The Broken Earth. These ruptures are a site of possibility and, ultimately, pleasure.
Daniel Hourigan’s article ‘Queer, difference, heresy: Salt Lane witches in Rupetta and out’ explores what he describes as “the queer at play” in Rupetta, describing the ways in which the novel’s intertextuality with fairy tales, folk tales, and Shakespearean narratives (among other texts) queers both the novel itself, and the genre of science fiction more broadly.
Ed C Chamberlain’s ‘A constellation of intimacies: parallels between the struggles of today and tomorrow in Cunningham’s Specimen Days’ provides a lucid examination of the themes of desire, feeling, and migration, in Cunningham’s trilogy of science fictional novellas, ultimately providing an illuminating interrogation of the ways in which Cunningham’s work explores and troubles the ways people experience non-normative forms of amative sociality across a range of (historical, social, geographical, and other) contexts.
Tara East’s ‘The queer body as time machine’ is a thoughtful discussion of the ways in which time travel narratives conceive of, and trouble, emerging notions of the gendered body. The essay reads a range of science fiction texts—including Nino Cipri’s ‘The shape of my name’ and Heinlein’s ‘All you zombies’—against, with or perhaps againstDonna Haraway’s theory of cyborg bodies and José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of a queer utopia.
Kelly Gardiner’s review of Krasnotein and Rios’s (eds) anthology of diverse science fiction and fantasy, ‘Of diversity and fairy dust’ provides a critical and contextual evaluation of the risks and benefits of publishing ventures aimed at addressing the lack of diversity.
My own article ‘His unspoken natural center: James Tiptree Jr as The Other I’ explores the overlap between gender performance and authorial performance in the work and biographical representations of James Tiptree, Jr. The paper explores some of the ways Tip’s identity disrupts the gender-normative structure of the ‘exchange’ between readers and writer, particularly in terms of the assumed correlation between the gender of the Implied Author and that of the ‘real human being’ he is (mis)recognised as being.
Finally, in my long, rambling, indiscrete conversation with Ellen Klages digs around in Klages’s experiences as a writer of science fiction that troubles at the boundaries of science fiction writing. The conversation explores the pleasures (or displeasures) of writing works that passes as strange.
Each of these works, both individually and collectively, provides a valuable, disruptive, destructive observation on or intervention in the project of protecting a monolithic hetero-patriarchal science fiction. Each is offered to you as an expression of reading and writing as practices bound up with queered experiences of pleasure and desire. Pleasure in texts, desire for texts; pleasure in possibilities; desire for destruction. Pleasure in the possibility of strange genres and even stranger genres.
They are offered to you, here, as part of an ongoing conversation about what queer science fiction is, what it has been, what it can become.
Reference
Yant, Christine (2014). Editorial: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Lightspeed Magazine. June 2014 Special Issue. Accessed 1 March 2019, < http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-by-women-destroy-science-fiction-editorial-team/>.
SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You’re welcome!
—
“The mashup of the two things we all love to talk about: ourselves & music”
Memoir Mixtapes is a nonprofit literary magazine that is entirely volunteer-run. Created bySamantha Lampf, the idea for the magazine came about on a commute home from Santa Monica to Koreatown in 2018. At the time, Lampf’s life was rapidly changing. After marrying, moving to Los Angeles and changing her career path, she felt as if something was still missing. When “Silver Springs,” by Fleetwood Mac, came on the radio — an artist her dad used to play constantly. Lampf was immediately transported to a specific time in her childhood where she experienced insomnia and depressive thoughts, saying “the music taunted me at all hours.” Soon after, she had the thought to write an essay about this song. She then began to think that many people had their own stories about songs, and Memoir Mixtapes was officially underway.
The first call for submissions was put out that night, and Lampf was unsure if she would receive more than five pieces. However, the first volume, titled “Origin Stories,” published 34 tracks. Since then, they have published eight volumes, with topics ranging from guilty pleasures to our personal anthems. Each volume consists of creative nonfiction submissions and a song (or two) to accompany each piece. The goal of the magazine is to use music as a natural provocation of emotion and memories, using music to connect with each other while reading about some of our most personal experiences.
Danny McLaren’s “Don’t Stop me Now // Queen” from Vol. 4 “Anthems”
While Memoir Mixtapes’ primary focus is their full volume works, they also support other literature about music or memoir that might not fit into their main magazine topics. Deep Cuts, a section created for these pieces, features recordings, visual art, playlists and more. Not a writer, but still interested in the project? Consider sharing a song recommendation! All you have to do is create an account on Medium and follow the steps listed on the website for a chance to have your song featured either Monday, Wednesday, or Friday.
Memoir Mixtape’s 2019 Playlist
Memoir Mixtapes is special because it gives us a way to discuss the impact of music on our lives. Music is an integral part of birthdays, weddings, religion and many other cultural practices, yet we often understand music as a separate entity from identity — one that is universal in its message rather than individualized and personal. However, writers at Memoir Mixtapes are allowing us to listen to music as they experience and hear it, providing us with a new method of listening to songs we have our own histories with.
If music and memoir sounds appealing to you, check out theMemoir Mixtapes magazine to read, listen or submit a piece of your own — they have rolling submissions, so submit anytime! For their tenth volume, Memoir Mixtapes is ready to talk about “Ballads & Breakups,” or the whimsical, disastrous search for love. As their page states, “if you felt it in your heart, we want to read it.” Calls for submissions are open now until June 30th!
_
Kaitlyn Liu is a freshman at Binghamton University majoring in English Literature with a concentration in rhetoric. Kaitlyn takes interest in writing about gender and race along with other intersectional classification systems. Kaitlyn currently writes for the opinions section for the student newspaper, Pipe Dream, as well as working as a copy editor. Outside of writing, Kaitlyn enjoys reading historical fiction and singing for Binghamton University’s oldest co-ed a cappella group, the Binghamtonics.
_
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
The data for 2019 shows that while most 2019 journals by Frontiers incurred no changes in article processing charge comparing to 2018, but the increase in APC of 23 journals (40% of Frontier journals) is significant, with APC increases of 18% – 31%.
Frontiers currently publishes 62 journals that shows 10% growth in the number of journals comparing to 56 journals in 2018. Of these, 23 journals (40%) have an increase of $774 in article processing charges but the other journals have no change in comparison to 2018 data. Therefore, the overall increase in Article processing journals for all Frontiers open access journals is 3 percent.
Based on an inquiry from Christopher Pym from Springer Nature (owner of BioMedCentral) on the Global Open Access List I (Heather) have re-calculated the observed BMC pricing changes from 2018 – 2019, in GBP rather than USD. BMC reports pricing in 3 currencies (a common practice for large publishers). We use GBP for historical purposes. In brief, this re-analysis confirms our original finding of a sharp increase in APCs. 66% of BMC journals for which we have APC data in GBP for both 2018 and 2019 have increased their APCs; 61% have increased their APCs at far beyond inflationary levels, causing the overall average (including journals that did not change APCs or lowered APCs) to increase by 15%, a rate far beyond inflationary levels. We thank Christopher Pym for his interest in our research.
We have APC data for both 2018 and 2019 for 260 BMC journals. The average APC for these journals was 1,416 GBP in 2018, 1,555 GBP in 2019, an average increase of 139 GBP or an average 9% increase. The pricing changes are more complex, however, as some BMC journals have maintained or lowered their prices. In USD (using XE currency converter May 1, 2019), the average APC for these journals rose from 1,852 USD to 2,034 USD, an increase of 181 USD (note rounding error of $1).
