Liminal
Noise is the trace and index of a relation that itself speaks of ontology. Noise is immersive because there is nothing outside of it and because it is in everything. It is the trace of the virtual out of which all expressive forms come to be, the mark of an ontology which is necessarily relational. Noise ultimately points us to the relational ontology according to which the world comes to pass, the way in which there is nothing that falls outside of the event, of the realm of process, of an existence formed only through the heterogeneous assemblages of different forms of expression which inescapably and incessantly contract the virtual into the actual.
Liminal explores the relationship between subjectivity, noise and immanence through recordings of daily “noise-scapes”. While interacting with the installation the body of the viewer also becomes a medium through which the work is realized. In the interpolation of ourselves into the work, this involvement, there is a becoming. A becoming that lacks a subject distinct from itself. If we cease to objectify the work then the space between author and reader, artist and viewer, composer and audience ceases to be one of maker-receiver but are inseparable planes embedded within the work, a single block of becoming. Within this geometry there is an unfolding of moments, durational intensities, uncertainties, effects, drives, propulsions.
The work unfurls in relation to the listeners position and movement creating an intimate experience of the performance and making them the author of their own experiences, offering a new listening experience on each playback. The “open” framework does not represent the logical end of the work, but an event of encounter. The work does not dodge materialization but deconstructs the methods of making the art object into a series of events. The sounds in liminal endlessly mutate across the installation, interrupted by the noises of silence. Always differentiated this is noise that does not settle, where even the column or mass of sound cannot be perceived as consistent as the pitches of the specific recordings are continually shifting. The work treats noise as not only a set of material conditions but also a dense layering of economic and social history. It is the fixing of the malleable relationships between technologies and their surrounding cultural context that creates the medium of noise.
SITTING IN ROOMS
In 1970, Alvin Lucier sat in a room and recorded himself telling us ‘I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice.’ Like Lucier I have recorded my voice and played it back into the room exploiting the distinct resonances of that room I was sitting in to erase slowly, through repetition, the semantic meaning of the words that tell us of my location. And with this expunging of my voice’s semantic function the symbolic function of the room is eroded too. The repetitions erase its architectural certainty rather than stabilizing it. In the end I am not sitting in a room at all anymore. Instead I am sitting in pure sound; the reverb and repetition having performed an acousmatic reduction to the core of sonic timespace: that of my enunciation and that of the viewers listening. The place of performance becomes the place of listening, the timespace of production coinciding with the timespace of perception and yet a multiplicity of places are thus produced that erode the notion of an authentic room while offering us the experience of our own temporality. Sound shatters spatial certainty and builds time of fluid rooms. My voice builds a room that knows no outside and yet it has no boundary. I am in it or it does not exist. It belongs not in language and architecture but in the body of the listener, who takes up the extension of my body to extend his own. The recorded voice does not extend into a space that is already there but builds the space that is already there, realizing the inner necessity of my body, but builds the space of my voice in the time of my perception.This space is not authentic or rooted; it does not offer function or order. It is the unordered timespace of the voice as sound, which does not follow language to build a room but erases the notion of roominess in the concrete experience of words as sounds erasing their own meaning in timespace of the building.
