Listening Publics: Ultra-Red’s Protocols for the Common

Written by Joshua Marquis
Edited by Greta Rainbow

“What did you hear?”

This question organizes the work of sound-art collective Ultra-Red, a group that works internationally, employing what they term “militant sound investigation,” in their practice with activist groups, organizers and organizations, cultural workers and communities, or the “politically inconvenient.”[1] The group emerged from the struggles of the AIDS crisis in 1994, as its two founding members met in the Los Angeles chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP). Since then, the collective has expanded to include other artists, researchers, and organizers from different social movements, who are embedded within or have long-term engagements with social movements such as “housing justice, anti-racism and the struggles of migration, HIV/AIDS justice, sexual and gender rights, and the preferential option for the poor,” using sound as an investigatory technique for inquiry with and within these communities, intended to provide “an accessible process for practicing listening and developing collectivity within the context of ongoing and long-term struggle”.[2] More recently, their practice has moved away from sound composition and toward the composition of listening: that is, staging “listening sessions,” or collaborative encounters, where sound objects are produced, listened to, and discussed among groups constituted in struggle. This shift to a composition of listening is where Ultra-Red’s practice has begun to constitute micro-public spheres, providing an encounter for the emergence and identification of common concerns through the register of sonorous and collective feeling. This process of collective reflection and the identification of a common becomes a necessary condition for the continued struggle against ongoing structural oppression and the silence it so violently imposes, thereby reconfiguring the direction those groups will take in the future.

It is important to note that to frame what follows, the composition of a public sphere in the work of Ultra-Red must be differentiated from the public sphere in its original, Habermassian formulation. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas defines the public sphere as, “the sphere of private people come together as a public” in order to publicly wield their “reason.”[3] Reason in this definition is “realized in the rational communication of a public consisting of cultivated human beings [emphasis added],” a technique mastered in the private sphere of the home.[4] The arena of the public sphere was thus open to all who could publicly use their reason, “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing equality of status, disregarded status altogether.”[5]This formulation has been criticized and contested by a number of scholars since its publication, including Nancy Fraser, whose insight in “Rethinking the Public Sphere” is useful for engaging Ultra-Red’s listening publics. In particular, she argues that the public sphere is not open and accessible to all (due to deliberate exclusions, as well as the ways in which the public use of “reason” is not a practice open to all), but also consequently that it is not possible to produce social arenas that disregard social status altogether, for, “where societal inequality persists, deliberative processes in public spheres will tend to operate to the advantage of dominant groups and to the disadvantage of subordinates.”[6] Drawing on revisionist historiographies of the public sphere, she argues that alternative publics, or what she terms “subaltern counterpublics” have existed since the time Habermas discusses, as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”[7] The aim in Ultra-Red’s work to produce an encounter for individuals constituted in struggle thus aims at constituting subaltern counterpublics that can meet to engage with concerns particular to them, with the medium of listening as their counterdiscursive strategy.

Much of the language used to elaborate on the public sphere is used by the collective themselves: for example, the SILENT|LISTEN project “attempts to reconnect the art world and AIDS activists with memories of when the arts served as a crucial arena - in some communities, the only public space - for open discussions about the pandemic [emphasis added]” (PS/o8: SILENT|LISTEN). Numerous scholars have traced the ways that contemporary artistic practices have turned toward the constitution of deliberative encounters or micro public spheres. Debates emerged around how contemporary art practices that take as their theoretical horizon “the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space,” should materialize.[8] In other words, contemporary art history has debated over how social art practices should frame the kinds, or qualities of, relations that they create. Rather than recount these debates here, we can simply align the composition of listening in Ultra-Red’s work with the framework of what Grant Kester has called, in Conversation Pieces, “dialogical aesthetics,” or “works that define dialogue itself as fundamentally aesthetic.”[9]  Kester uses dialogical aesthetics to consider projects that “all share a concern with the creative facilitation of dialogue and exchange,” in other words, projects that fold conversation into the work itself, defining it as fundamentally aesthetic.[10] If the composition of listening in Ultra-Red’s work is thus to create a dialogical encounter that functions something like a public sphere, it centralizes the orchestration of listening rather than consensus (or dissensus for that matter), and thus engenders forms of communication that are not limited to rational or reasoned debate.