Of the 260 BMC journals for which we have 2018 and 2018 APCs:
172 (66%) increased in price
55 (21%) maintained the same price
33 (13%) decreased in price
Of the journals that increased in price, the range of percentage increase was from under 1% to 55%. 158 journals (61% of all journals) had APC price increases clearly beyond inflationary levels, ranging from 7% – 55%.
On the basis of this selective re-analysis of 260 BMC journals for which we have price data I conclude that the average APC price increase for BMC journals is 15%, (factoring in journals that did not change APC or lowered APC), a rate far above inflation, and that the majority of BMC journals (61%) increased their APCs. This confirms our original findings of a sharp APC increase for BMC in 2019. Please note that this re-analysis using the same basic dataset but slightly different methods. The re-analysis is limited to journals for which we have data in both 2018 and 2019, and is limited to GBP. When new journals and journals no longer published by BMC are factored in, this changes the averages; there can also be differences in findings based on which currency is selected for analysis.
A list of BMC APCs in GBP in 2018 and 2019 follows, in order by percentage change (highest price increase first).
Journal Title
2019 APC (GBP)
2018 APC (GBP)
2019-2018 change in GBP (amount)
2019 – 2018 change in GBP (percentage)
Tropical Medicine and Health
1570
705
865
55%
Molecular Cancer
2490
1,470
1,020
41%
Acta Neuropathologica Communications
1570
950
620
39%
Particle and Fibre Toxicology
2170
1,370
800
37%
Molecular Autism
2170
1,370
800
37%
Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research
2290
1,470
820
36%
Journal of Hematology & Oncology
2490
1,650
840
34%
BMC Pulmonary Medicine
1990
1,370
620
31%
Immunity & Ageing
1990
1,370
620
31%
Journal of Translational Medicine
1990
1,370
620
31%
World Journal of Emergency Surgery
1990
1,370
620
31%
Cardiovascular Diabetology
2170
1,540
630
29%
Journal of Nanobiotechnology
1870
1,370
500
27%
Pediatric Rheumatology
1870
1,370
500
27%
Cell Division
1990
1,470
520
26%
Genome Medicine
2570
1,900
670
26%
BMC Veterinary Research
1570
1,165
405
26%
Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials
1790
1,370
420
23%
Behavioral and Brain Functions
1790
1,370
420
23%
Cardiovascular Ultrasound
1790
1,370
420
23%
Cell Communication and Signaling
1790
1,370
420
23%
Diagnostic Pathology
1790
1,370
420
23%
Genes & Nutrition
1790
1,370
420
23%
Molecular Cytogenetics
1790
1,370
420
23%
Reproductive Health
1790
1,370
420
23%
Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling
1790
1,370
420
23%
Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control
1790
1,370
420
23%
International Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology
1790
1,370
420
23%
Thyroid Research
1790
1,370
420
23%
Clinical Epigenetics
2040
1,565
475
23%
Retrovirology
1990
1,565
425
21%
Journal of Physiological Anthropology
1270
1,000
270
21%
Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation
1790
1,430
360
20%
Nutrition & Metabolism
1790
1,430
360
20%
BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine
1690
1,370
320
19%
BMC Geriatrics
1690
1,370
320
19%
BMC Medical Research Methodology
1690
1,370
320
19%
BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders
1690
1,370
320
19%
BMC Neurology
1690
1,370
320
19%
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health
1690
1,370
320
19%
Clinical Sarcoma Research
1690
1,370
320
19%
Conflict and Health
1690
1,370
320
19%
Fluids and Barriers of the CNS
1690
1,370
320
19%
Globalization and Health
1690
1,370
320
19%
Head & Face Medicine
1690
1,370
320
19%
International Breastfeeding Journal
1690
1,370
320
19%
International Journal of Health Geographics
1690
1,370
320
19%
Microbial Cell Factories
1690
1,370
320
19%
Neural Development
1690
1,370
320
19%
Patient Safety in Surgery
1690
1,370
320
19%
Radiation Oncology
1690
1,370
320
19%
Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology
1690
1,370
320
19%
Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy
1690
1,370
320
19%
Virology Journal
1690
1,370
320
19%
Hereditary Cancer in Clinical Practice
1690
1,370
320
19%
Journal of Ovarian Research
1690
1,370
320
19%
Breast Cancer Research
2290
1,860
430
19%
Genome Biology
2380
1,950
430
18%
Cancer Cell International
1790
1,470
320
18%
Journal of Inflammation
1790
1,470
320
18%
Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery
1690
1,390
300
18%
Stem Cell Research & Therapy
1690
1,390
300
18%
BMC Research Notes
990
825
165
17%
Biological Procedures Online
1870
1,565
305
16%
Biotechnology for Biofuels
1870
1,565
305
16%
Human Genomics
1870
1,565
305
16%
Microbiome
1870
1,565
305
16%
International Journal for Equity in Health
1690
1,420
270
16%
Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy
1650
1,390
260
16%
Nutrition Journal
1790
1,510
280
16%
Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology
1690
1,445
245
14%
Gut Pathogens
1790
1,540
250
14%
Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases
1790
1,540
250
14%
BMC Cancer
1590
1,370
220
14%
BMC Health Services Research
1590
1,370
220
14%
BMC Public Health
1590
1,370
220
14%
BMC Medicine
2170
1,880
290
13%
AIDS Research and Therapy
1690
1,470
220
13%
Biomarker Research
1690
1,470
220
13%
Archives of Public Health
1570
1,370
200
13%
Basic and Clinical Andrology
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Anesthesiology
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Biotechnology
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Cardiovascular Disorders
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Evolutionary Biology
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Gastroenterology
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC International Health and Human Rights
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Medical Genetics
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Medical Imaging
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Microbiology
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Palliative Care
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Pediatrics
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Pharmacology and Toxicology
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Psychiatry
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Surgery
1570
1,370
200
13%
BMC Systems Biology
1570
1,370
200
13%
Cardio-Oncology
1570
1,370
200
13%
Clinical Proteomics
1570
1,370
200
13%
Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation
1570
1,370
200
13%
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes
1570
1,370
200
13%
Infectious Diseases of Poverty
1570
1,370
200
13%
International Journal of Mental Health Systems
1570
1,370
200
13%
Population Health Metrics
1570
1,370
200
13%
Thrombosis Journal
1570
1,370
200
13%
Epigenetics & Chromatin
1790
1,565
225
13%
Harm Reduction Journal
1790
1,565
225
13%
Journal of Neuroinflammation
1790
1,565
225
13%
Biology of Sex Differences
1790
1,565
225
13%
Molecular Medicine
1790
1,565
225
13%
Critical Care
1990
1,750
240
12%
Experimental Hematology & Oncology
1690
1,495
195
12%
Molecular Brain
1570
1,395
175
11%
Implementation Science
1690
1,510
180
11%
Respiratory Research
1790
1,615
175
10%
Journal of Biological Engineering
1570
1,430
140
9%
Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice
1570
1,430
140
9%
Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer
1690
1,540
150
9%
BMC Infectious Diseases
1490
1,370
120
8%
Trials
1490
1,370
120
8%
Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
1370
1,265
105
8%
Asthma Research and Practice
1480
1,370
110
7%
BioData Mining
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Biochemistry
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Bioinformatics
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Clinical Pathology
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Ecology