I am sitting in the studio
I am sitting in the living room
I am sitting in the garden
I am sitting in Paola's room
I am sitting in the prayer room
THE INVISIBLE EXHIBITION
First recording
Recording of the performance
In my attempts to try and exhibit my artwork outside the neutral environment of the white cube I have come to learn a lot of crucial factors about exhibiting aural artwork and how it is perceived and at times goes unnoticed. Sound functions via listening and this is a very obvious but easily overheard fact. One of my artworks, as part of a workshop with the Junction University, was an attempt to de-stabilize the historicity of the museum by means of creating interventions and activating things that would seem secondary or insignificant. The gesture was performed at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and involved recording the prevalent ambient sounds in the museum and replaying them back into the space of recording. It relied on subliminal additions to the fabric of urban life with a view to suggest evocative listening through accidental encounter. Engaging with the work evoked the notion of aural awareness through the public reaction, to the significance of the ear as annotated in a wide range of visual media. To engage with the work is also to reflect on ones identity as a listener and to reconsider the function of the ear in everyday life. It invited the people to an informal engagement with artwork that most members are unfamiliar with, in contrast to the suggestive space of the art gallery as a space for contextual listening. The installation produced a situation in which spatiality was articulated through the temporal movement of sound and temporality realized through spatial notions. The work was a critique on the predominantly visual methods of cataloguing and display of historicity in the museum. Visual spaces can be expanded, invented and denied through the experience of sound. Sound re-invests meaning and functions of spaces. Using sound to resonate space enters into conversation with the architectural parameters, their visual identification and everyday use, extolling their histories and expanding their present functions. These ideas echo with Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’ (1964). Sound produces a new visualization of space, renders it immersive and inhabitable; it connects space and brings to perception invisible links and ideologies of separation. Using sound is a potent way of interfering with the everyday, its invisible routines and repetitive trajectories, making them available for sensory contemplation.
AURAL MIRROR
Space
Presence
Autoaffected
Breath
When mirrors face each other, the objects reflected in them become smaller and less distinct until the mirrors seem merely to reflect themselves. An echo is differentiated by being made of (one or more) distinct and discrete repetitions of the original sounds. Aural mirror is an installation, which tries to immerse the listener in the echo’s of their own sounds. It is not only a mirror in the metaphorical sense of reflecting (sounds) as a mirror but a psychoanalytical sense of the sonorous womb. As the listener enters the installation the ambient sounds of their movement and voice are picked up by the microphones and played back into the space. These repetitions of sounds are reflected within the space until they abstracted into a drone. This drone devoid of any signifying content keeps looping back on itself. This opens up a space in which the listener hears first an acoustic impact, followed by echo effect, followed by clear out-of-phase sounds. Psychoanalytically, this series of moments renders how the fantasy of sonorous enclosure can only be heard in retrospect. That is, only after hearing voices split away from one another can we imagine their having once sounded together.
After the above-mentioned splits and before the end, the fantasy of sonorous envelope consists both in the listener's hearing intertwined and indistinguishable "sounds" and the fact that we know that one is stationary (as if deaf), the other mobile and listening. Listening subjectivity is produced as the listener joins the configuration; he/she is stationary, like the recorded sound, but while the recorder is deaf (it can only speak), the listener is mute (we can only listen). The unison between visitor and the installation at the beginning of each of this piece presents the listener with a fantasy of sonorous oneness; as the visitor and recorder diverge, we hear a clear acoustic mirror as one sound literally echoes another. This initial unison- followed-by-divergence is heard as if from the listener's position from within the imaginary order with its binary categories of listener, on the one hand, and immediate perception of sound, on the other.
Aural Mirror also explores the sonic possibilities of the timeless continuum; it is intended to steal your sense of time from you, that it slows time, that it achieves a balance or merely a state where sound floats and stands still at the same time, its effect being to drown your own self into a real-time oblivion. The layering tones over each other in increasingly dense structures and require a very high volume level, following in the footsteps of La Monte Young in wishing to envelop the listener in sound so that liminal harmonic relations are experienced from within the sound what Douglas Kahn terms as “listening inside sounds.” What is important about this is that by thus enclosing the listener within sound, the listener is unable (aurally) to leave the auditory space of the piece and thus able fully to experience its most essential dimension, namely time. The installation creates an illusion of the sonorous envelope through very repetitive and metrically regular fragments, on the one hand, and irregular entrances of sustained pitches, on the other.
DISPLACED
Vancouver City Line
London Underground
Mumbai Western Railway Line
Geologists find their bearings by means of natural points of reference located along the terrain. These points generally stand out from the rest of the terrain and are called amers (landmarks). By identifying three such landmarks in complementary directions, the geologist is able to construct a triangle that inevitably includes his/her position. This method is called Triangulation. The sound installation Displaced takes up the principle of triangulation and substitutes site specific sound recordings (information elements that can be recognized by listening carefully) for visual landmarks.
