20 10 09 Mona Wales The Cure Pt 1 Patched - Missax

Essay: Unpacking “The Cure (Pt 1)” – Missax 20/10/09 by Mona Wales

Word count: ~1,250

3.3 Intersections with Contemporary Theory

| Theoretical Lens | Connection to the Piece | |------------------|--------------------------| | Phenomenology (Merleau‑Ponty) | The immersive soundscape foregrounds the corporeal perception of the body; listeners become aware of the lived body as a site of both pain and repair. | | Post‑humanism (Hayles, Braidotti) | The hybrid of organic and digital signals challenges the human‑machine binary, aligning with post‑humanist claims that identity is constituted through technological assemblages. | | Medical Humanities | By invoking medical imagery (EKG, x‑ray) while simultaneously critiquing the reductionist view of disease, the work participates in a humanistic critique of biomedicine. | | Aesthetic of the Uncanny (Freud) | The familiar (heartbeat, children’s choir) is rendered strange through glitch and distortion, eliciting an uncanny sensation that mirrors the discomfort of confronting one’s own mortality. | missax 20 10 09 mona wales the cure pt 1

3.2 The Role of Ambiguity

The work deliberately refrains from providing a resolution. The final ambient pad dissolves slowly, leaving the listener in a state of suspended expectancy. This open-endedness is essential: it forces the audience to confront the incompleteness of any cure and the ongoing nature of healing. The phrase “Pt 1” signals that the investigation is unfinished—there will be subsequent parts that may introduce new modalities (perhaps a “cure” through community, or a “cure” through loss). Essay: Unpacking “The Cure (Pt 1)” – Missax

3.1 The “Cure” as a Metaphor

The title “The Cure” invites a literal reading—an antidote to disease—but the piece resists a straightforward medical narrative. Instead, it frames cure as a processual, layered negotiation between body, technology, and memory. Body: The opening heartbeat anchors the composition in

  1. Body: The opening heartbeat anchors the composition in the physical, reminding us that any cure must first acknowledge the embodied condition.
  2. Technology: The glitch motifs and digital distortions portray remediation as an act of re‑coding, echoing contemporary discourses on gene editing and software patches.
  3. Memory: The repeated phrase “the skin remembers” evokes epigenetic theories (the idea that trauma can be encoded in cellular structures), suggesting that a cure must also reckon with historical imprints.

Thus, “The Cure (Pt 1)” operates as a critical meditation on the limits of both medicine and technology: it celebrates their capacity to intervene, yet constantly reminds us of the irreducible mystery that persists after each attempt at repair.