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Hematology
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Nephrology
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Nursing
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Ophthalmology
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Oral Health
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Physiology
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Structural Biology
1480
1,370
110
7%
BMC Urology
1480
1,370
110
7%
Cancers of the Head & Neck
1480
1,370
110
7%
Clinical and Molecular Allergy
1480
1,370
110
7%
Clinical Diabetes and Endocrinology
1480
1,370
110
7%
Contraception and Reproductive Medicine
1480
1,370
110
7%
Disaster and Military Medicine
1480
1,370
110
7%
Fertility Research and Practice
1480
1,370
110
7%
Journal of Clinical Movement Disorders
1480
1,370
110
7%
Lipids in Health and Disease
1480
1,370
110
7%
Maternal Health, Neonatology and Perinatology
1480
1,370
110
7%
Movement Ecology
1480
1,370
110
7%
Proteome Science
1480
1,370
110
7%
Translational Medicine Communications
1480
1,370
110
7%
Tropical Diseases, Travel Medicine and Vaccines
1480
1,370
110
7%
Women’s Midlife Health
1480
1,370
110
7%
Addiction Science and Clinical Practice
1480
1,370
110
7%
Annals of General Psychiatry
1690
1,565
125
7%
Cancer & Metabolism
1690
1,565
125
7%
Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine
1690
1,565
125
7%
Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders
1690
1,565
125
7%
Arthritis Research & Therapy
1870
1,750
120
6%
Veterinary Research
1175
1,150
25
2%
BMC Biophysics
1390
1,370
20
1%
BMC Genetics
1390
1,370
20
1%
Cerebellum & Ataxias
1390
1,370
20
1%
Fungal Biology and Biotechnology
1390
1,370
20
1%
Multiple Sclerosis and Demyelinating Disorders
1390
1,370
20
1%
pneumonia
1390
1,370
20
1%
Research Integrity and Peer Review
1390
1,370
20
1%
Sleep Science and Practice
1390
1,370
20
1%
Irish Veterinary Journal
1390
1,370
20
1%
Cellular & Molecular Biology Letters
1390
1,420
-30
-2%
World Journal of Surgical Oncology
1570
1,650
-80
-5%
Research Involvement and Engagement
1480
1,565
-85
-6%
Bioelectronic Medicine
1480
1,565
-85
-6%
Big Data Analytics
1290
1,370
-80
-6%
Hereditas
1290
1,370
-80
-6%
Marine Biodiversity Records
1290
1,370
-80
-6%
Porcine Health Management
1290
1,370
-80
-6%
Source Code for Biology and Medicine
1290
1,370
-80
-6%
Journal of Biomedical Semantics
1290
1,370
-80
-6%
Journal of Biological Research-Thessaloniki
1390
1,510
-120
-9%
Pilot and Feasibility Studies
1390
1,565
-175
-13%
Systematic Reviews
1390
1,565
-175
-13%
Environmental Evidence
1290
1,470
-180
-14%
BMC Dermatology
1180
1,370
-190
-16%
BMC Emergency Medicine
1180
1,370
-190
-16%
Journal of Congenital Cardiology
1180
1,370
-190
-16%
Diagnostic and Prognostic Research
1480
1,745
-265
-18%
EvoDevo
1690
1,995
-305
-18%
Agriculture & Food Security
1290
1,565
-275
-21%
Cilia
1290
1,565
-275
-21%
Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome
1420
1,810
-390
-27%
Sustainable Earth
690
900
-210
-30%
Animal Biotelemetry
1180
1,565
-385
-33%
European Journal of Medical Research
1480
1,995
-515
-35%
BMC Medical Ethics
990
1,370
-380
-38%
BMC Nutrition
990
1,370
-380
-38%
BMC Obesity
990
1,370
-380
-38%
Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine
990
1,370
-380
-38%
BMC Psychology
860
1,370
-510
-59%
Canine Genetics and Epidemiology
860
1,370
-510
-59%
Journal of Eating Disorders
860
1,370
-510
-59%
BMC Zoology
790
1,370
-580
-73%
Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica
1510
1,510
0
Advances in Simulation
1565
1,565
0
Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology
1370
1,370
0
Biological Research
1430
1,430
0
Biology Direct
1370
1,370
0
Biomaterials Research
1370
1,370
0
BioPsychoSocial Medicine
1370
1,370
0
BMC Biology
1780
1,780
0
BMC Developmental Biology
1370
1,370
0
BMC Endocrine Disorders
1370
1,370
0
BMC Family Practice
1370
1,370
0
BMC Genomics
1370
1,370
0
BMC Immunology
1370
1,370
0
BMC Medical Education
1370
1,370
0
BMC Medical Genomics
1370
1,370
0
BMC Molecular Biology
1370
1,370
0
BMC Neuroscience
1370
1,370
0
BMC Plant Biology
1370
1,370
0
BMC Women’s Health
1370
1,370
0
Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation
1370
1,370
0
Cell & Bioscience
1370
1,370
0
Chinese Medicine
1370
1,370
0
Clinical and Translational Allergy
1470
1,470
0
Emerging Themes in Epidemiology
1370
1,370
0
Environmental Health
1420
1,420
0
European Review of Aging and Physical Activity
1370
1,370
0
Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
1370
1,370
0
Frontiers in Zoology
1510
1,510
0
Genetics Selection Evolution
1175
1,175
0
Gynecologic Oncology Research and Practice
1370
1,370
0
Health Research Policy and Systems
1565
1,565
0
Human Resources for Health
1565
1,565
0
Infectious Agents and Cancer
1370
1,370
0
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity
1650
1,650
0
Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance
1600
1,600
0
Journal of Ecology and Environment
1370
1,370
0
Journal of Foot and Ankle Research
1370
1,370
0
Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition
1370
1,370
0
Journal of Medical Case Reports
825
825
0
Journal of Pharmaceutical Health Care and Sciences
1420
1,420
0
Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition
1370
1,370
0
Malaria Journal
1430
1,430
0
Mobile DNA
1370
1,370
0
Molecular Neurodegeneration
1650
1,650
0
Multidisciplinary Respiratory Medicine
1370
1,370
0
Parasites & Vectors
1370
1,370
0
Perioperative Medicine
1565
1,565
0
Plant Methods
1430
1,430
0
Public Health Reviews
1370
1,370
0
Revista Chilena de Historia Natural
1240
1,240
0
Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine
1485
1,485
0
Cancer Imaging
1370
1,370
0
Journal of Otolaryngology : Head and Neck Surgery
1370
1,370
0
The Italian Journal of Pediatrics
1370
1,370
0
Cancer Communications
1370
1,370
0
BioMedical Engineering OnLine
1375
1,370
5
Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research
1570
1,565
5
Skeletal Muscle
1570
1,565
5
Algorithms for Molecular Biology
1390
1,370
20
Our recent analysis of BioMed Central publishing company journals reveals a sharp increase both in number of open access journals and also article processing fees.
BMC currently publishes 330 open access journals that comparing to 2018 data shows an increase of 11% in number of journals. While 25 journals have no article processing fee for authors to publish their articles, there has been a 57% increase in average article processing charge comparing to the last year, as the average processing fee was $1402 in 2018 and now it is $2200.
Comparing to the last year, 264 journals have increased and 5 journals have decreased in APC (article processing charge). The average APC increase for journals is $917 and the average decrease is $124.
In the three-volume second edition (1987) of Tennyson’s complete poems, editor Christopher Ricks cites more than twelve hundred instances where phrases and short passages are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands. These similarities are sometimes as minimal as two or three words, but in some cases extend to several words in the poems. My own work on Tennyson’s textual parallels, benefiting from the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since that edition was produced, has identified hundreds more. Like those previously identified, each of these new instances may be deemed an allusion (meant to be recognized as such and pointing, for definable purposes, to a particular antecedent text), an echo (conscious or not, deliberate or not, meant to be noticed or not, meaningful or not), or merely accidental. Unless accidental, these new textual parallels tell us more about Tennyson’s reading and shed further light on his thematic intentions and artistic technique. But do they also tell us that Tennyson, for all his talent as a poet, was also a plagiarist on a grand scale?
