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46 ISSUE 001 NON-FICTION JOURNAL STEPHANIE SPRAY 47 The majority of work on the archive Elisofon advises that they avoid to-date has engaged with image- and text- using fog filters during the expedition, since based archives, frequently calling our attention it would alter the image in ways that would to their silences and gaps. Ernst Karel and work against its “scientific purposes.” He Veronika Kusumaryati artfully and intelligently says: “the only thing the expedition can address the dearth of critical media work on do is hope to create reality, or a sense of the sonic archive in their newwork, Expedition reality and, you know, when you start getting Content, a 78-minute augmented sound piece into semantics, what is real?” He offers his that premiered at the Berlin International Film opinion of the documentary aims of their Festival in February 2020. Cleverly, this (mostly work: “I think what the expedition, in a way, sound) work begins with a description of the has to do aesthetically is not to ever alter it semantic value of the image. so it become false, but that it becomes as Expedition Content starts with a natural as possible […] to attempt to achieve nearly four-minute conversation in which a what I would call naturalism, if we could use few members of the 1961 Harvard Peabody that word.” Elisofon asks Gardner if he agrees, Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea and the latter responds: “Not exactly.”33 discuss the effects of filters on photographic The conversation is cut by the intrusion of images. Life magazine photographer Eliot another voice, distorted by radio static, which Elisofon speaks with ethnographic filmmaker describes the origins of the tape’s contents and Harvard Film Studies Center Director as “Cambridge, Massachusetts in America. Robert Gardner, the expedition organiser, Gardner, Harvard Peabody Expedition” and two recent Harvard graduates who will which according to Karel and Kusumaryati, be supporting the expedition, Sam Putnam is a sonic rupture that is in the archival tape and Michael Rockefeller. Michael—the great- itself, not an editorial decision. Thereafter, grandson of John D. Rockefeller, founder of the sound-space dramatically shifts to the Standard Oil Company, and son of Nelson reverberant soundscape of a village in the Rockefeller, then-governor of New York—was Highlands of western New Guinea for several tasked with taking photographs and recording minutes. We hear Hubula villagers speaking audio, producing thirty-seven taped hours for to one another in close proximity to their pigs the expedition’s audio archive. as a small airplane passes overhead. "These sonic breaks in time and space present listeners with a puzzle throughout the work, whereby they must critically engage with the multiple overlapping times of the sounds heard: the time of the recording, of the archive as its cataloged by archivists, of the editing of the archive itself into Expedition Content, and of the present moment as the work unfolds." Sonic Archive Fever: Ernst Karel and Veronika 33 Gardner’s ambivalence in this response is telling, since "naturalism", or the pretence of naturalism, is not what his filmmaking is Kusumaryati’s Expedition Content entirely known for. From the film that Gardner would ultimately make from this 1961 expedition, Dead Birds (1963), to his later equally acclaimed and controversial film, Forest of Bliss (1986), Gardner’s artistry stands out, evinced in his camera movement and by Stephanie Spray framing. Increasingly, with each of his films, we are frequently aware that what we are seeing is his unique vision. 48 ISSUE 001 NON-FICTION JOURNAL STEPHANIE SPRAY 49 Under the Mountain Wall.35 Sound recordist “inflects archive fever or desire” as it opens Michael Rockefeller mysteriously died later the archive to the future.37 Derrida argues the same year, when his boat capsized on a that an archive is therefore never complete, return trip to New Guinea to collect artefacts since we cannot know all of the meanings it for his father’s new ethnological museum will ultimately contain. in New York. According to Kusumaryati and Karel and Kusumaryati’s Expedition Karel, the Rockefellers donated the audio Content brings to life the Rockefeller sound archive of analogue tapes to the Peabody archive to call our attention not only to the Museum in 2005, which later sent the colonial past of West Papua, but to engage us tapes to the Indiana University Archive of with disciplinary and institutional critiques. Traditional Music to be digitised. This extends to the Film Study Center at Expedition Content activates Harvard University, which Robert Gardner the archive, not merely for its verbal or founded, and the Harvard Peabody Museum, informational content, but as it presents both institutions that Karel and Kusumaryati Michael Rockefeller’s own fumbling have collaborated with or worked within. attempts to use his microphone. As I was Although Lucien Castaing-Taylor took the listening, I wondered at times if Rockefeller reigns of the Film Study Center at Harvard