Kester draws on Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, albeit quite critically, problematizing, like Fraser, his denial to forms of communication that fall outside of reason and the rational, and further, his assumption that “we are, as discursive agents, capable of both identifying and representing our interests in a direct and unmediated manner.”[11] In orchestrating listening oriented around the question of what did you hear? Ultra-Red’s listening sessions allow for a sense of common interests to emerge from the dialogical encounter, rather than assuming fixed subjects with the ability to identify and represent their interests when they enter the arena for debate. This is especially important given the ways their work deals with the structural oppression of communities, which increasingly individualizes imposed problems for those who must fight for survival. The dialogical exchange in a listening session can thus enable common concerns to condense from answers to the repeated question, what did you hear?

This type of exchange must be differentiated from the kinds of art practices that seek to engender antagonism as a telos, advocated in the art historical work of Claire Bishop (social antagonisms) and Caleb Kelly (sonic antagonisms). Both these scholars identify the moment in which one’s expectations of an artistic event are ruptured, and the antagonisms (whether social or sonic) of the institution within which the artistic event take place are exposed and amplified. To substantiate their arguments, Bishop looks to the work of artists like Thomas Hirschorn and Santiago Sierra, while Kelly looks to that of Marco Fusinato and Kusum Normoyle. These artists, while sustaining tensions within discrete works of art as Bishop suggests, fail to engage in sustained relation to those constitutive tensions. Instead, they more appropriately fit the model of “critical art,” put forth by Jacques Rancière. He writes, “there is no reason why the sensory oddity produced by the clash of heterogeneous elements should bring about an understanding of the state of the world; and no reason either why understanding the state of the world should prompt a decision to change it.”[12] Indeed, Claire Bishop’s interest lies in criticizing relational art’s “demonstration of a compromise, rather than an articulation of a problem.”[13] This theoretical limitation restricts artistic practices to the representation of a problem, rather than using artistic practices to explore postures toward solutions, and expresses a limited understanding of what art can do. Ultra-Red’s work demonstrates that the articulation of a problem is not enough to catalyze any sort of change for the communities most affected by it.

In terms of the social antagonisms that Bishop theorizes, the composition of listening in the work of Ultra-Red seeks not to produce “sensory oddities,” that might perturb attendees of a Biennale, in an attempt to bring about a sense of what is wrong with the state of the world. Rather, it is oriented toward a continued refusal of ends (that must be differentiated from the open-endedness of relational aesthetics) in terms of a project’s materiality. That is, projects evolve and continually become within the context of ongoing struggles, adapting to new reflections that emerge from practices of listening, thus producing new revolutionary postures. This necessitates the collective’s embeddedness within communities constituted by struggle, thus prioritizing ongoing, direct relations of accountability to those groups, rather than to the institutional spaces within which the events occur. This is evident in both the VOGUE’OLOGY and SILENT|LISTEN projects, as both enact the durational, ongoing nature of conceptual art by remaining embedded in communities constituted by struggle, and using their artistic practices to reflect on the ways that struggle has taken or is taking shape. This always necessitates room for reflection and growth, so the projects also always engender a self-reflexive openness to future possibilities.

Since the two founding members of Ultra-Red were former members of the Los Angeles chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP), the collective has been embedded within the struggles of HIV/AIDS from the outset. The SILENT|LISTEN project is a direct result of this engagement, manifesting as “a series of public meetings designed to build a record of the past, present and future trajectories of the AIDS crisis on a local basis” (PS/o8: SILENT|LISTEN). It materialized after frustrations from a 2004 workshop series, organized to train activists interested in catalyzing a new chapter of ACTUP Los Angeles, when Ultra-Red’s members came to realize a need for an “affective architecture” of the AIDS crisis in its contemporary moment, as the rage that functioned as a catalyst for collective action in the past was no longer working.[14]

Starting at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the project materialized as listening sessions where the collective invited local community organizers and activists, people living with HIV/AIDS, health care professionals, and others, to, as they described in an artist-talk, “stage a moment of collective reflection: what statements need to be entered into the record of the AIDS crisis in a given city?” and with those statements, “how do we develop an analysis based on these collective reflections,” and, “what does action sound like based on what we heard?” Each session began with a performance of John Cage’s 1952 composition, “Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds,” a conceptual work of silence that extends for exactly the length of time the title suggests, drawing attention to the sounds of the museum space and those in it. The silence was then evaluated, as members of the collective asked: “What did you hear? When was the last time you were in this space or one like it? What is the relationship between this space and [the city where the performance is held]? When was the last time you talked about AIDS in this space or one like it?”.[15] Listening thus begins by attending to the sounds of the space and those in it, without the medium of talk. Within this orchestrated silence, attentive listening would amplify any and all presence.