Questions about
Tennyson’s originality were first raised early in his career, with an unsigned
review of his Poems (1833) in the New Monthly Magazine accusing him of
having ‘filled half his pages with the most glaring imitations’. Thirteen years later, in The New Timon, Edward Bulwer‑Lytton referred scornfully to the
‘borrowed notes’ and ‘purloin’d conceits’ of ‘School‑Miss Alfred’. The most galling attack, however, and the one
that prompted Tennyson’s most intense and sustained response, came late in his
life. It was long after he was named Poet Laureate, long after his verse had
won him fame, fortune and all but universal admiration, and came, ironically,
from a scholar‑critic who claimed to hold him and his poetry in high regard.
When John
Churton Collins published the first of three installments of ‘A New Study of
Tennyson’in the January 1880 issue
of The Cornhill Magazine—including in
it, based on his wide reading and prodigious if imperfect memory, nearly a
hundred instances in which Tennyson seemed to him to have derived phrases,
lines, passages, even whole poems from an assortment of earlier, mostly
classical authors—Tennyson filled the margins of his copy with comments generally
ranging from denial to outrage.
Alongside two lines from his Mariana,
said by Collins to have been adapted from two lines ‘scarcely less beautiful’
of the Latin poet Cinna, Tennyson wrote: ‘I read this for the first time’. Alongside
five others, ‘not known to me’. Alongside six, ‘nonsense’. Alongside three,
‘no’, or ‘no, close as it seems’. Alongside five, ‘!!’ or ‘!!!’ and so on. In three instances, it should be noted, Tennyson’s
marginal comment was ‘possibly’. If, as
seems unlikely, he took the trouble to both read and mark up parts two and
three of Collins’s Cornhill pieces—later
collected with other purported instances of the poet’s borrowings in Collins’s Illustrations of Tennyson (1891)—his copies
and any marginal comments they contained seem not to have survived. Tennyson’s annoyance with Collins and
insistence on the originality of his poems found further expression in his
subsequent correspondence and conversation, with one scholar, Edmund Gosse,
whose latest critical study Collins had panned in print, reporting—or
claiming—that Tennyson had consoled him by calling Collins ‘a louse on the
locks of literature’.
Was
Tennyson, then, despite his denials, a serial plagiarist? What can, I think, be said is that Tennyson’s
repeated insistence that he only rarely consciously and deliberately borrowed
anything from anyone is as questionable as Collins’s repeated insistence that
he believed the same thing. Based on the
enormous number of textual parallels to prior works to be found in Tennyson’s
poems—those previously (and credibly) identified, plus those first reported in my
study—a fundamental and lifelong aspect of Tennyson’s art would seem to have
been his habit of echoing any work ancient or modern he had read and at least
half-consciously recalled, that his creative intelligence told him would
enhance the resonance or deepen the meaning of his poems.
These
textual parallels do not, in my view, reflect a lack of imagination or a want
of originality, but an imagination of enormous range and power that regarded
everything he had ever read, as well as the world around him, the people he
knew, the people he loved (or didn’t), and his own personal and emotional
experience, as the raw material of his art.
If Tennyson’s lifelong practice of crafting poems in this manner—a
practice adopted, to varying degrees, by countless other poets both ancient and
modern—left and leaves him susceptible, however unjustly, to the charge of
plagiarism, then so be it. The fact
remains that in doing so, Tennyson masterfully created some of the most
memorable and original poems ever written in the English language.
In the three-volume second edition (1987) of Tennyson’s complete poems, editor Christopher Ricks cites more than twelve hundred instances where phrases and short passages are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands. These similarities are sometimes as minimal as two or three words, but in some cases extend to several words in the poems. My own work on Tennyson’s textual parallels, benefiting from the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since that edition was produced, has identified hundreds more. Like those previously identified, each of these new instances may be deemed an allusion (meant to be recognized as such and pointing, for definable purposes, to a particular antecedent text), an echo (conscious or not, deliberate or not, meant to be noticed or not, meaningful or not), or merely accidental. Unless accidental, these new textual parallels tell us more about Tennyson’s reading and shed further light on his thematic intentions and artistic technique. But do they also tell us that Tennyson, for all his talent as a poet, was also a plagiarist on a grand scale? Continue reading →
The concept of open access is complementary to, and in opposition to the commons. The similarities and overlap appear to be taken for granted; for example, many people assume that open access and Creative Commons just go together. The purpose of this post is to explore the essential opposition of the two concepts. The so-called “tragedy of the commons” is actually the tragedy of unmanaged open access. Understanding this opposition is helpful to analyze the potential of commons analysis to develop and sustain actual commons (cool pool resources) to support open access works. Ostrom’s design principles for common pool resources are listed with comments and examples of open access supports that illustrate the principles and a proposed modified list design to meet the needs of open access infrastructure is presented.
Details
The purpose of the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons research program (and blog) is to advance our knowledge of how to build and sustain a global knowledge commons. I define the knowledge commons as a collective sharing of the knowledge of humankind that is as open access as possible, in the sense of free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. My vision of the knowledge commons is one that is inclusive, that is, all who are qualified are welcome to contribute. The vision is simple. Understanding and articulating what is necessary to achieve the vision is not simple, and I argue that it will require developing new theoretical and empirical knowledge.
The purpose of this post is to focus on the relationship between two basic concepts, “open access” and “the commons”. There is an intuitive complementarity between the two concepts that might be best understood as an outcome of recent historical developments. The open sharing of Web 2.0 or social media, the open access movement, renewed interest in the concept of the commons, and the development and growth of Creative Commons, have all occurred in the past few decades. The nature and title of this research program Sustaining the Knowledge Commons reflects an ellipse of the two concepts. To advance our knowledge, sometimes it is necessary to question our basic assumptions. For this reason, acknowledging the complementarity of the two concepts, this post focuses on open access and the commons as oppositional in essence. I explain why this matters and how commons design principles might be used to develop and sustain open access organizations and infrastructure (as opposed to open access works).
As Ostrom (2015) points out in the second chapter of her ground-breaking Governing the Commons, the example of the “tragedy of the commons” as presented by Harding in an influential article – a pasture where any herdsman can graze – is not a commons, but rather a pasture that is open to all, an open access resource. A commons is not an open access resource, but rather a resource that is collaboratively managed by a group of people who benefit from the resource who develop, monitor and enforce rules for collective management of the resource. Ostrom presents empirical examples of successful and unsuccessful commons or common pool resources (CPRs) and articulates design principles for successful CPRs.
Ostrom’s research focuses on limited physical resources such as fisheries and water, and acknowledged that research on such CPRs is at a very early stage. The extent to which design principles based on physical CPRs can be employed to understand the potential for electronic commons, where there is no limit to the re-use of resource per se is not known. A few researchers have made an effort at this analysis. For example, Hess and Ostrom (2007) edited a book on understanding knowledge as a commons, one of the influences inspiring my own work and the title of this research program and blog.