The installation is an attempt to construct a triangle in a fictive, virtual space on the basis of sound recordings of train journeys in India, Canada and United Kingdom. The installation is a critique on the position of sound in space, constantly in flux and vacillating between orientation and uncertainty. By replaying the recordings in the installation space, we take into consideration their spatial behavior as an integral element of the composition of the space. The sounds signify and embody the ideas of movement and flux in contrast to the motionless and featureless ambience of the gallery. The recordings of the train journeys are country specific and evoke a strong sense of location, but that location is in a constant state of transformation. Relocating the sounds from their “natural” acoustic environment into the white cube creates an interesting interplay. The recording and particularly the spatialization do not depend on the site of installation. However, the restitution of what has been fixed in the studio depends on the ambient listening conditions of the site.
The sounds were both preselected as well as discovered coincidently. They include the passengers talking, the intercom announcements and the sounds of the train engine. They were selected because of their innate, acoustic and musical qualities, which contributed the recording a specific, irreversible image. The sounds were then edited and selected keeping in mind to preserve the quality that already existed while making the recording. Within the gallery the recordings can be heard on headphones mounted on the walls. The headphones were mounted on specific positions in the gallery to create a triangular shape within the space.
MEMORIES OF A PLACE IN A SPACE
The future is written in your palms…..…Not just another day at the beach....Bombay the last journey……..London the first time……The last call……The first day of spring……Through the tunnel of time..….Last evening.
Walter Benjamin’s twenty-year Passagen-werk attempted to develop an alternative way of writing history, one in which artifacts were allowed to speak for themselves. He saw the progress of history as a growing pile of debris made up of multiple present experiences. In the objects of history, he recognized a synthesis of the collected material histories of objects and the mental imagery that define objects in the eyes of the viewer. For Benjamin, a collection of artifacts is capable of rendering history without narration or theoretical framework because objects hold both the process of their development and their conceptual essence. The method becomes a dialectical relationship with that world, which in turn, is represented not as an all-encompassing totality but rather in terms of specific material and experiential constructions.”
The word collage comes from the French “coller”, “to paste.” The idea of fastening pieces together, of mixing them in variation, all to stir the imagination and evoke the presence of objects is as old as culture itself. In scrapbooks, grangerized texts in Europe, and in performance or storytelling objects in Africa and America, collage is principally tied to memory. As a memory technology, such collage serves as both a launching point and crossroads from the ordered juxtaposition of distinct pieces, stories extend like mathematical singularities outward, while simultaneously pulling distinct forms onto its imaginary stage. The dual character collage, a zone where objects exist alternatively as objects and referents, provides a way of understanding how memory plays off our physical and social environments.
Since Plato, memory has been likened to marks etched upon wax tablets. A notion revived in cybernetic models of the brain where memories are stored in bundled packages of data existing within our neural nets. Memories are constructed as copies of sensory experience, existing in the mind. For many years neuropsychologists have sought the elusive trace of memory or engram in the tissue of the brain without positive results. These metaphors neglect the everyday creation of memory technology in scrapbooks, libraries, photo albums and audio recordings which point to a distributed system of recollection. Such concepts of memory negate compositional power and intentionality by obfuscating memory’s link to remembering. When memory is reconceptualized as an act of living consciousness, the objects of memory can be seen as linked to larger accounts and stories. Listening attends to the whole field of sound as a partner in the unfolding of time and space, acting upon and being acted upon in a mutual intensity, underscores a relation to sound and its inherent situatedness through the lens of time.
Recording not only serves to create new memories, but also to approximate, guide and kick-start existing recollections. But such functions become all the more intensely engaged when one listens to a recording- a form of supercharged recollection that facilitates and expedites our very act of remembrance, and goes further to extend the stylistic and chronological range of our immediate biological memories. Recording, as a way of honing the listener’s perception of interpretive individuality, allow immediate and interspersed comparison between performances. As the recording informs the listener in changeable symbiosis with their aural memory, more or less ignored where recollection is strong, and engaged with full attention wherever the memory comes up short.