A number of individuals who were deliberately invited to the listening session from local AIDS organizations were then invited to approach the microphone and “enter a statement into the record,” which was then played back by a collective member using various real-time sound-processing technologies, extracting certain statements so that they were fragmented, distorted, and looped. The contingencies of each listening session were thus built into the work itself, as well as a conceptual availability to different articulations of local needs in each city they took place. As each subsequent speaker entered their statement, the previous one continued to play, so that by the final speaker, a thick ambiance of distorted voices and cacophony had enveloped the sound-space of the room.  Each session would conclude with an invitation for all others present to enter statements into the record. The recordings from this session were then remixed into “the minutes,” which were played at the following listening session, and from there, the performance would repeat.

This was only the first iteration of the project. With the collected minutes from seven cities, the collective reconfigured the project for the Sixteenth International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August 2006. The speakers from the previous sessions were invited to join the collective for a new performance, the minutes from all the listening sessions were released as a CD that was available to be freely downloaded from their website, and an installation,SILENT|LISTEN: The Record, was housed in the Art Gallery of Ontario (see Figure 1). The installation involved looped statements of what Lauren Berlant calls “political feelings,” filtered from more generalized statements that emerged in each of the listening sessions.[16]From here, the project continued to evolve into a workshop, Untitled (for Seven Voices)(2007), then another installation that incorporated visual media for the first time Untitled (for Six Voices) (2008), which then became two outdoor actions: Untitled (for Small Ensemble) at the Historic State Park in Los Angeles, November 18, 2007, and Untitled (for Large Ensemble) on Van Buren Street in Chicago, May 9, 2008.
 Figure 1. Ultra-Red, "SILENT|LISTEN The Record," 2006, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Photo: Art Gallery of Ontario.

Discussing AIDS activist art in the contemporary moment, the collective suggests that, the “challenge is to produce work that suspends resolution and that employs duration to construct spaces in which our loss and grief can acquire a critical language directed against dehumanization.”[17] This work may then “pursue the durational to the point of becoming a spatial practice,” in its constitution of an arena for a listening public.[18] As earlier described, to hold these encounters within arts institutions is a deliberate decision, echoing the ways in which these institutions served to hold the cultural public spheres struggling with the HIV/AIDS crisis at its height, when discussion of the crisis in political public spheres was absent. For a public sphere constituted at the height of the AIDS crisis in a gallery space, common concerns were clear and pressing, largely related to a need for governmental intervention and funding for medical research. In this case, the goals of representational politics were clear. But with developments in medical technologies directly affecting the prognosis for people living with HIV/AIDS in the present, the crisis has become more ambiguous, its edges no longer and not yet defined. Lauren Berlant describes this as the impasse that defines the present moment: where individuals move around “with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic.”[19] Listening is the medium by which the collective attempts to make sense of the present and its contours then, adapting to the ongoing crisis by means of an ongoing, evolving project that is effectively spatial.

VOGUE’OLOGY is another such project, in this instance between the Ballroom Archive and Oral History Project and Ultra-Red since 2009. Like SILENT|LISTEN, it takes shape in different ways at different times. As an investigation, the project involved different phases: first, an encounter between members of the House and Ballroom scene and the New School’s Gender Studies Program in May 2010; secondly, oral history interviews conducted with members of the scene in the summer of 2010; and thirdly, “Vogue’analysis,” a series of performances reviewed and discussed by prominent members of the scene.[20] The material amassed in these phases then became the corpus for an exhibition at the Parson’s Aaronson Gallery in 2010. Sember claimed that the gallery was used to “house an investigation” where participants were invited to “consider the encounter between objects, such as a dress, photograph, or video of vogue performances, and  propositions or assertions made by Ballroom members about various aspects of the scene.”[21] Protocols used in the investigation were printed on the gallery windows and were available on the tables in the room, and gallery-goers were encouraged to follow them while approaching screens or objects that were accompanied by headphones that played recordings from those earlier phases (see Figure 2).
 Figure 2. "VOGUE'OLOGY," 2010. Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Parsons The New School for Design. Photo: Vera List Centre

