Engram: An Immersive Audio-Walk (review)

What does philosopher Martin Heidegger mean by finitude? When we realize that our lives end by dying, Heidegger suggests, many of us cannot cope with the possibility that we, as personae, end. This inability to cope generates a resistance to death manifesting as a perception of time never ending, or alternately, we seem to exist in an eternal present. Others cope with finitude, instead generating a grasp of temporality. Once we understand that our personal future ends, we differentiate an eternal present into past, present and future. Dying gives us articulation of time.

As noted in a previous issue of the Oral History Review, the oral history interview offers a chance to preview finitude by throwing narrators into what philosopher Jan Potachka calls “quasi-time” (see Jeff Friedman, “Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment,” Oral History Review 41, no. 2 [Fall/Winter 2014]: 290–300). Quasi-time temporarily brackets our experience of time by reminiscing about the past while keeping critical distance to that past from the narrators’ current present. This bracketing operation is, of course, a crucial framing mechanism for oral history interviewing. Once inside the “quasi-past,” depending on prompts from a conscientious interviewer, narrators reconstruct possible sequences of quasi-past/present/futures (in the past) while still able to comment (in the present) on prior choices, actions and experiences from the present

In Engram, Swedish Art Academy graduates and radio journalists Tomas Rajnai and Jens Nielsen have created a similar bracketing project. By recording oral history interviews with individuals living their dying in hospice, the artists created an especially intense collection of reminiscences in which quasi-time becomes telescoped. Prompting questions about past joys or regrets, and the physical, mental and emotional experience of dying, are framed by the intense urgency with which those narrators reminisce. As event publicity states, “What would you do if you only had 640 breaths left?”

This audio walk is based on the works and aesthetic of Rimini Protokoll, a collective of Berlin-based theater artists who specialize in immersive theater projects blurring the boundaries of performer and audience, and theater and nontheatrical space, helping audiences understand their nonstaged lives as legitimate forms of everyday performance. As sociologist and proto-performance studies scholar Erving Goffman noted, the performance of everyday life counts, as we occupy various life roles and wear our daily masks, as part of a continuum of life performance we have come to expect and consume only on stage (Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959]). While other audio walks, such as Toby Butler’s work in the UK (previously reviewed in the Oral History Review; see Jeff Friedman, review of “Drifting, from Memoryscapes Audiowalks,” Oral History Review 33, no. 1 [Winter/Spring 2006]: 107–109), address ways that existential choices can be re-created through oral history-based performance of reminiscence, Engram creates an especially poignant version of Goffman’s everyday life (and dying) performance. As participants in Engram, twenty of us were directed, through binaural earphones, to sit in several back pews in the sanctuary at Hallgrímskirkja, a towering Lutheran church in Rekyavik, the capital city of Iceland, on a cold, cloudy, windy day in late May.

The quality of sound is resonant in our ears. Based on experiences working with narrators at the end of their lives for Legacy, my oral history project with performing artists with HIV/AIDS, I expect that the originally recorded voices were probably light in volume, breathy in quality and timbre, and that there were several pauses due to weakness. On the recording, talented audio actors represent a singular male and female voice compiled and selected from edited “rescriptions” of original recordings. The practice of...