Jennifer Proctor begins her artist’s statement by describing how her experience of audiobooks prompted new ideas about reading, texts, and authors. If sound studies is a field that has become adept at “thinking across sounds,” it is apt that an experience of audiobooks was one of the inspirations for Proctor’s imageless film, Am I Pretty?, which seeks to similarly reorient our experience of a decidedly visual genre of online video. Proctor’s “masking” of the image produces a profusion of affective and critical results, and highlights the tangle of voice and image relationships inherent to this online phenomenon. We hear young women presenting themselves for visual assessment in order to elicit textual comments from strangers that they hope will give them a more authentic verdict than what they hear from those who are co-present around them (notice how often they refer to what “people” or “friends” are “saying”).

The multiplicity of these voices and the common, yet also deeply singular, experiences they relate (and perform) harkens back to much older “kaleidosonic” forms of auditory narration that since the golden age of radio have fascinated audiences by arraying a series of vocal types across shallow sonic spaces connected by segues (Verma 2012). Historically this rhetoric has both depicted a mutually sympathetic coalition and requested listeners to join with it as an imagined community, summoned into existence and actuated by sound. If that comparison is apt, Proctor’s intervention in the genre may be to show how that sort of politics is shortcircuited, or at least deferred, by our own habit of attaching our own “visual assumptions” based on traces within the voice and its recording method. This aspect of the work recalls a key passage in Derek Jarman’s famous 1993 film Blue, which like Am I Pretty? consists of a single color visual focalizing an audio voice-over, in which Jarman’s narrator reflects on a suspicion toward the image, one that finds a special articulation in the world of sound: “The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world.”

As Kiri Miller points out, there is a sense of hope in the final statement in the recording, which feels like a moment when we are hearing someone at last listening to themselves, using the process of posting a video – a form that ostensibly uses the internet as a visual mirror meant to confirm social ideas about body image – as an acoustic mirror, hearing the sound of their own thoughts exteriorized. It would be naïve to task this self-present voice with helping us escape from the prison of the body. That’s impossible. But when it comes to the prison of the soul, there may be some hope.

Works Cited

Verma, Neil. 2012. Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics and American Radio Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.