Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear
Material Propositions, Conceptual Corollaries, Reflections, and Diffractions within a Developing Body of Artistic and Philosophical Practice
Jorge Boehringer
Norths is an ongoing body of artwork in continuing development. This exposition centres around work first exhibited during the summer of 2023, which marks the opening phase of this project. The Norths-works embody data and sound in a variety of ways, as discussed here. However, the real subject of this exposition is not the construction or technical details of each of these pieces. Instead, this exposition uses language, images, design, and sound to present conceptual corollaries arising out of the making of the works and my own experience with them.
Making Norths-works consistently necessitates an investigation and revisitation of many fundamental concepts. These concern assumptions about sound art itself, relationships between language and meaning, or those between experience, measurement, phenomena, and truth. Thinking and experiment act together in the creation of the Norths-works.
In making the Norths-works, a great deal of space is left open for reflection. Although each piece is materialised separately, I often work on more than one at a time. Insights about the works arise holistically from my overall working process. As such, they are often applicable to the whole body of works, or to some corollary of the work in the world. The Norths-works embody critical perspectives or propose spaces for such critiques to occur.
As sites or process-objects, Norths-work embodies provocations and materialises propositions. Norths-works become a philosophical technology, sites that invite performance of intuitive, practical phenomenology.
In the first portion of this exposition, ‘Reflective Corollaries and Diffractive Propositions’, I discuss the works as a group. These sections focus on the holistic insights arising out of the process of creation of these works, as well as those that have driven this creative practice. This discussion, exposing practice as research, forms the core of this exposition.
Following this, shorter sections discuss each individual piece. A brief discussion is undertaken to describe the functionality of each piece, as well as the sound and appearance of each. This is supplemented by short sound examples and images. Some of the Norths-works evade image-capture. In such cases, images are supplemented with more conceptual visual material corrollated to the piece under discussion. Specific issues raised by or materialised within the piece are then discussed.