These protocols were the same protocols used in the investigation, demonstrating to gallery visitors the process by which the statements they heard were captured from the Ballroom Archive and Oral History Project. From this experience, gallery visitors were encouraged to develop their own written record of their experience, and the ways their “understanding of objects and statements shift in relation to each other,” to be shared in writing at the gallery, or via email to Ultra-Red. This demonstrated an interest in dialogue to the exhibition, even as it marks a shift from the more direct use of dialogical exchange in a project like Silent|Listen. Though since these reflections tend to be unidirectional and less dialogical (gallery attendee to artist), perhaps even more clearly, the exhibition was accompanied by a series of free public programs: film screenings, a panel discussion, a workshop, and a listening session in the gallery. Sember stated that, “The gathering of members of the Ballroom scene in the gallery space resulted in the articulation of fundamental questions concerning cross-generational transmission of knowledge and values and the need to think seriously about how the community organizes itself.”[22]

Conversations at each of these public events were documented, reviewed and analyzed, similar to the material of the archive and investigations, and from this analysis further action was spawned. Emerging from this exhibition and the accompanying events was concern for the ways that, “the history of the ballroom scene intersects with the multiple and often divergent struggles for freedom in the United States and elsewhere,” leading to the project’s next iteration, a sound investigation and five days of listening sessions at the 2012 Whitney Biennial with Scottish arts organization Arika, engaging the question, “What is the sound of freedom?”.[23] From here, the project established a concrete goal: to establish The Ballroom Freedom School, drawing on notions of freedom and pedagogy from the Mississippi Freedom Schools. While this is a long-term goal that is yet to be realized, the project continues doing pedagogically oriented iterations in various institutions, like at the MOMA PS1, where they occupied one of the Sunday Sessions programs for, “Respect the Runway: The Red Carpet to Mastery” in 2014: a large scale Ball demonstration that occupied the space for an evening.

The commitment to the communities constituted in the struggles of the House/Ballroom scene exemplifies a relationship of accountability that does not end at the end of a Biennale, or the end of funding from an arts foundation, like the work heralded by Claire Bishop. Rather, the project’s basis is this relation of accountability, and from there, different conditions allow for new consolidations or manifestations of the project to take place. Listening becomes a means by which the community can reflect on concerns that emerge through collective discussion in the encounters held in galleries, which can then become the material basis for new orientations toward the future. This is not shy from contradiction or antagonism: in fact, listening is used to interrogate contradictions and antagonisms that emerged from initial sound investigations, or that exist within the community already. One example discussed by Sember is of whether or not it is possible to learn vogue, or if it is inherent. This was documented in the 2010 exhibition by including statements that exemplified both arguments as a sustained tension in many of the works. As an investigation, the process of including these contradictory statements sought to interrogate the ways that an archive can shape the future; that is, how listening to a contradiction can affect the shape of action to come.

Here crystallizes this notion of listening that is so crucial to the work of Ultra-Red, which cuts across the sonic and the social antagonisms present in their listening sessions. Just as the composition of listening is distinct from the composition of simple relational encounters, it is distinct from the composition of sound objects to be listened to unidirectionally. Brandon Labelle suggests in “Auditory Relations” that “sound is intrinsically and unignorably relational,” suggesting that sound art as a practice, “harnesses, describes, analyzes, performs, and interrogates the condition of sound and the processes by which it operates.”[24] He then lays out three axioms about sound. First, “sound is produced and inflected not only by the materiality of space but also by the presence of others.” Thus, the acoustical event becomes social, generating listeners and multiple "acoustical 'viewpoints'." Finally, sound is always a public event because it immediately reaches multiple destinations from a single source. Listening within this framework is a “form of participation in the sharing of a sound event.”[25] Just as Claire Bishop cautions about relational aesthetics, without attention to the quality of the relationships set up by a sound event, or otherwise, what forms of participation listening enacts, an argument about sound’s relationality can fall into the trap of homogenizing the ways in which different sound events set up listening as a means of engagement. In their Five Protocols for Organized Listening, the collective writes that, “the power of sound lies in its listening and the changes in the world that listening might catalyze among people committed to revolution. The sound object as an end in itself is a pale retreat from the thrill of that possibility.”[26]

