Vocable Gestures

Graduate / Professional

A studio course exploring forms of broadcast and voice as material, and the interrelations of typography, sound and circulation. Through expanded approaches to publishing and making public, the course frames modes of transmission and distribution as active components of the work itself. Borrowing its title from a 1977 survey-essay by sound poets and low-tech technologists Larry Wendt and Stephen Ruppenthal, ‘Vocable Gestures’ draws on a range of references, precedents, distances and frequencies. Notably from the history of telephony and communication technologies in New Haven specifically, notions of ‘tele-intimacy’ and from text-sound as a medium in which ‘poetry left the page of the book to invade the acoustic space — once again’. Students will engage with the phonic, semantic and material possibilities of language and develop independent projects that incorporate gestures of making, writing, listening, transmitting and sharing 3 Course cr M 9:25am-12:25pm