You might begin an argument with your partner about dishes or an ex-boyfriend. By the end, you have discussed the existence of God, the true meaning of love, and who has cooked more dinners across the lifespan of your relationship. How did you get here?
Danielle Freakley wants to pick apart these familiar conversational tangles through music.
Freakley is an artist-in-residence at WFAC, where she has been developing “argument jams”: loose, participatory performances somewhere between a jam session and theatre. Two people argue while others soundtrack them on synthesisers, listening for a phrase that might become a chorus. Freakley begins as conductor, directing the music and, at times, the argument itself, before handing the baton over.
From there, the roles can shift: arguers can become musicians, musicians can conduct, and participants can move in and out of the conversation as they please. Meanwhile, Freakley – or potentially trained artificial intelligence – can keep track of what is “logistically happening” in the exchange.
The point is not to determine who is right. Freakley is interested in making the mechanics of an argument perceptible while it is still happening: what language is doing, and how two people can end up somewhere neither intended to go.
As the tone shifts, keyboardists can move between sounds that are Warm & Dreamy, Epic, Hostile, and so on. Alongside them, patterns in the argument can be named as they appear: who is playing nice, who is poisoning the well, where an argument has begun to bend out of shape.
Identifying these patterns is not punitive, or about deciding who wins. Freakley hopes instead to bring some clarity to the black hole that can form at the centre of a disagreement – the “crazy-making” quality of arguing, where you can lose touch with reality.
An argument can feel enormously consequential from the inside. Freakley thinks there might be some relief, or comedy, in seeing these mechanisms of conversation from a distance. You might notice the strange manoeuvres people make while trying to get another person to understand them; you might notice your own imperfect speech. The jams make room for both reactions: oh no, I do that and oh no, you do that.
That generosity extends to the instruments themselves. The synthesiser she uses, the MiniFreak, “looks like a child’s toy, but it’s a really aggressive monster”, Freakley says. “It’s fantastic.” Trying to control it is “a bit like surfing”. Being a little wobbly is expected. “I want regular people who maybe haven’t played instruments in a while, or at all, to feel okay.”
Many people reading this will already be familiar with Danielle from Quote Generator, the several years she spent speaking exclusively in quotations, or Please Say, her social practice work at the Venice Biennale in which people scripted one another in real time. The argument jams return to her longstanding interest in what language does between people: how it connects us or keeps us apart.
When I visited Danielle’s studio, she argued with me about cats and let me play the MiniFreak. I would not normally play an instrument in public, or argue with a stranger. Inside the argument, you could be clumsy, smart, difficult or wrong without any one of those things becoming the whole truth about you. You could hear what you were doing while you were doing it. When you left, you could put it down.
Choose your fighter!!!
Instagram: @danielle_freakley
Website: www.freakley.net
