Trans-mission: visualizing and imagineering of a transgender voice is the title of an ongoing artistic research situated in the intersection of Feminist and Queer Theory, Phenomenology and New Materialisms. The project facilitates art and science's possible collaborations around the invisible object-voice, as a means to explore the entanglement of matter and meaning, and more specifically the interdependence of the material voice with the technology of gender.
The research derives from the acknowledgment of the gendered logic of the voice, the researcher’s own transgender experience in relation to it, and the observation that within performance practices there is a gap regarding how a transgender voice is being represented, often giving in to binary-based understandings. Through an autoethnographic approach, literature reviews and practice-as-research, this philosophical, material, and artistic inquiry exposes and deconstructs the vocal gender normativity through the process of visualization, based on the physics of cymatics. Doing so aims to expand the theoretical and practical imagination on voice’s perception beyond fixed identity definitions, and to suggest an imagineering of the vocal materiality that renders voice something more than a simple signifier of gender.