Those Lips Were Made to Suck that Button
(2013)
author(s): Taina Riikonen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In this liquid text/sound, the act of recording breastfeeding is explored in terms of artistic research as machinic liminality and embodied listening. In line with Felix Guattariās notion of a machine as a prerequisite of technology, the highly intimate recording of neonatal nutrition is explored as an artistic inquiry, which is dependent on the interconnecting processes of the machinic assemblage (the coupling of a baby and a breast). Listening to breastfeeding through the headphones with a microphone touching the skin, produces a particular technology of recording that is noisy in its radical exclusion of other sounds, temporalities and spaces, as well as in its endless counter-oscillation and intrusiveness. The theoretical rhizomes of the article draw from the work of Luce Irigaray, Felix Guattari and Jean-Luc Nancy. The qualities of recording the breastfeeding are analysed through visceral parameters based on touch, embodied listening, and recording as a corporeal-political activity.