Sounds of walking: Can sound re-present the embodied experience of movement time and distance in the landscape?
(2024)
author(s): Martin P Eccles
published in: Research Catalogue
In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.
Soundwalking in contested space
(2022)
author(s): Andrew Brown
published in: Research Catalogue
I am an artist researcher undertaking a Ph.D. by Published, Established, and Creative Works at Nottingham Trent University, entitled ‘Soundwalking in Contested Space’.
Soundwalking is an expanding creative discipline with its origins in situationist practices and soundscape studies. Alongside numerous fellow artists and researchers, I am exploring the far-reaching possibilities of the medium. In my thesis, informed by over two decades of leading art walks and composing soundwalks, I interrogate my own soundwalking practice, that I use as a means of investigating contested space. I consider findings from six of my soundwalks composed between 2013 and 2018 and guide the reader through my process and the methods of aleatoric composition, temporal shift, synchrony, and ordeal that, in combination, distinguish my soundwalks.
Alongside writers and theorists such as Tim Edensor, Brandon LaBelle, and Frauke Behrendt, social geographer Doreen Massey provides a firm theoretical foundation through her conception of space as ‘the product of interrelations’ and imaginable as ‘a simultaneity of stories so far’ (Massey, 2005, p. 9). While Massey adopts a generally progressive tone in her articulation of space, in recognition of the human potential that can be realised through spatial encounters, I place emphasis upon its contested nature, as a product of the unequal power relations that arise out of the everyday interactions of human beings.
My contribution to knowledge is both thematic and methodological, through my core concern of human-contested space, the specific combination of methods that I apply within my practice as research, and in the ways these methods encourage deeper appreciation and understanding. My research journey traces a path through contested urban and rural space and exposes the lived realities of human experience when utopian or hubristic visions falter or fail. My findings are directed towards researchers investigating contested space, be it from artistic, social-historical, or environmental perspectives.
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Minuting. Rethinking the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening
(2021)
author(s): Jacek Smolicki
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exploratory essay introduces selected sound recordings along with notes and observations from Minuting – a practice of sonic journaling I have performed daily since July 2010 in numerous locations and settings. I weave these observations together in a way that resonates closely with the idea of repetition, in multiple forms: protest, automation, cycle, and ritual, as well as the repetition inherent to my acts of recording. While introducing sounds from the archive of Minuting, I reflect on how this constrained and systematically enacted form of listening, recording, and re-listening leads to a transversal type of sonic reflexivity. It is a form of alertness to sound that stretches beyond the immediate resonance of the 'now' – towards spatially and temporarily distant, yet to some extent intertwined, objects, subjects, events, and environments. The text evolves across three interrelated layers: annotated recordings from the project's archive, a set of thoughts and associations triggered by re-listening to the material, and a discursive analysis that opens up the project to a dialogue with other thematically resonant debates and practices. Drawing on perspectives from media studies, the philosophy of technology, sound studies and durational art, I discuss Minuting as an art work, a creative constraint and a transversal listening practice. Lastly, I propose it as an existential media technique for composing critical and reflective positions towards one's surrounding space, experience of time, and use of sound technologies.