Jacques Attali and Henri Bergson have addressed the difficult question of what impact infinite reproducibility has had on memory, habit and subjectivity. To help understand recordings as commodified memories of specific time spans, I turn to Attali and his analysis of what he calls “the repetitive economy” of mechanical reproduction and its tendency toward stockpiling. Bergson assists with comprehending the complex dynamic between past memory and present moment, and with describing the different forms of remembrance that recordings represent. Memory is a large and multifaceted subject, clearly, and here we must consider it as a commercial-social construct, a historical resource, an everyday effort that humans accessorize more and more in the twenty-first century, and a participant in formation of musical texts. Sound recordings are in themselves memory objects comprising a specifically apportioned span of real time.
Recordings have empowered us with entirely new kinds of surrogate musical memory, blurring distinctions between remembering and imagining and allowing us to think we can hear and recollect far beyond the fickle recesses of the individual person’s inner ear. Bergson’s contemporaries tended to understand memory as a present-to-past process where recollections are stored more or less precisely and can be retrieved or returned to. At the point where the sensation enters the memory, according to this perspective, the memory becomes free from the object that instigated the memory. Bergson revised this view, saying that such conceptions represent an illusionary, surrogate, or prosthetic manner of recollection and force subjective memory to follow a graphical model of history. According to him a person constantly verifies the memory to be against the object, and in that sense memory formation is a cooperative effort: “Any excitation which leaves from the object cannot stop en route in the depths of the mind. It must always be returned to the object itself. Instead of being a discrete entity that resides in the past, memory is a process of past to present where the recollection achieves actualization in the present moment in the form of current perception and bodily action. The memory resides in and lives for the present, where it shapes perception and physical action, and for that reason there can be no returning to a specific point or aspect that we might choose to “recall” from “the past.”
In visual arts texture is rendered through the application of materials, whereas in the sound piece it is made possible through the function of the sounds. I have tried to mix sound, technology, intimate memories and objects to elevate the scrapbook like recordings to artistic documentary. I view sound- the medium of my practice- as the creation of memory technology. In ‘Memories of a Place in a Space’ the sound recordings display their environments in a painterly fashion. Out of the mouths of bystanders and pedestrians come a palette of colors and a variety of surface qualities, but what shape them are the distinct undertones of the environment. A variety of perspectives are displayed by letting distinct voices cross each other. Transcribing speech historicizes a language event. Oral interviews, aside from their value in contributing to a people’s history, display the pattern of thinking their value through memories, through events and communities. Beyond creation of authentic individual records, speech documents are descriptive of neighborhoods and occupations through the special way people use language. The formal or causal tones one uses to describe events are indicative of social structures. Every phrase is a language event relating the history of the verbal gesture, conveying identity, style, community and culture. When we speak, the words we use are inherited from the vast reserves of time and cultural interplay. The language world we live in is built by the slow culmination of choices. It is our social inheritance. The everyday construction of language events, the bricolage of words, clichés, and semantic units, mirrors the construction of consciousness and community identity. By recording voices the piece evokes both the speakers and the speech situation. For a moment the speaker enters into the recording.
The box is a metaphor for a container of memory and by collecting and carefully juxtaposing found sounds in small, boxes, I have tried to create aural poems in which place, form, texture, and sounds play together. The recordings were chosen carefully; although many held no intrinsic value alone; only when combined did they reveal a deeper meaning. I am interested in finding poetic connections of meaning between disparate sound environments. Using things we can see, I have made a box about things we cannot see: ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams. This act turns everyday sounds into mysterious treasures.
VOICELESS
Voiceless is an attempt to understand the experience of sound through silence, the visual and language. The recording is a silent recording of a person speaking to the camera in four different languages. In Voiceless both silence and the body are employed in an exploration of an ‘audible liminal’ in which linguistic sonorities are brought forth from the depths of the human body and silenced with technological means. Its audio/visual documentation instructs the viewer to watch the performance on continuous loop, serving to mask any beginning or end to the piece. The work does not intend to arrive or resolve. Its intention is to invoke an in-between condition and bathe in that condition perpetually. When we realize the potential of the body, as an inter-semiotic sounding board, and position this in combination with modern technology, it offers the artist a sonically liminal situation, brought about by the tension caused when body and technology meet. The body and technology have an uneasy relationship, and this idea of the body and technology inhabiting the same space, is conducive to liminal foregrounding. The meeting of body and technology and/or their fusion offers the artist a tension-filled scenario in which in-between states can be exposed and investigated. In this, and despite the fact that the physical body operates within a virtual field mediated by digital technology, our technological environment remains grounded in the corporeal. No matter how we try to entertain technology at the expense of the material body, the corporeal influence is always in play.
