A SHOCK IN THE ear - analysis

Click here for a presentation also regarding the piece

The 1998 interactive media art piece A Shock in the Ear by Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda with Richard Vella is deeply reminiscent of the immigrant experience in sound, language, and visual style. To Neumark’s home country of Australia, which was once solely a home to the Aborigines of Australia, and then became a British penal colony, and is now a multicultural continent, this sort of story is not new, but it is always worth retelling.

The long, drawn-out sucking sound as a transition is one of the first prominent signifiers of culture, though it might not be immediately obvious. To me, it sounds like someone sucking their teeth, which in my experience growing up in a Caribbean household, is an incredibly rude gesture. It then becomes shocking to me when this is included in an art piece, something that is often decided to be dignified and highbrow. If the sucking teeth doesn’t resonate, then it might remind someone of slurping noodles or soup, which to some might be considered complimentary, and others bad table manners.

The burned images of landscape are reminiscent of old photographs and memories, as if there were years of wear and tear that passed and distorted the images. It as well speaks to the image of a divergence from the standard sleek look of the internet, which as time goes by, and even the program it exists on becomes outdated, gets sleeker and sleeker.

There are also several references to time within the piece, primarily noticeable in the fact that the cursor to access the next page is a clock and another half a clock.

Several images in fact contain clocks or numbers, possibly as a reference to how shocking time goes by, how time gets faster as it goes by, and when you see a young family member age faster than expected. Furthermore, voices will reference how much time has passed since something, namely the female voice who talks about her experiences moving from Italy to Australia, and her having to

learn English growing up.

Though one of the sites that, to me, evokes the immigrant narrative the most, is the one with the drawing of the man’s face next to a simplified TV, where part of the audio that plays when you place our cursor within the TV, says “do you feel like you are a television that was going wrong?”

It then goes on to describe the way TV’s were smacked in order to work, but when that occurred, minute circuits within the TV were shifted and it was never the same after the beating. This to me is a very clear metaphor for the brutal routine of assimilation, how the majority might find the outlier in their community and actively seek to make them like them, a very common experience amongst immigrants.

Another site, one with a portion of a face showing the nose and mouth, a sailboat, and one man taking a chisel to another man’s nose, also reminds of assimilation, but specifically in the physical aspects.

The face consists of what are generally seen to be non-white features, which are in greater society seen not as perfectly neutral features to have, but aberrations to the white, European face. Action against this type of face is taken in the upper right corner, where one man goes to carve the other man's face, a nod to both phrenology and eugenics, a dark conclusion to assimilation.