Resources versus infrastructure
To understand why it matters that open access and the commons are oppositional concepts, consider the difference between open access works (articles, journals, books, data etc.) and the infrastructure that is needed to create and sustain open access resources. The only restriction to use of an open access resource is reader-side infrastructure (computer and internet) and ability to read and understand. However, the creation and ongoing support of open access works requires resources (hardware, software, internet connectivity, editors). This – the infrastructure to build and sustain open access works – is where Ostrom’s design principles for common pool resources is most likely to be fruitful. Examples of open access infrastructures that are, or could be, managed as common pool resources include: OA journals produced by independent scholars or groups of scholars (e.g. society or university-based); open source journal publishing (e.g. Open Journal Systems); university consortia sharing of infrastructure and /or support for open access (e.g. Scielo, Ontario’s Scholar’s Portal, Open Library of the Humanities).
Design principles for common pool resources
Table 3.1 of design principles is Ostrom’s (2015, p. 90) summary of her findings of characteristics of successful CPRs. Following are proposed minor modifications of the design principles for open access infrastructure, and examples of how these design principles might be useful for open access infrastructure (as opposed to open access works).
“Table 3.1. Design principles illustrated by long-enduring CPR institutions
Clearly defined boundaries
Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money.
Collective-choice arrangements
Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.
Monitoring
Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.
Graduated sanctions
Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
Conflict-resolution mechanisms
Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.
Minimal recognition of rights to organize
The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.
For CPRs that are parts of larger systems:
Nested enterprises
Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises”.
Can Ostrom’s CPR design principles might be applied to OA resources? Examples, comments, and proposed modified design principles
Ostroms’ design principle “1: Clearly defined boundaries
Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself”.
Proposed modified design principle:
1: Clearly defined boundaries
Individuals or organizations who have rights to participate in and benefit from CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
Anyone with internet access can read the journals included in PMC. To be included, journals must meet scope, technical and quality requirements.
Ostrom’s Design Principle 2: “Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions. Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money”.
Proposed modified design principle:
2: “Congruence between participation and provision rules and local and/or disciplinary conditions. Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local and/or disciplinary conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money”.
Examples
Institutional repositories such as uO Recherche https://ruor.uottawa.ca/ are very well aligned with design principle 2. Policies are set by the university and reflect regional practice and law (e.g. copyright law). Staff are paid local wage rates in local currency. Decisions about software, hardware and support can reflect local preferences (e.g. for open source software or proprietary solutions, stand-alone or collaborative repositories) and budgets. In the case of my own university, the University of Ottawa, the institutional repository reflects the official French / English bilingualism of the university.
The HAL archives-ouvertes.fr https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ is a collaborative repository reflecting the research community and language of France.
Ostrom’s Design Principle 3: “Collective-choice arrangements
Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rule
This principle fits smaller CPRs; see design principle 8 on nested enterprises for global open access. For example, university-based researchers can participate in policy consultations for the local institutional repository; members of the editorial board of a journal can participate in setting policy (the principle is the same whether the journal is open access or not).
Ostrom’s Design Principles 4:, 5, and 6 are treated together as OASPA provides examples of all:
“4. Monitoring
Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators”.
5. Graduated sanctions
Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms
Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials”.
Example: the Open Access Scholarly Publisher’s Association (OASPA) Membership Applications, Complaints and Investigations https://oaspa.org/membership/membership-applications/ displays characteristics of a CPR where members (appropriators) actively practice monitoring, graduated sanctions, and conflict-resolution mechanisms. Even after being accepted as members, OASPA members may be identified by other members as not meeting the criteria for acceptance (monitoring); these complaints trigger a conflict-resolution mechanisms that involves a series of graduated sanctions, investigation, possible requirement for the member to alter policies and/or practice and potential termination of membership.
Ostrom Design Principle “7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize
The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities”.
Proposed modified Design Principle “7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize
The rights of participants to devise their own organizations are not challenged by external authorities or bodies”.
Comment: this principle could be applied in the context of open access to the rights of researchers to develop their own institutions or organizations (e.g. based on common disciplinary requirements) and/or rights of local institutions to develop their own approach (as opposed to global open access policy).
Example
The Open Library of the Humanities https://www.openlibhums.org/ was developed by scholars in the humanities to support open access in the humanities. Design Principle 7 recognizes the right of scholars to organize in this fashion.
Ostroms’ Design Principle 8. “Nested enterprises
Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises”.
Comment: this is the principle that most needs development for sustainable open access on a global scale. Every country, region, and discipline needs to contribute to create and sustain open access. This requires many organizations of different types and sizes, each with its own set of principles and approach to monitoring, sanctions, and conflict resolution. This needs to be coordinated (but not controlled) at a higher level for permanent open access to succeed.
Proposed modified design principles for a global knowledge commons
Clearly defined boundaries
Individuals or organizations who have rights to participate in and benefit from CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
Congruence between participation and provision rules and local and/or disciplinary Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local and/or disciplinary conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money.
Collective-choice arrangements
Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.
Monitoring
Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.
Graduated sanctions
Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
Conflict-resolution mechanisms
Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.
Minimal recognition of rights to organize
The rights of participants to devise their own organizations are not challenged by external authorities or bodies”.
Nested enterprises
Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
Acknowledgement
This post builds on conversations with prior SKC research collaborator Alexis Calvé-Genest.
References
Hess, C. & Ostrom, E., eds. (2007). Understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to practice. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Ostrom, E. (2015). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Canto Classics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316423936
Last week, Carlo Patrão published “On the Poetics of Balloon Music: Sounding Air, Body, and Latex (Part One),” which examined the history of the association between balloon travel and experimentation and the idea of silence, along with a round up of conceptual artists who have used balloons in their work. Today’s post continues this exploration with an in-depth conversation between the author, producer Marina Koslock and sound artist Judy Dunaway.
Against Levity: Experimental Music and the Latex Balloon
The term balloon music gained some virality in 2011 after Finn, the protagonist of the animated series Adventure Time, rubbed a toy balloon and improvised a rap over its squeaky sounds. “Balloon music is the future,” says the character. This few second-long scene became an instant meme, inspiring many to share their own versions of the “futuristic sound of balloon music.”
Balloons themselves are viral objects. Designed to infect our moods, they are part of social rituals ranging from the deeply personal to collective (political) euphoria. They are cheap, amusing and awe-inducing. As resonant chambers, balloon membranes are sonically responsive to touch while, at the same time, highly tuned to the vibrations of the environment. To start playing a balloon, no prior experience is required. In this sense, the balloon is a democratic instrument whose sonic textures circumvent expensive music equipment.
The Jazz composer Anthony Braxton was once asked why he used balloons in his Composition 25 (1972). Braxton replied: “I didn’t have enough money for the electronic equipment that could make those kinds of sounds. I’m interested in the expanded reality of sound opened up by the post-Webern continuum, but I’m restricted to using cheap materials. So, you know, I was walking down the street one night and I thought, Hey! I gotta have balloons!”
Anthony Braxton, B-Xo/N-0-1-47a or Composition 6G, w/ Leroy Jenkins, Leo Smith and Steve McCall, with balloon sounds, 1969
“For me, that piece (Composition 25) really best demonstrates the full symbolic meaning of the balloon in the early avant-garde,” says balloon music composer Judy Dunaway. “I’ve discussed this with Braxton himself – the balloon replicated electronic equipment that he couldn’t afford at the time, but he also saw it as a way to open up the minds of the performers to get them to think differently about how they were improvising and how they were interacting in the piece.” Braxton’s Composition 25 is scored for 250 balloons and musicians are required to produce sound by squeezing, rubbing and popping balloons. “I like the idea that he breaks down the hierarchy,” adds Dunaway, “black musicians were discriminated against and they didn’t have the financial means that the white musicians had… and he was using this as a way to get beyond that and say: Here, I’m going to do electronic sounds without any electronics, I don’t need to go buy a Buchla or be associated with an academic institution that can give me access to equipment, right?”