A phenomenology of the voice is not only a return to the center of embodied meaning in sound, but a return to the existential voice, to the speaking and listening that occurs with humankind. In the voice of embodied significance lies the what of the saying, the who of the saying, and the I to whom something is said and who may also speak in the saying. In the voice is harbored the full richness of human signification. Thus, not only is there the constant possibility of polyphony in the realm of voiced word, there is also the possibility of a harmonious or disharmonious gestalt in any occurrence of word. Here, there is a counterpart within sounded word that reverses the first approximations of sound and sight in relation to the experience of language-as-word. Vision is allegorical, its compensating logic is motivated by the desire to cover up any incongruity between expression and perception, sign and signification. In a panoramic view of the visual field there is an all-at-once quality to experience. Within the view lies a multiplicity of things united spatially in a gestalt. In listening to voiced word, however, there is a different type of all-at-once gestalt, which, although also serial in a strictly temporal sense, is a gestalt in which the harmonics of voice occur. The “meanings” that are more than merely grammatical ones occur within this all-at-oneness giving voice its amplified sense of possibility.
The speaker is capable of saying only what language permits. So the structures of meaning production are always already predetermined in the phallogocentric sense, whatever comes out of your mouth is already predetermined in its range of meaning; whatever you say and however you say it, you are always merely uttering the phallus. The speech situation occurs within the context of full significance. Here not only voice but the face as the indicator of pregnant silence remains part of the entire gestalt. But there also remains the hiddenness of the “silent” voice of inner speech, which like the hidden side of a transcendent thing remains hidden to the other. And beyond both the pregnant silence bespoken by the face and the “outer” silence that does not reveal inner speech, there lies the Open silence of the ultimate horizon. In all three respects there remains a hiddenness that belongs to the center of voiced language.
“In the visual I am different to you, at a distance other, and visible to you through this otherness outside your body. In vision you see me all at once, liking or rejecting it and I am through you liking or rejecting that which you see. Whilst you are visible to yourself only in my gestures that represent your visual presence towards me.” -Salome Voégelin
The immersivity of listening provokes a multitude of perspectives, suggesting at any stage more than one solution or its contradiction. Sonic meaning processes are complex and multitudinous, and do not work along linear lines of progressive discovery, driven by the desire for the agreement of the perception with its object in the quest for harmony and universal meaning. Sound consciously involves the experience of the individual listener in the creation of the imaginary source as complex and continuously changing possibilities. The visual body is a synesthetic whole, not disturbed by any incompatibility between the reading of the body and its reality, “…inventing the illusion of pure present meaning” - Young. The visual horizon makes us believe and lets us believe that is a whole we are seeing, existing there before us in a meaningful entirety. The visual whole neglects the details of its parts, which lie in the motion of its continuous construction in sound. Vision sets out a linear progression – in sound there is no linearity. The sonic loss is not compensated for in the same way as the visual distance recovers the lack. The metonymic audition does not impose its compensatory reading onto a ‘visual’ object in a linear way. The immersivity of listening to silence provokes a multitude of perspectives, suggesting at any stage more than one solution or its contradiction.
The sonic is not substantiated in the visual, but in the imagination of the visual. Our existence in sound is fragile, endless, multiple positioning, demanding continuous non-imperative fragmentation of the self, as well as if the object/phenomenon perceived. The non-compatibility of sound prevents the desire of hearing as a discovery of ones own pre-existing fantasy, and rather problematizes and questions this total fantasy, throwing the viewer into doubt, building the reality of the auditory image in doubt, and any engagement with it in uncertainty. The distance of the viewer onto the image, which enables the discovery of a total and pre-existing fantasy, makes a complex experience impossible. It renders the seen a fulfillment of the viewer’s expectation rather than at every moment in doubt constructed possibility. The correlation of the semiotic is compensating, nothing is left in-between for doubt to enter a more complex representation to emerge. The sonic doubt is incessant; its lack of a clear signification offers an individual complex narrativation, articulating a continued transgression of the visual horizon in time. The lack of space between sign and signifier in the visual logic frames a location of desire.
