The Evidence of Things Not Heard will address the materiality of the voice mobilized in Mendi + Keith Obadike’s “NUMBERS STATION.” In this piece, the voice performs a charged erotics of data in the artists’ incantatory recitation of numbers from slave ship manifests, lynching statistics, and stop-and-frisk data. The crux is the contradictory nature of these numbers-as-documents: the irreconcilable gap between the abstraction of the numbers and their referent, that is, the histories of violence that would account for the accumulation of these bodies. The voice not only intimates the violence of black bodies reduced to numbers, it also gives form to the materiality of the numbers, the “feel” of data.
Soyoung Yoon is at work on two book projects which discuss the re-definition of the status of the document: Walkie Talkie, about the rise of cinéma vérité amid anti-colonial struggles; and Miss Vietnam: The Work of Art in the Age of Technowar, which reframes technological reproducibility via the framework of reproductive labor. Yoon is Program Director and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at the Department of the Arts, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the New School. She is also a Visiting Faculty at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.