was even listening. It seems certain that University in 1997, and later founded the he was not monitoring the sound as he Sensory Ethnography Lab, evidence of Robert recorded much of the time, since the levels Gardner’s influence and legacy are tangible in are occasionally hot, or clipping. At other these spaces. When I was a graduate student at These sonic breaks in time and consider the implications of the Michael times his descriptions of the sounds heard Harvard and active in the Sensory Ethnography space present listeners with a puzzle Rockefeller sound archive, not only for what it are impoverished. Rockefeller is revealed Lab, Ernst Karel was the Assistant Director of throughout the work, whereby they tells us of the past, and 1961 Harvard Peabody increasingly as an unreliable guide in 1961 the Film Study Center at Harvard University must critically engage with the multiple Expedition specifically, but as the grounds New Guinea, which at times sounds present, (2007–2018). Occasionally, when I would go to overlapping times of the sounds heard: the for understanding the present. The work immediate, or accessible to us, and, at his office to check out equipment, he would time of the recording, of the archive as its exposes a critical juncture in Netherlands other times, is completely lacking because show me an old trunk filled with equipment cataloged by archivists, of the editing of the New Guinean colonial history, while prodding of mistakes Rockefeller made during his that had apparently been used on Gardner’s archive itself into Expedition Content, and us to consider its continued reverberations recording. Describing his recordings as expeditions.38 As an anthropologist and of the present moment as the work unfolds. in present-day West Papua. In the course of either “occupational sounds” or “sounds of filmmaker trained at Harvard, Kusumaryati In the first five minutes, Expedition Content 78 minutes, Karel and Kusumaryati manage nature,” Rockefeller labels much of what he too must have felt the weight of Gardner’s has already presented itself as a critical to transform not only how we encounter this records either in advance or after recording, legacy in these spaces. Her 2018 dissertation archival sound work that will prod at colonial specific archive, but what we think is possible describing phenomena we purportedly will “Ethnography of a Colonial Present: History, anthropology’s heart. For its remainder, it to do with a sonic archive formally. hear, or have heard, but occasionally, either Experience, and Political Consciousness in examines the essential time of fieldwork, due to recording malfunction or negligence, West Papua” directly addresses the trans- when anthropologists and documentarians there is no recorded sound to hear or we hear temporality of colonialism and continued alike encounter their Hubula subjects, something other than described. A couple state violence in West Papua. Given Karel and and the sound space of the archive, where of times, Rockefeller catches his mistakes Kusumaryati’s relationships to Harvard these unequal exchanges are buried. What and re-labels. With no image to distract or University, the Film Study Center, and West Expedition Content does so adeptly is to preoccupy us, the inclusion of these actual Papua, they are engaged arguably in a kind of make audible and legible those voices that erasures call our attention to the materiality “insider ethnography,” which is the application have been silenced through omission. The Archive of the tape, while also allowing us time of the methods of ethnography, in this instance To distill Expedition Content’s to imagine what other erasures might be sonic, to a context that is one’s own. Although import to these aspects alone would Expedition Content draws from the 37 hours present in the archive. the institutional critique is most evidently underestimate the ambition of the work. of tape recorded by Michael Rockefeller In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida levied at expedition members, it implicitly It is likewise an astonishingly good listen documenting the encounter between the writes about the temporality of the archive, points to the broader colonial context that that examines the nature of the sonic 1961 Harvard Peabody Netherlands New which he describes as containing “both the enabled the Rockefeller archive in the first archive with sound while drawing us into the Guinea Expedition and the Hubula, also promise of the future” as much as a recording place. Expedition Content will contribute "archive fever" that Jacque Derrida famously known as the Dani, in the Central Highlands of a past and, thus, each archive “carries an to future interpretations of the body of work described.34 Derrida claims that we do not of western New Guinea. This multimodal unknowable weight”.36 This weight does not emerging from the Sensory Ethnography Lab have an adequate concept of the archive, expedition was remarkably fruitful in that it carry a negative charge, however, but instead these past several years.

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