Stacey Sewell writes of the absence of visual reference in acousmatic music as enticing the listener to focus not necessarily on the inherent sonic particulars of the sound object, but on the listener’s own sense of embodiment. According to Sewell, ‘the lack of a visible performer may turn the listener’s attention back onto her own body’. Sewell refers to electroacoustic works that feature sound material where the biological body is referenced (inhalation of breath for example) as being particularly charged with this self-reflexive quality. In contrast to Pierre Schaeffer’s phenomenology of transcendence through reduced listening, Sewell suggests that the acousmatic experience can create the opposite effect, enticing and encouraging us to reconnect with our own corporeality.
Voiceless tries to approach this idea of the acousmatic in retrograde with an intention to explore the affect of seeing the source of the sound but not being able to hear it. This not only brings the viewers attention to the absent sonic material in the piece but also intends to raise their awareness of their immediate sonic environment and their sense of embodiment. A vital aspect of listening, in which the human body is the spatial referent for implied and diffused sound, which bears clear relationship to Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology.
Kendell alludes to the important role the body plays, on our perception of the spatial parameters:
“The deeply meaningful sense of space that is aroused when listening has its roots in a lifetime of embodied spatial experience. Beneath the apparent continuity of everyday space are the axes of the body giving structure and context to the experience of spatial event the body is an important point of reference in the realization of a digitally meditated working environment. This grounding of technology through the body is a key factor in enabling listeners and spectators to identify with digitally mediated art works. The body as an organizing metaphor, can be seen as seeping into the realm of digitally mediated arts practices, not least as a way to pacify the anxiety that can occur when technology is foregrounded.”
The intimate familiarity we have with our own bodies, our experience as bodily creatures in a fundamentally material world, shapes how we discern aural space. Our digitally meditated environment does nothing to negate this fact. Perhaps the most convincing argument for the relevance of the material body in technologically mediated environments is that the physical body is the receptacle of all that we experience. The material human body is the mediator in terms of how we experience the world. The centrality of the human body in performance activity resonates with Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenological take on the body as being the site through which all worldly experience is routed. Even when one negotiates with a digital avatar or enters into a virtual cyber world via computational connection, our reception of disembodied information, and the way we process it, is only made possible via the sensing organs of the body (eyes and ears) which are grounded in physicality.
PUNCTUM
“Space has no objective reality except as an order or arrangement of the objects we perceive in it, and time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it”
-Lincoln Barnett (on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity)
Punctum is a sound installation, which uses objects from the Victorian era to evoke absence and memory. The sound clip contains a female voice reciting the Victorian poem “Only a Little Shall We Speak of Thee” by Mary E. Coleridge and the ambient silence in the exhibiting space. The recorded voice signifies the absent body. Victorian poems were circulated as “acoustic devices” for the mediation of voice and worked as a mechanism for the disembodiment of voice. When a poem is spoken aloud, its auditory effects often seem to exceed the speaking voice. Poems are transcriptions or prescriptions for voice, some locate, while others dislocate a speaking subject by emphasizing absent voices, empty echoes and displaced dialogue; some look for voices mediated by print and visual technologies, while others hear oral recitation and musical effects as a remainder that appeals to the ear as well as the eye.