Judy Dunaway, Mother of Balloon Music, Innova Recordings, 2006
Producer Marina Koslock and I met Judy Dunaway at MassArt in Boston to talk about her balloon-based sculptural sonic performances and the ready-made latex balloon as a sound producing instrument. For the past 25 years, Dunaway has been developing a singular specialization in the balloon as a medium for sound and music. You can keep just broadening out and do more things with a concept; or you can work in a particular parameter as an artist and keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper, and that for me as been more interesting, is to pursue that line”, explains Dunaway.
As a consequence, her balloon work has spanned out through several records (e.g. Balloon Music and Mother of Balloon Music), scores, sound sculptures, solo performances, ensembles, and numerous installations. The poetics of the latex balloon as a sound producing instrument contrast with the atmospheric balloon explored in part one of this article. The balloon, no longer buoyant, stays in close proximity to the body of the performer. The surface of the balloon is vibrated through rubbing, stroking, squeezing, pulling, popping and through the control of air releases. These sonic tactile acts bring forth dialogues between the performer’s body and the latex body of the balloon. “I limited my playing techniques to the balloons and my body,” says Judy Dunaway, “it was essential to be able to feel everything that was happening with the balloon in order to be able to fully explore all the sonic possibilities.”
The balloon functions as an external sensory organ, like a skin, that vibrates when sound passes through. In Deaf culture, balloons have a long history of being used as resonating chambers that amplify vibration and facilitate hearing. Deaf people use them at concerts, musicals, clubs and raves to hear the music through the vibration of the balloon’s membrane. David Toop writes about Alexander Bell in the 1870s encouraging students from a Boston school for deaf children to hold balloons in their hands while walking on the street as a safety measure in order to hear the vibrations from the cobblestones as fast horse-drawn wagons passed by. Vibrational information is processed in the same way as sound information. As the scholar Steph Ceraso proposes, the common definition of listening needs to be expanded to include the sensory, contextual, and material aspects of a sonic event. Dunaway’s sound installation Manual Eardrums invites participants to a different mode of listening through the vibration of the balloon. “You are given earplugs at the door and an inflated balloon, and you hold it between your hands as you walk around the space. There’s a low tone playing that sweeps between 100Hz and 150Hz and it causes different vibrational patterns in the room that you can feel and map them out,” explains Dunaway. “Your eardrum is the balloon that you’re holding.”
Judy Dunaway performing Amplified Twister Balloon, Photo by Mizuki Nakeshu
Judy Dunaway started to play balloon music in the late 1980s, first as a preparation for guitar string and soon after as a solo instrument. It was in the midst of the AIDS Crisis and Dunaway was part of the downtown improv scene in NYC. “Many of my friends were dying,” she recalls. “Everybody was saying what caused this? Nobody knew how the disease was being spread,” adds Dunaway. “Then, of course, there was this discovery that it was sexually transmitted and you could prevent transmission with latex condoms. Suddenly, they had this power,” she says, “latex had this power to save people’s lives, and I say that that is when balloons really began to speak to me. They were something beyond a mere mechanism to make sound.” Within the envelope of the balloon Dunaway found space for memory, life, and sensuality.
From the beginning, her balloon work has articulated tensions between explicit and implicit meaning around issues relating to social activism, environmentalism, and feminism. “In an era, which continues to be that a woman’s control of her own body is restricted or attempts are being made to restrict our bodies, I coupled myself to this instrument that expresses sensuality, sexuality, and humanity,” says Dunaway. The balloon, as a resonating chamber, bypasses western musical traditions that mechanize the body and gender stereotype musical expression. For Dunaway, the balloon generates a “non-judgmental somatic relationship.”
“Seeing my connection to the body of the balloon, that to me served as an unspoken rebellion against the patriarchy, against the power structures that have oppressed women and, ultimately, all humankind by severing the psyche and the body,” says Dunaway. Following the scholar Robin James, the patriarchy is not just a “relation among people” but is also a “relation among sounds” that are coded in a gender system of masculine absolute/feminine other. “The way I approach the balloon is not nailed or fixed or part of this history,” clarifies Dunaway. The balloon as an instrument has allowed Dunaway to develop a musical lexicon outside of a male-dominated classical heritage.
Judy Dunaway performing Piece for Tenor Balloon, written notation with improvisational passages, 2002
For example, this is her description of the round balloon as a sounding instrument:
Imagine a string, a string on a violin or guitar, and this string is held taut on either end by a knot and a bridge; now imagine that string suddenly melted and spawned out into an orb and it’s all held tight by a column of air. . .this is the palette that I have to access when I play the Tenor Balloon, I have all these harmonics on this curved shape, and I control it partially with my knees.
The Tenor Balloon is placed between both knees and Dunaway applies and releases pressure on the balloon producing microtonal changes on its surface. “And I also use water,” she adds, “copious amounts of water, warm water on the balloon and on my hands because that’s the way I get this stick and slip mechanism to work.” The hands gliding on the balloon’s surface act similar to a bow on a string reaching different nodes and moving through harmonic series.
Judy Dunaway performing “Hommage à Kenneth Noland”, for amplified giant balloon, vibrators, synthesized tones, and projected video, with Max/MSP/Jitter interface, 2017
Each balloon requires its own specific touch or sounding technique. On the piece Amplified Giant Balloon, vibrators are used to resonate the surface of a giant balloon creating a low drone sound. “It’s like vibrating a giant bass string”, says Dunaway, ”I tune my vibrators, I go to the sex shop and I listen to vibrators, and I tune the vibrators to each other so there’s a little beating pattern between them that I can control.”
Around 2015, Dunaway added a new balloon to her solo performances, the AmplifiedTwister Balloon. The twister balloon is equivalent to the long balloons used to make balloon-animals. Due to its string-like shape, the sounds produced through rubbing or gliding differ from the sounds of a round balloon. “The harmonic series isn’t so predictable,” she continues, “the tension is highest close to the navel of the balloon and that makes it microtonal different from one end to the other like an out-of-tune bugle.” Visually, the AmplifiedTwister Balloon performance delivers a feminist affirming statement. Defying the tradition of the male guitarist stroking the female form of the guitar, Dunaway finds musical material in a phallic-shaped balloon. “I sort of invert this”, she says, “now I have the penis form that I’m stroking and caressing and I’m taking this phallic power for myself in the Amplified Twister Balloon.”
To develop a practice around the accessibility of latex is to engage with politics of mass-production and exploitation of resources and labor. Dunaway mentions the connection between the air and breath that fills the balloon and the mass-extraction of latex from the lungs of the Earth. “[Balloons] are literally the blood from a tree in the Amazon,” says Dunaway, “and there’s a whole history of how the indigenous people there were and still are persecuted. Now, they are mostly farmed in Malaysia,” she adds.
Latex being collected from a tapped rubber tree, Wikimedia Commons
Between 1890 and 1920, a rubber fever led to a boom of extraction and exploitation of rubber-bearing plants in the Amazonian countries and to the forced displacement, slavery and mass killing of its indigenous people. The same happened in many African countries. As John Tully writes in his book The Devil’s Milk, “it is still true that where there is rubber there is often human suffering.” Ricardo Arias, a Columbian composer working with balloons (balloon kit) since 1987, has acknowledged this suffering through his balloon work. In Musica Global, Arias composed a series of 20 short balloon pieces called Caouchu: The Weeping Tree/El Árbol Que Llora in memory of the native Americans tortured and killed by the North American and European hunger for natural rubber latex.