The kind of participation engendered in the listening sessions composed by Ultra-Red seem to provide a useful answer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s question in Listening, “is even listening itself sonorous?” when considering, for example, the four minutes and thirty-three seconds of ‘silence’ that begin the listening sessions in the SILENT|LISTEN project.[27] Nancy echoes many of the relational arguments that permeate theories of sound, considering questions of hearing and listening in relation to sound, and in relation to the self and its relation to sound and meaning. For him, the distinction between hearing and listening lies in a strain toward understanding: he writes that, “if to hear is to understand the sense… to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning and consequently one that is not immediately accessible.”[28] Meaning and sound share the space of the “renvoi,” or reference, as both are made in a totality of referrals that consist of both sending away and returning. They thus also occupy the space of the self, as the self for Nancy is, “nothing other than a form or function of referral: a self is made of a relationship to self …which is nothing other that the mutual referral between a perceptible individuation and an intelligible identity.”[29] Meaning, sound, and self are thus all resonance for Nancy, they all share this space of “renvoi,” and listening is an opening toward resonance and the perpetual referral it denotes.

In these terms then, how does Ultra-Red compose listening? In the case of listening sessions, the ambiguity of the question and primary protocol that organizes an inquiry, what did you hear? leaves room for listening as both oriented toward meaning that is elaborated collectively, or toward the resonances of sound in the body, giving way to its own kind of collectively elaborated meaning. Here, listening can bring “into play questions of position (both social and spatial), relation (to sound objects, speakers, authors, and fellow listeners) and perception (attention, duration, quality, memory, etc.).”[30] In a listening session, one is encouraged to approach a microphone (at a particular moment predetermined in the protocols), to express what one heard, that is, to recount the experience of a sound’s resonance within one’s body, which is then circulated as its own sound, amplified for others. Whether consciously or not, a description of what one heard expresses meaning, though this destabilizes notions of meaning in much the same way Nancy is invested in doing, as it is elaborated collectively, that is, outside of a self, within the space of referral. When one expresses: “I heard x,” into a microphone, this meaning becomes sonically circulated within the room, where it exits a self and finds meaning only when resonating within others, who approach the microphone and express that they either also heard “x,” or perhaps, “y.” In the latter case, the discrepancy can be examined and discussed as part of the conversation.

Nancy notes importantly that “the sonorous [is] tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion).”[31] Listening importantly sits on the border of both hearing as a sensation and empathetic identification. Grant Kester’s discussion of dialogical aesthetics conclusively refers to a notion of listening that “is concerned with recognizing the social context from which others speak, judge, and act,” whereby, “it attempts to situate a given discursive statement in the specific material conditions of the speaker.”[32] Listening sessions are thus encounters that can give way to this kind of identification when asking what others heard and analyzing the responses, hinging on the ways in which the sonorous is, as Labelle and Nancy describe, inherently relational.

The question then becomes: how can the sonic be mobilized not just to represent problems of relationality, but to make its corporeal presence meaningful, if meaning is what moves beyond a self and into the realm of the common? In the case of SILENT|LISTEN: The Record, the installation involved playing the minutes of previous performances simultaneously at seven different tables, but also with seven different microphones on the same feed. This meant that the room was filled with “a tremendous wall of feedback that circulated and phased between the audio monitors placed on the tables,” producing “a cacophony of sounds.”[33] Here, noise can expose the antagonisms silenced in the traditional sonic configuration of the gallery space, but as Lauren Berlant brilliantly argues, it also “makes the noise viscerally meaningful…in other words, it becomes slowly apparent that to cast the political as a feedback loop is another way to understand the ambiance of the classic public sphere.”[34] Ultra-Red’s project is therefore “not just to make new opinion directed toward the state or civil society as it exists, but as new noise for a body politic, new visceral political sounds.”[35] It is a composition of noisy ambience for a subaltern public sphere, but differences in noise matter: Berlant cautions attention to the fact “some noise is sanctioned and invited to dilate, while some noise calls out the police.”[36]