The amalgamation of all these objects produces the idea of a possible event, or indeed an impossible event, rather than the re-presentation of an actual occurrence. It presents the melting together of then and now, a possible past produced in the present, a false memory, being laid out for us to indulge in and get carried away by. The intimacy between the individual and the garment, which is a Victorian nightdress, remains even after the individual is gone it retains the form of the absent body like a second skin. Clothes thus become remnants of individuals and markers of personal memory and absence. The fusion of the voice along with the garment and the vocabulary of the architecture render the installation piece fleshlike, evoking the absent human body. The space is a living tissue constantly changing and adapting to events. The discrete details are not immediately perceptible to the viewer, but only emerge after a period of close scrutiny. This slowing down of vision is intentional in order to bring the viewers attention to the aural. The Punctum - whether via the eye or the ear - is a difficult, if not impossible thing to pin down. Visual memory presents, whereas sonic memory suggests. The nooks and crannies of the abandoned Victorian house are opened by sound; and memories and narratives are replayed and conceived. The materials sampled and collaged together emphasize the tension between the now and the past in current perception and draws the listener into its production. I use the temporality of the recording for its particular motion of looping, circling back and recycling time: for its refusal to adhere to a formal end point. The phenomena of duration in playback also ‘deals in the confusion of temporal distinctions- between past, present and future,’ emphasizing the durational as kinetically connected to the continuous. Memory according to Bergson, is the intersection of mind and matter, this complicates the idea of present perception by placing its trigger in the past. In this way memory is forever becoming and has never been and is wholly dependent on the individual’s encounter and perception.
During the stages of discussing the thematic for In the Expanded Field, I had time and again referred to an exhibition I saw at the David Roberts Art Foundation, called A House of Leaves. Much like the novel it is based on, A House of Leaves borrows different languages, tells multiple narratives and asks its viewer to become a co-author in order to encounter an event as a collective effort to define an art form. Rather than being structured around an external theme selected by the curator and “illustrated” with artworks, the exhibition self-organized internally, the process mostly came from the artworks and the building they were placed in. Since it was in a constant state of flux, the exhibition was never the same and never entire, but always virtually composed and completed by visitors: the gallery as a deferred action and a space of encounter. The exhibition has left a huge impression on my practice and my approach towards exhibiting. Treating action and encounter as artistic mediums In the Expanded Field attempted to question how the act of exhibiting can accommodate the processes and enquiries of artistic practice as both ‘action’ and ‘event’. An event is comprehended as a ‘unique confluence of circumstances’; it is ‘temporary punctual’ and therefore ephemeral. An event could have ‘repeatable structure’, allowing the event to be repeated or re-presented. The evental is the concrete, malleable and active. It is dynamic and multiple, but most importantly it is made up of temporal spaces and experiences. The work exists when it is installed, and then, when de-installed, it seems to disappear. Hence having the quality of being discontinuous and yet periodic. The works existence can be understood as a series of events. The event creates and is inseparable from space. It forces space to constantly change, adapt and adopt it. The space becomes the event or organism itself, not just a container or a background phenomenon.
Within my work temporality lends itself as the primary medium, where any material, composed in if not contaminated by repetition is spatially encountered both in time and of time. My practice researches the intricate ways in which the voice acts within and without the body of the speaker in the space and time of the live event and the recording. Like the event of recording, the voice is live and once spoken, retreats to the past while signaling the future. The voice originates in the body of the performer and is caught by the ears of the spectator; it exists in the time and space of performance. When only the voice is presented, it has the potential to act almost like a strange body in itself, which can interrogate the gaze, and practices its own unfixed autonomy and evoking absence. The act of listening to a recording sparks new connections with the live event of encounter, bridging time and dislocating the voice from the once present body. My work involves the use of various media to bring the viewers attention to the aural. The act of exhibiting creates a situation of focused listening wherein the viewer can encounter the aural. The aural is ephemeral – ever-changing and forever in flux; just like time, we cannot isolate a single moment of encounter of the aural other than in the actual encounter of the event. Exhibiting my work in this manner works in sync with my current practice, as the ephemerality of the event in time is equivalent to the nature of sound.
DON'T LISTEN TO THIS
IMMERSED
LOCKER
PUBLIC PRAYER
RAIN
SLIPPERING SYNTAX OF TIME
SPRACHEN (LANGUAGES)
Don’t Listen to This is an attempt to suspend, as much as possible, ideas of genre, category, purpose and art historical context, to achieve a hearing that is the material heard, now, contingently and individually. This suspension does not mean a disregard for the artistic context or intention, nor is it frivolous and lazy. Rather it means appreciating the context and intention through the practice of listening rather than as a description and limitation of hearing.