These ontological relations between the balloon’s materiality and the environment inform Dunaway’s work. “I’m writing a piece for a large 30 to 35 person balloon ensemble. This piece is called Wind Ensemble and is all about the air going out of the balloon, and the sound of the mouthpiece being vibrated as the air comes out.” Dunaway shares a video recording of this work and the room is filled with high pitched sounds changing at different speeds. The experience is immersive; a meditation on air and vibration. “It’s rather minimal in the concept because I really want you to notice the small changes and nuances over time.” The performative element of the piece has balloon players squeezing the balloon’s mouthpiece and bending over large balloons to make them vibrate until the balloon’s last breath. “Ideally, I would like 60 balloon players, that would be great!” she exclaims. The embodied relationship that Dunaway has developed with the balloon over the past decades resulted in an artistic practice extremely tuned to the sonic proprieties of every inch of the latex balloon.
Still from Le Ballon Rouge by Albert Lamorisse, 1956
The poetics of balloon music bring forth alternative narratives that challenge dominant hierarchies of music production, bypassing expensive technology and expectations of gendered musical expression. The balloon as an object of childhood and of playfulness is charged with emotional resonance and invites the construction of meaning while offering an opportunity to build upon subversive themes. In this two-part article, the balloon was analyzed as an object that is able to generate a vertical dimension of self and the construction of a sense of Place within the silence of the upper air regions that informed the “listening ear” to perceive difference. As a Probe, the balloon navigates the irreversibly altered constitution of the airspace, sonifying masses of air and weather data. Filled with breath or air, in Play, the latex balloon is an extra ear attached to our bodies that vibrate in sympathy with the terrestrial agitations of the Earth. Maybe Finn from AdventureTime is on to something. “Balloon music is the future.”
—
Thanks to Judy Dunaway for the interview and records; Marina Koslock for co-producing the interview with Judy Dunaway; and Jennifer Stoever for your help and excellent editing.
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Featured Image: Judy Dunaway, photo by Alice Bellati
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Carlo Patrãois a Portuguese radio producer and independent researcher based in New York city.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Last week, Carlo Patrão published “On the Poetics of Balloon Music: Sounding Air, Body, and Latex (Part One),” which examined the history of the association between balloon travel and experimentation and the idea of silence, along with a round up of conceptual artists who have used balloons in their work. Today’s post continues this exploration with an in-depth conversation between the author, producer Marina Koslock and sound artist Judy Dunaway.
Against Levity: Experimental Music and the Latex Balloon
The term balloon music gained some virality in 2011 after Finn, the protagonist of the animated series Adventure Time, rubbed a toy balloon and improvised a rap over its squeaky sounds. “Balloon music is the future,” says the character. This few second-long scene became an instant meme, inspiring many to share their own versions of the “futuristic sound of balloon music.”
Balloons themselves are viral objects. Designed to infect our moods, they are part of social rituals ranging from the deeply personal to collective (political) euphoria. They are cheap, amusing and awe-inducing. As resonant chambers, balloon membranes are sonically responsive to touch while, at the same time, highly tuned to the vibrations of the environment. To start playing a balloon, no prior experience is required. In this sense, the balloon is a democratic instrument whose sonic textures circumvent expensive music equipment.
The Jazz composer Anthony Braxton was once asked why he used balloons in his Composition 25 (1972). Braxton replied: “I didn’t have enough money for the electronic equipment that could make those kinds of sounds. I’m interested in the expanded reality of sound opened up by the post-Webern continuum, but I’m restricted to using cheap materials. So, you know, I was walking down the street one night and I thought, Hey! I gotta have balloons!”
Anthony Braxton, B-Xo/N-0-1-47a or Composition 6G, w/ Leroy Jenkins, Leo Smith and Steve McCall, with balloon sounds, 1969
“For me, that piece (Composition 25) really best demonstrates the full symbolic meaning of the balloon in the early avant-garde,” says balloon music composer Judy Dunaway. “I’ve discussed this with Braxton himself – the balloon replicated electronic equipment that he couldn’t afford at the time, but he also saw it as a way to open up the minds of the performers to get them to think differently about how they were improvising and how they were interacting in the piece.” Braxton’s Composition 25 is scored for 250 balloons and musicians are required to produce sound by squeezing, rubbing and popping balloons. “I like the idea that he breaks down the hierarchy,” adds Dunaway, “black musicians were discriminated against and they didn’t have the financial means that the white musicians had… and he was using this as a way to get beyond that and say: Here, I’m going to do electronic sounds without any electronics, I don’t need to go buy a Buchla or be associated with an academic institution that can give me access to equipment, right?”
Judy Dunaway, Mother of Balloon Music, Innova Recordings, 2006
Producer Marina Koslock and I met Judy Dunaway at MassArt in Boston to talk about her balloon-based sculptural sonic performances and the ready-made latex balloon as a sound producing instrument. For the past 25 years, Dunaway has been developing a singular specialization in the balloon as a medium for sound and music. You can keep just broadening out and do more things with a concept; or you can work in a particular parameter as an artist and keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper, and that for me as been more interesting, is to pursue that line”, explains Dunaway.
As a consequence, her balloon work has spanned out through several records (e.g. Balloon Music and Mother of Balloon Music), scores, sound sculptures, solo performances, ensembles, and numerous installations. The poetics of the latex balloon as a sound producing instrument contrast with the atmospheric balloon explored in part one of this article. The balloon, no longer buoyant, stays in close proximity to the body of the performer. The surface of the balloon is vibrated through rubbing, stroking, squeezing, pulling, popping and through the control of air releases. These sonic tactile acts bring forth dialogues between the performer’s body and the latex body of the balloon. “I limited my playing techniques to the balloons and my body,” says Judy Dunaway, “it was essential to be able to feel everything that was happening with the balloon in order to be able to fully explore all the sonic possibilities.”
The balloon functions as an external sensory organ, like a skin, that vibrates when sound passes through. In Deaf culture, balloons have a long history of being used as resonating chambers that amplify vibration and facilitate hearing. Deaf people use them at concerts, musicals, clubs and raves to hear the music through the vibration of the balloon’s membrane. David Toop writes about Alexander Bell in the 1870s encouraging students from a Boston school for deaf children to hold balloons in their hands while walking on the street as a safety measure in order to hear the vibrations from the cobblestones as fast horse-drawn wagons passed by. Vibrational information is processed in the same way as sound information. As the scholar Steph Ceraso proposes, the common definition of listening needs to be expanded to include the sensory, contextual, and material aspects of a sonic event. Dunaway’s sound installation Manual Eardrums invites participants to a different mode of listening through the vibration of the balloon. “You are given earplugs at the door and an inflated balloon, and you hold it between your hands as you walk around the space. There’s a low tone playing that sweeps between 100Hz and 150Hz and it causes different vibrational patterns in the room that you can feel and map them out,” explains Dunaway. “Your eardrum is the balloon that you’re holding.”
Judy Dunaway performing Amplified Twister Balloon, Photo by Mizuki Nakeshu
Judy Dunaway started to play balloon music in the late 1980s, first as a preparation for guitar string and soon after as a solo instrument. It was in the midst of the AIDS Crisis and Dunaway was part of the downtown improv scene in NYC. “Many of my friends were dying,” she recalls. “Everybody was saying what caused this? Nobody knew how the disease was being spread,” adds Dunaway. “Then, of course, there was this discovery that it was sexually transmitted and you could prevent transmission with latex condoms. Suddenly, they had this power,” she says, “latex had this power to save people’s lives, and I say that that is when balloons really began to speak to me. They were something beyond a mere mechanism to make sound.” Within the envelope of the balloon Dunaway found space for memory, life, and sensuality.
