Being Not Concluding
I have returned to this small collection of texts in order to create a kind of summary. These texts concern the first iteration of the works that make up my ongoing project Norths. In the time since this text was begun, new outgrowths of these initial works have emerged, as well as opportunities to exhibit both these original works and the new pieces. New insights have also arisen in the development of these works. Nevertheless, the overall themes and working methods detailed here remain consistent. The Norths-works have thereby defined their own continuity of being, but the texts contained in this exposition require a drawing together.
It cannot be the function of this anti-conclusion to document and detail the developments subsequent to the body of works discussed in this exposition. Nor is it the intention of this section to erroneously suggest finitude for a creative process still in development. In contrast to many academic fields, language in artistic research often functions to expose ongoing practice as research, or research through practice. Language, in an artistic research exposition, cannot be held to account for complete or circumspective answers to research questions. In a great deal of artistic work, and exemplified by the works presented here, ‘answers’ are enacted through phenomenological engagement by individuals with the work. The encounter is primary, and any language applied is something extra. However, language added to the works can be used, as it is used in this exposition, to draw together the threads leading to the creation of the works, to explicate insights arising from making them, and to propose conceptual corollaries offered by experiences of the work.
In my work, contemporary art and philosophy converge. Neither is more primordial to the work than the other, and in fact both are forms of the same pattern of inquiry by which my work as a whole is constituted. That philosophy can be conducted outside of language and enacted by embodied and embedded participants in environments is part of my proposal. What has been given in this exposition is not the artworks themselves but language and media artefacts. The absence of the works themselves affords an opportunity to materialise the likeness of these artworks in words. However, to use words rather than space-time in the presentation of the works has necessitated conceptual support above and beyond that needed to frame the same propositions offered by the works in their physical materialisation. This linguistic undertaking has resulted in the small group of texts you have just been reading.
The second section of this text, Norths-as-a-Whole, exposes the key thematic propositions that necessitate the development of the practice from which the Norths-works have emerged. These themes reappraise fundamental concepts and assumptions about the nature of data, knowledge, and communication in our shared world. A shift in perspective towards a wider ecological outlook necessitates a reconsideration of concepts foundational for philosophy, artwork, and aesthetics. These have included the notion of subject-object duality, the usage of language and the certainty it provides, the nature of and relationships between objectivity and measurement, and what counts as data, knowledge, reality, and truth. These are the Reflective Corollaries and Diffractive Propositions forming the subtitle to section two. Whereas the 'material propositions' promised by the subtitle of the exposition itself are found in the works themselves.
Two critiques emerge from this exposition: one centres around the institutional and social practice of relying on language or measurement standards as a stand-in for experience; the second relates to a fallacious equality between data and truth. While this point is made through the exhibition of the works themselves (humorously in cases like Bird on a Wires or Local Seis, psychedelically in Gate, phenomenologically with Trve Norths, and contemplatively with Constellation), language by its nature does it differently.
Language does its work differently than the materialised artworks themselves, whose ability to situate circumstances for phenomenological activity is central to my own artistic practice. However, to put this forth in the present exposition using words, images, and sound examples has been a challenge and an occasion for experiment. In communicating the ideas and excitement of the Norths-works in the absence of the pieces themselves, my hope is that readers will take these ideas and energy, whatever their impressions may be, and do something with them. I hope that the ideas put forth in this exposition are provocative of further discussion, perhaps even artworks, but most of all of listening.
A frame of mind and a body that listens is essential when encountering the Norths-works, as it is in reading these texts (which murmur about the works like a fantastic flock of starlings). Among the many modes of listening, listening to artworks for what they propose, and to texts for the questions and insights that emerge from between the words is central to the work performed here. I do not intend the Norths-works to be ‘read’ as words or graphs are read but rather listened to and reflected upon.
To be clear, the Norths-works are not translations of data, nor representations or illustrations of it. I have chosen not to provide detailed mappings conclusively illustrating the deterministic relationships existing between data and sound in these works. Norths short-circuits the fetishisation of technology and sabotages techno-solutionist approaches which so often sanitise critical work conducted at intersections of data and art. In Norths, data is treated as a signal and used for constructive or critical purposes. If we must read, we should read and listen through this exposition and these works. They are intended to provide vantage points, not measurement standards.
The Norths-works are philosophical technologies. They can be used to situate an experimental phenomenological engagement with the world by those open to such usage. The connection between data and sounding surface is removed from the foreground such that the distracting compulsion to ‘read’ the work as a stand-in for data or phenomenon also withdraws. Norths installations are new places, not stand-ins. Places, like landscapes, cannot be read as one reads a spreadsheet. To frame an instance of a vibrant pulsing field of being, all that is needed is a visiting perceiver-participant. The wildness remaining between the work and the participant accounts for whatever happens next.
Throughout the contemporary era, the notion of ‘what constitutes an artwork’ has broadened in many directions. It has become an increasingly accepted notion that artworks may transcend individual authors to include or be completed by perceivers. Nevertheless, dualistic approaches still dominate market-driven art-making, and Western culture. A fundamental fracture is implied by dualistic thinking, separating subjects and objects, individuals and their environments, and people and one another. To deny or ignore primordial ecological interconnectedness affords an opening for social exploitation and environmental destruction, as we continue to witness worldwide. In opposition to this, Norths seeks to highlight possibilities for experimental phenomenology for engaged participants. Active perceptual participation reveals structural interconnectedness, thereby raising consciousness of a shared lifeworld between people, cultures, other organisms, and things.
The form of participation invited by the Norths-works is open and, in an individual sense, interdisciplinary. The work that I have begun in Norths was not begun from within a single discipline but arises from technical, philosophical, and artistic traditions. As the pieces are brought to conceptual and perceptual completion by visitors, they enter a potentially infinite zone of activity, not a discipline but a field. As the Norths-works continue, it will be interesting to see whether the works remain within the domain of artwork at all or instead define an 'interdiscipline', a new space between disciplines. In a concern for honesty as to how these works develop and also in order to avoid artificially constraining this potential development, in the present text I have looked beyond the most cited theorists and practitioners of the international sonification scene, and rely rather on those fields, thinkers, and artists from whom I draw my own artistic practice and philosophical background. As understood in light of the philosophical and artistic research work presented here, my questions and propositions do not necessarily require complete and definitive answers but instead may be used to delineate a new territory for investigation. This text provides a set of linguistic way marks in this territory, a subset of which I have called Norths, marked by an alignment of ‘standing stones’ in the form of the sculptural and sound works that materialise this research in and for phenomenological experience.