Darrin Martin / Binaural mirage

Darrin Martin, Gift Perception, three-channel synchronized video installation, installation view (2010)

The autonomous or simultaneous unreliability of both senses and machines, sometimes strange and frustrating, occasionally dazzling or disturbing, is a theme that Darrin Martin has been exploring for decades in his multimedia installations. Art historian Pasi Väliaho describes the development of the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz in the 17th century as indebted to then-novel projection technologies of anamorphic perspective, the camera obscura, and the magic lantern, contrasting the situated, constrained, and fallible perspective of the individual “monad” with the omniscience of God. “Even when we are awake we are visited by images, which come to us unbidden, as in dreams,” Väliaho quotes him as saying. Leibniz here invokes the magic lantern, “with which one can make figures appear on the wall by turning something on the inside.”

1/2 Right, video (2003)

Meanwhile, sound studies scholar Robin James has critiqued recent scholarship in “new materialism,” which presumes to be iconoclastic in elevating sound over sight as closer to an authentic experience of “resonance.” Jonathan Sterne, cited by James, dubs this fallacy “the audiovisual litany.” “New materialism’s gesture of supersession,” James writes, “shows its ability to keep pace with—and garner prestige in—an academy that has itself embraced neoliberal market logics, data analytics, and the like (.)” The scientistic fundamentalism of the waveform, promoted by scholars such as Jane Bennett and Karen Barad, echoes the binary arithmetic created by Leibniz. Connected by Gilles Deleuze to the play of light and shadow, Leibniz’s binary code would be fundamental not only to digital computation, but also to the contemporary dominion of quantified prediction and statistical objectivity: an ideology that James calls “the sonic episteme.”

The Amalgams (x, y, z), three-channel video (2015)

Having gone through a lengthy experience of hearing loss as an adult, shortly after having completed a graduate program steeped in poststructuralist theory, which in turn followed an undergraduate program focused on experimental structuralist video art, Martin is a prolific media artist committed to challenging presumptions of the senses as calibrated conduits for empirical input. And coming of age as a gay man not long after the tragic and turbulent first decade of the AIDS crisis, he also understands the body and popular culture as sources of abundant symbolism. Among his repeated and adroitly interwoven motifs, Martin’s work has incorporated analog video distortions of fragmentary assemblages, verbal and textual descriptions of unseen or unheard phenomena, and asymmetrical quasi-stereo pseudo-doubling, as well as numerous pieces that recreate elements of his encounters with hearing tests and assistive listening devices.

The Casts, video (2015) Objects Unknown, HD synchronized video projections, 3D printed objects, shelving, and sound (2015)

Contrapposto, video installed with 3-D print (2016)

Martin’s hallucinatory multichannel video installations The Amalgams (x, y, z), Objects Unknown, and The Casts and Infra-Colour (all 2015) feature kinetic analog mutant montages of monochromatic assemblages made of foam, tape, and other at-hand materials, with the latter two including the objects themselves, and The Casts featuring verbal tactile descriptions by three “shirtless bearded men” handling the objects. Similar sculptures were attached to a man’s nude body for Contrapposto (2016); this performer was then digitally scanned, with a 3-D print and altered video of the rendered scan being exhibited together. Continuing along these lines, Disembody Electric (2015) features glitchy shimmering footage of a scanned bust portrait of Martin himself, while Semblance is a 3-D print of the scan on a rotating base. In the current era of high-definition digital video, these works and many others by Martin reclaim the vast crip potential of analog ambiguity and mechanized texture to be found in low-resolution content, with fragments of classical architecture and nude bodies alluringly detourning the disembodied and depoliticized vaporwave aesthetic of the 2010s.

The Divide, two-channel synchronized video installation, installation view (2015)

In his two-channel video installation The Divide (2015), one of Martin’s works that capitalize on the bilateral nature of standard human vision and audition, “a pair of identical twins narrate(s) sets of stereoscopic images produced over a century ago.” The twins’ speech is captioned and played over pans of flickering and filtered video of the photos in their viewers, which include portraits of families and soldiers, as well as natural and urban settings. Video clips of the twins speaking are intermittently included as part or all of one or both projections. Viewers themselves are invited to look through stereoscopic viewers for Martin’s installation Ancestral Songs (2020), in which they can see HD video of “interior spaces.” This video is synced to a large wall-sized projection featuring outdoor scenes, in front of which hands manipulate a variety of assistive listening devices belonging to Martin’s relatives. The audio portion of the work, described in captions on the large projection, is the sound emitted by the hearing prostheses being handled.