The eyes work as an ordering tool: segregating according to differences and aligning references to build up meaning within the field of vision. Images are dialectical, expressing themselves against each other. They are a chain of differences however mobile. The ear, when it operates not in the service of such a visual organization, does not order things but produces its own ephemeral order. Sound can give an indication of left or right, high or low, etc. but this is not the orientation of objects and of places but of itself. Sonic listening is not dialectical, it works not on differences and similarities but hears cumulatively. It stacks things against each other indiscriminately, hearing whatever is at hand; it can do so because it operates in the dark, unseen.
I try to explore listening not as a physiological fact but as an act of engaging with the world. It is in the engagement with the world and myself within it are constituted, and it is the sensorial mode of that engagement that determines my constitution and that of the world. A visual epoche is a stripping back to the core of visuality, a sonic epoche in Schaffer’s terms, is a stripping away from the sonic anything that ties it down to visuality. However this is not reducing, but a freeing it and opening it up to a multitude of audible possibilities. Phenomenological listening as an intersubjective sensory-motor engagement is a reduction in order to get to the essence of the perceived, to critically experience and expand that essence; not to reduce the heard but to get the wealth of the heard through a bracketed listening. Listening as an effort of epoche, in the sense of focusing rather than reducing, without desire to bring its experience back into the context of language as a structural means of ordering, expands and generates the object as a sonic phenomenon; speechless but eternally resounding.
SOUNDING MATERIALITY
CLOCK
FRIDGE
LEAF
RAIN
WIND
For Sounding Materiality I made piezoelectric transducers, which were attached to different surfaces in order to make the recordings. The transducers were designed to sense audio vibrations through solid objects. Unlike normal air microphones, contact microphones are almost insensitive to air vibrations but sense only structure borne sound. They are passive and high impedance and this can cause them to sound ‘tinny’ unless used with a matching preamp. The recordings are of the sounds transmitted through different materials with the use of piezoelectric transducers and using software instruments. The recordings were then amplified and manipulated with the help of sound synthesizers.
The eyes work as an ordering tool: segregating according to differences and aligning references to build up meaning within the field of vision. Images are dialectical, expressing themselves against each other. They are a chain of differences however mobile. The ear, when it operates not in the service of such a visual organization, does not order things but produces its own ephemeral order. Sound can give an indication of left or right, high or low, etc. but this is not the orientation of objects and of places but of itself. Sonic listening is not dialectical, it works not on differences and similarities but hears cumulatively. It stacks things against each other indiscriminately, hearing whatever is at hand; it can do so because it operates in the dark, unseen.
समय : (SAMAY)
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The composition technique involves recording the sounds through various means such as a musician playing sustained notes on instruments, recording the sounds transmitted through different materials through the use of piezo-transducers and using software instruments. These recordings from the piezo-transducers are manipulated with the help of synthesizers. The resultant sound is achieved by layering these continuous drones, which produce what David soldier terms auditory hallucinations. By layering these recordings over each other in increasingly dense structures my intention was to envelope the listener in sound so that the listener can experience the sound from within the sound, what Douglas Kahn terms as listening inside sounds. What is important about this is that by enclosing the listener within sound, the listener is unable to leave the auditory space of the piece and thus fully able to experience the most essential dimension, namely time. In my attempt to create the drone and extending their duration I tried to create some drones with no discernable beginning or end. This acts upon the listener in time and alters our perception in relation to time slowing it down. The pulsating sound generated in loops creates a space in which the temporal beats are subdued and creates a trance like state. This makes it possible to consider the compositions as a temporal form, which could inform a consideration of Deleuze’s concepts of the time of chronos and aeon. Wherein the sounds having a defining attack and decay relate to chronos (the measuring, fixing, structure creating mode of time) and the sounds having pure loops, with no discernable beginnings or ends relate to aeon (indefinite time of event, which is at the same time going to happen and has just happened, which eternally returns).