From the beginning, her balloon work has articulated tensions between explicit and implicit meaning around issues relating to social activism, environmentalism, and feminism. “In an era, which continues to be that a woman’s control of her own body is restricted or attempts are being made to restrict our bodies, I coupled myself to this instrument that expresses sensuality, sexuality, and humanity,” says Dunaway. The balloon, as a resonating chamber, bypasses western musical traditions that mechanize the body and gender stereotype musical expression. For Dunaway, the balloon generates a “non-judgmental somatic relationship.”
“Seeing my connection to the body of the balloon, that to me served as an unspoken rebellion against the patriarchy, against the power structures that have oppressed women and, ultimately, all humankind by severing the psyche and the body,” says Dunaway. Following the scholar Robin James, the patriarchy is not just a “relation among people” but is also a “relation among sounds” that are coded in a gender system of masculine absolute/feminine other. “The way I approach the balloon is not nailed or fixed or part of this history,” clarifies Dunaway. The balloon as an instrument has allowed Dunaway to develop a musical lexicon outside of a male-dominated classical heritage.
Judy Dunaway performing Piece for Tenor Balloon, written notation with improvisational passages, 2002
For example, this is her description of the round balloon as a sounding instrument:
Imagine a string, a string on a violin or guitar, and this string is held taut on either end by a knot and a bridge; now imagine that string suddenly melted and spawned out into an orb and it’s all held tight by a column of air. . .this is the palette that I have to access when I play the Tenor Balloon, I have all these harmonics on this curved shape, and I control it partially with my knees.
The Tenor Balloon is placed between both knees and Dunaway applies and releases pressure on the balloon producing microtonal changes on its surface. “And I also use water,” she adds, “copious amounts of water, warm water on the balloon and on my hands because that’s the way I get this stick and slip mechanism to work.” The hands gliding on the balloon’s surface act similar to a bow on a string reaching different nodes and moving through harmonic series.
Judy Dunaway performing “Hommage à Kenneth Noland”, for amplified giant balloon, vibrators, synthesized tones, and projected video, with Max/MSP/Jitter interface, 2017
Each balloon requires its own specific touch or sounding technique. On the piece Amplified Giant Balloon, vibrators are used to resonate the surface of a giant balloon creating a low drone sound. “It’s like vibrating a giant bass string”, says Dunaway, ”I tune my vibrators, I go to the sex shop and I listen to vibrators, and I tune the vibrators to each other so there’s a little beating pattern between them that I can control.”
Around 2015, Dunaway added a new balloon to her solo performances, the AmplifiedTwister Balloon. The twister balloon is equivalent to the long balloons used to make balloon-animals. Due to its string-like shape, the sounds produced through rubbing or gliding differ from the sounds of a round balloon. “The harmonic series isn’t so predictable,” she continues, “the tension is highest close to the navel of the balloon and that makes it microtonal different from one end to the other like an out-of-tune bugle.” Visually, the AmplifiedTwister Balloon performance delivers a feminist affirming statement. Defying the tradition of the male guitarist stroking the female form of the guitar, Dunaway finds musical material in a phallic-shaped balloon. “I sort of invert this”, she says, “now I have the penis form that I’m stroking and caressing and I’m taking this phallic power for myself in the Amplified Twister Balloon.”
To develop a practice around the accessibility of latex is to engage with politics of mass-production and exploitation of resources and labor. Dunaway mentions the connection between the air and breath that fills the balloon and the mass-extraction of latex from the lungs of the Earth. “[Balloons] are literally the blood from a tree in the Amazon,” says Dunaway, “and there’s a whole history of how the indigenous people there were and still are persecuted. Now, they are mostly farmed in Malaysia,” she adds.
Latex being collected from a tapped rubber tree, Wikimedia Commons
Between 1890 and 1920, a rubber fever led to a boom of extraction and exploitation of rubber-bearing plants in the Amazonian countries and to the forced displacement, slavery and mass killing of its indigenous people. The same happened in many African countries. As John Tully writes in his book The Devil’s Milk, “it is still true that where there is rubber there is often human suffering.” Ricardo Arias, a Columbian composer working with balloons (balloon kit) since 1987, has acknowledged this suffering through his balloon work. In Musica Global, Arias composed a series of 20 short balloon pieces called Caouchu: The Weeping Tree/El Árbol Que Llora in memory of the native Americans tortured and killed by the North American and European hunger for natural rubber latex.
These ontological relations between the balloon’s materiality and the environment inform Dunaway’s work. “I’m writing a piece for a large 30 to 35 person balloon ensemble. This piece is called Wind Ensemble and is all about the air going out of the balloon, and the sound of the mouthpiece being vibrated as the air comes out.” Dunaway shares a video recording of this work and the room is filled with high pitched sounds changing at different speeds. The experience is immersive; a meditation on air and vibration. “It’s rather minimal in the concept because I really want you to notice the small changes and nuances over time.” The performative element of the piece has balloon players squeezing the balloon’s mouthpiece and bending over large balloons to make them vibrate until the balloon’s last breath. “Ideally, I would like 60 balloon players, that would be great!” she exclaims. The embodied relationship that Dunaway has developed with the balloon over the past decades resulted in an artistic practice extremely tuned to the sonic proprieties of every inch of the latex balloon.
Still from Le Ballon Rouge by Albert Lamorisse, 1956
The poetics of balloon music bring forth alternative narratives that challenge dominant hierarchies of music production, bypassing expensive technology and expectations of gendered musical expression. The balloon as an object of childhood and of playfulness is charged with emotional resonance and invites the construction of meaning while offering an opportunity to build upon subversive themes. In this two-part article, the balloon was analyzed as an object that is able to generate a vertical dimension of self and the construction of a sense of Place within the silence of the upper air regions that informed the “listening ear” to perceive difference. As a Probe, the balloon navigates the irreversibly altered constitution of the airspace, sonifying masses of air and weather data. Filled with breath or air, in Play, the latex balloon is an extra ear attached to our bodies that vibrate in sympathy with the terrestrial agitations of the Earth. Maybe Finn from AdventureTime is on to something. “Balloon music is the future.”
—
Thanks to Judy Dunaway for the interview and records; Marina Koslock for co-producing the interview with Judy Dunaway; and Jennifer Stoever for your help and excellent editing.
—
Featured Image: Judy Dunaway, photo by Alice Bellati
—
Carlo Patrãois a Portuguese radio producer and independent researcher based in New York city.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
The Institute of Network Cultures is proud to announce the return of MoneyLab to Amsterdam: two days filled with presentations, workshops, performances and discussions by and with artists, academics, activists, geeks, and students about pressing financial issues. What is the status of our experiments with alternative finance in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the rise of right-wing nationalism? Can we move beyond the critique of libertarian start-ups and their male preoccupations? What is the role today of artists and designers in this expanding financial ecology? Are platforms becoming the new banks? What are the counter-designs of digital transactions? How do we relate to the emerging regulatory regimes that want to “civilize” fintech? Can we speak of a gentrification of payments, as Brett Scott indicated?
Possible topics:
Beyond the Blokechain: the Cryptofeminist Agenda
Geopolitics of Finance: From Altright to China
Investigative Journalism without Consequences?
Financial Hacking: From Dark Web Smokescreens to White-Collar Crime
Payments and the Platforms: Monetization of Social Media
Questioning Financial Visualization
AltFin: Experiments from Prototype to Pilot
The event consists of a 2-day conference, workshops and an evening program with performances. If you are interested to participate, please contact Geert Lovink <geert [at] xs4all.nl>.