Listening in this case involves sensory immersion in the noise that makes up a sense of the common. In Sounding New Media, Frances Dyson writes,

Immersed in sound, the subject loses itself, and, in many ways, loses its sense.Because hearing is not a discrete sense, to hear is also to be touched, both physically and emotionally. We feel low sound vibrate in our stomachs and start to panic, sharp sudden sound makes us flinch involuntarily, a high pitched scream is emotionally wrenching: sound has immediate and obvious physical effects. In listening, one is engaged in a synergy with the world and the senses, a hearing/touch that is the essence of what we mean by gut reaction—a response that is simultaneously physiological and psychological, body and mind.[37]

Once the subject has lost its self, that is, once one is detached from the fantasy of a self, they can participate in collective listening, where a sense of being in common with others can emerge. As both Berlant and Dyson describe, this is a visceral experience that, when harnessed as it is in Ultra-Red’s listening sessions, can have the effect of producing encounters that last longer than the listening sessions themselves, extending beyond the walls of the gallery to effectuate changes in the ways this intimate public sphere considers the matters of their survival. This new media ecology is extended by Ultra-Red’s choice to make this noise available for free download from their website, managing to move beyond the limited possibilities of institutional engagement with sound objects and allowing them to circulate in different ways.

Kester suggests that art plays a role in the wider realm of democratic politics insofar as its current cultural construction as “a privileged realm of free expression” grants it the space as a “quasi-protected opening onto a broader cultural and political arena within which these various forms of aesthetic knowledge can be mobilized.”[38] Ultra-Red's listening sessions rest beyond both the microtopian relational encounters of Bourriaud, and the antagonistic tensions of Bishop, in that they are aimed at the constitution of subaltern counterpublic spheres where a sense of the common can emerge, can be deliberated and discussed, and can produce and circulate new orientations for communities constituted in struggle. The listening sessions demonstrate a means by which the cultural construction of art Kester discusses can be engaged in a renewed question of what art can do. This is an especially politically oriented tactic given the ways that neoliberalism’s mechanisms of individualization have led to a waning of a sense of the common, but also because it renews the possibilities that an encounter produced within a gallery space can engage. By taking shape sonically, these practices produce another dimension by which the composition of listening in Ultra-Red’s work opens individuals into an encounter with others constituted in the same struggle. Listening thus embodies a practice that enacts the full extent of the political possibilities that art generates, adapted to the needs of our contemporary moment.

endnotes

[1] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 245. [2] Ultra-Red, Five Protocols for Organized Listening, 3. [3] Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 27. [4] Ibid, 35. [5] Ibid, 36. [6] Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," 66. [7] Ibid, 67. [8] Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 14. [9] Kester, Conversation Pieces, 13. [10] Ibid, 8. [11] Ibid, 113. [12] Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 75. [13] Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 69. [14] Ultra-Red, "Time for the Dead to Have a Word with the Living: The AIDS Uncanny," 82. [15] Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image, 248. [16] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 245. [17] Ultra-Red. "Time for the Dead to Have a Word with the Living: The AIDS Uncanny," 90. [18] Ibid, 85. [19] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. [20] Ultra-Red, SCHOOL OF ECHOES: Vogue'ology Protocol Compendium. [21] Gaboury, "Elements of Vogue: A Conversation with Ultra-red." [22] Ibid. [23] Ibid. [24] Labelle, "Auditory Relations,” 468. [25] Ibid, 469-470. [26] Ultra-Red, Five Protocols for Organized Listening, 4. [27] Nancy, Listening, 5. [28] Ibid, 6. [29] Ibid, 8. [30] Gabourey, "Elements of Vogue: A Conversation with Ultra-red." [31] Nancy, Listening, 10. [32] Kester, Conversation Pieces, 113. [33] Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image, 49. [34] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 248. [35] Ibid, 248. [36] Ibid, 230. [37] Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture, 4. [38] Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, 69.