Themes II

Beyond suicide and Christian ethics, beyond kinship and oedipal frustration, beyond these and all of Hamlet’s articulable themes, what if the players could be said to gather around the unnamed it that demarcates a shared concern that only becomes visible through the discourse of an assembled community? If one attempts to algorithmically read Hamlet’s process of calling the court to order that it may both construct and adjudicate a matter of consequence, then is it enough to read this call in the appearance of individual and thematically weighty words? Find in this sonification a continually (re-)constructed audience for the naming of Hamlet’s concerns. Here individual words are treated as a nascent objects of shared concern, around whom the community assembles in order to define its contours and to be recursively defined in turn. As in Presence I and II, each character has here been assigned a sound that is unique to them. Every time a selected word appears, and only when it appears, the sounds of all of the characters present in that scene will play as a proxy for the gathering of implicated minds. In this way, one can sonically contemplate Hamlet as a continual reshuffling, or rather, reimagining of its discursive communities. As you listen, consider how the frequency with which these communities assemble changes over time. Similarly, consider in which pivotal or dull scenes these gatherings most frequently occur.