Ancestral Songs, two silent synchronized and looped HD wall projections 

accompanied by HD asynchronous stereoscopic loops in viewers with sound  (2020)

Fractured video of visual perception tests is overlaid with tones and speech used in audiology exams for the immersive three-channel video installation Gift Perception (2010), which extrapolates on sound and imagery from an earlier one-channel work, Monograph in Stereo (2005), which documented Martin’s experience of hearing loss and inaugurated his motifs of sculptural fragments, captioned nonverbal sound, and mirrored semi-symmetry.  A more modestly scaled two-screen “portrait piece” entitled Fischinger and Linstrom (2012) documents moving electronic imagery created by, respectively, “a 20th century filmmaker dedicated to visualization of the ephemeral qualities of sound, and… a practicing ENT (ear, nose, throat doctor) attempting to visualize sounds perception via scientific methodologies.” And one of Martin’s most mesmerizing works in this stereo vein may be Tunnel Vision (Before and After Split) (2015), a two-channel projection “produced by recording every tunnel on a road trip driving up the coast of Croatia and stopping at the city Split in between,” with different portions of the journey silently cruising along in asymmetrical asynchrony.

Tunnel Vision (Before and After Split), two-channel video (2015)

These works literalize Martin’s experience of hearing tests as troubling distinctions between subjective perception and objective quantification. “My tinnitus is also generating a pitch, or some pitches, that in some ways contest the thing that I'm hearing,” he told me. “So there's a blurring of the inside and outside, and I actually have had similar experiences, where the internal and external are not as easily defined.” A work that Martin will be premiering later this month expands this theme into a group project. The piece is a remarkable structured collaboration undertaken with a convening of disabled artists and scholars that took place in 2012, but whose origins began earlier. Catherine Kudlick, who was teaching at UC Davis, approached him about partnering to invite deaf artist Joseph Grigley to campus as a visiting artist. In 2010 Kudlick invited Martin to partake in a Critical Disability Studies residency with disabled scholars Georgina Kleege, Mara Mills, and others, supported by a UC Humanities Research Institute Fellowship. Martin took the opportunity to lead a participatory description exercise, asking different viewers (some with low vision) to describe the often visually abstracted portions of Monograph in Stereo, which, along with ½ Right (2003) and Other Turbans (2007) comprises his “Hearing Loss Trilogy.”

Monograph in Stereo, print from video still (2005)

Martin was able to take advantage of a second convening in 2012 in order to work with yet more disabled artists, scholars, and curators in a range of disciplines, including Allison O’Daniel, Amanda Cachia, Kevin Gotkin, Michele Friedner, Victoria Marks, Ann Carlson, Terry Galloway, Sara Hendren, Ivan Ramos, Scott Wallin, Laurel Friedman, Patrick Anderson, and Hentyle Yapp. At one point, Martin brought his collaborators to an outdoor area and distributed cut sections of an unspooled 16mm educational science film entitled Clouds and Precipitation. He invited participants to describe the length of celluloid that they were handed in whatever terms they chose, recording their responses on the spot in front of a makeshift green screen. The result of this collective enterprise, Clouds and Perception, will be shown as part of a larger program Martin put together,“What Are Words For?,” screening on Wednesday, March 27th at the State Theatre as part of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Sensoria Principia, video from site-specific projection (2006)

Both in his solo and collaborative works, Martin has made and continues to make an enormous contribution to queer disability art. He draws on the aesthetically (somewhat) canonized yet culturally (somewhat) forgotten tools of past generations of consumer-grade video, made iconic by artists like Dara Birnbaum and Vito Acconci, and collectives like General Idea and Ant Farm, transmitting and transmuting the uneven frictions and frissons of cultural politics through the medium-specific grain of interference, distortion, juxtaposition, noise, and glitch. In his work the miraculous incompleteness of embodiment shines on irregular surfaces, voiced and captioned by unreliable narrators and soundtracked by the hypnotic qualia of medicalized musique concrete. As in Martin’s site-specific projection Sensorial Principia (2006), in which a nude male performer sensually licks and luxuriates among the pages of Isaac Newton’s major text on the principles of gravity, empirical objectivity is treated with ludic irreverence. Symmetry is compromised and transparency is a fantasy. Indeed, the glowing worlds conjured in Martin’s environments can be said, all connotations intended, to be resolutely non-binary.

Disembody Electric, video (2015)