Ecstasies of Rooms (2020) - embedded interactive composition, 45 minute audio score, participation duration variable
0.s through space
It’s soothing to sense space. A naming of ever-present sensation: atmosphere. Always there, everchanging. I’m not crazy, by which I mean, I am not isolated in a perceptual event that cannot ever be shared. No. The walls emanate, the floor, the radiator, the light. Beyond it there’s the world, the city, the country. I feel it all, intended or not. I purposefully bring it to the centre. I move around it. I turn the gain up on sensation. Feeling through the walls. Engrained in voice. No, I am not crazy. I am affected.
Christine Cornwell and I made three pieces over the past four years that are included in this PhD. Ecstasies of Rooms (EoR, 2020), Ecstasies of Things (EoT, 2022) and between you and me (byam, 2023), all three commissioned by Gaudeamus Music Week Festival in Utrecht. Each opportunity offered conditions for different creative approaches and allowed us to deepen our creative partnership.
EoR is a slowing down of the biorhythm so that in engaging with the piece, you can sense your own space through voice, driven by process, disinterested of sonic outcome. Two voices guide you through your living room in an audio score playing on headphones through an app on your phone. Much of this guidance is aimed at sensitising you to the space you are in and to your own voice. We do vocal warmups that connect your sound to your body and your body to the space. There are five instances in the audio recording during which you are guided to sense the space and objects around you through your own voice. You sense the ceiling and floor of the space; you smell an object you have nearby, and you feel light in great detail. All of this aided by your own voice as it brings closer and animates these different elements in the room. You are given a choice to record your vocalisations during these five instances and submit it to us through the app. Your recorded sounds then get positioned into a virtual 3D space that looks like a basic living room. You can navigate this room online surrounded by a collection of weird vocalisations that other participants submitted.
Ecstasies, thing power
Gernot Bohme defines a concept in his theory of atmospheres that accounts for the ability objects have to leak into space to create atmospheres. He calls this ecstasies. In his conception this is ‘the quality that objects have to emanate into space and modify the surroundings, creating a sphere of presence’ (Bohme, 1995, tr. 2016). A perceiver has to ‘step into this ecstasies-infused space and be bodily present in a particular way’ (Bohme, 1995, tr. 2016) to sense these atmospheres. This idea is akin to the concept of animism or, if infused with ideas of agency and intentionality, Jane Bennett’s enchanted materialism or thing-power which extends to ‘molecules at farfrom-equilibrium states, nonhuman animals, social movements, political states, architectural forms, families and other corporate bodies, sound fields.” (Bennett, 2010) which she invites us to ‘listen’ to in order to perceive.
In this piece, these theories have opened possibilities for diving deeper into a sensation that has reached out and pulled the attention out of the self, attuning deeper to the space in-between self and other.
The process
Christine and I have a long-lasting friendship. We briefly collaborated years before this work and re-connected creatively during the Covid-pandemic for mutual support and creative conversations. These conversations turned more specific when we received a commission from Gaudeamus Festival's Screen Dive project to develop a new online work.
We worked together for many months in remote sessions in which we would bring our bodies in contact with our domestic spaces, sounding and observing what has power to move us. We would give each other tasks and ways of inhabiting the space, writing up detailed notes on our experiences for the other to read, building a shared experience at a distance. Over these many months and informed by the activations from the theories outlined above that I was bringing into the conversation; we built a felt knowledge of what our bodies and voice were activated to do in our domestic spaces.
The questions that guided the development of this piece (and developed further in its sister piece, Ecstasies of Things) are: what kind of bodily presence is needed for a corporeal atunement to ecstasies or atmospheres? What kind of listening and sounding should be nurtured and explored?
After many trials and tests with each other, trying to find practical answers to these questions, we started assembling a subset of physical tasks that could be unified in one continuous narrative. Our exercises offered restricted points of focus for attention within which sound had permission to manifest whatever sensations emerged from particular actions.
At this point in the research, the idea of incoherent sensation was not so clear to me as something that could be inhabited with ease. Instead, the exercises I provided (two out of the total five Christine and I made, plus a playful vocal warm-up informed by my experience with Roy Hart voicework) zeroed in on touch and smell activated by voice. The actions presented were, in a similar way to the drawing process in Drawing 10 (red+black), meant to nurture a type of sounding and listening that bypassed listening to sonic outcome, focusing in on sensations. This enabled us and the participants to engage in processes of sounding that allowed playful, silly, organic and visceral sounds to come to the fore.
The desire to record the sounds and to showcase them in a 3D virtual space came as a way to normalise and validate these visceral strange sounds that emerged almost as an incidental spill over from the guided experiences. The virtual common room was also a sketch of our shared pandemic situations - most of us isolated in our domestic spaces getting deeply intimate with our inescapable homes. The 3D space is messy, imprecise and only gives a flavour of the experience without claiming anything more conceptual or profound. A playground, a manifestation of a room we might have in common in our collective sonic imagination
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I sat down in the middle of the room and noticed I was really restless. There was this fast flowing energy inside of me, bubbling, a bit like the water in a waterfall. Stuff was going on and I felt the need for vibration, so I started shaking the soles of my feet, a bit like a restless leg shake, really fast so that the vibration would travel around my body. At this point I was sitting down cross legged, in a bit of an extended butterfly, spine upright. I could touch the soles of my feet with my hands and I did. Then my hands started traveling up and down my legs and at some point I started to make a sound, a bit like a bird-like ha-ha, trill like, at the same kind of tempo with the shaking of my leg. That evolved for a while while my hands started defining a rhythm within which the vocal trills could sit. The vocals then followed the hands like the motion and the sound were one. It felt I was exposing whatever energy has been inside, turning myself inside out.
(my notes, 17.04.2020)
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The kitchen ventilation sound is always there, I decide it will be much easier to accept the noise and tune into the pitches...if you ignore the white noise/general sound from outside a pitch emerges. I don’t sing the note but breathe out at the pitch I can hear, and then when the air runs out, I breathe in at the pitch…
As soon as I start, I feel wider, the focus has become wide, I don’t feel like I am experiencing anything from my own body but feel part of the room! I feel like a part of the breath that is breathing out, I don’t see the objects in front of me (table, chair, piano, lamp, bookshelf, fridge) but I feel the areas I surround them, like air. The breathing is not focussed air but more general to make the pitch, this means all other sounds and feelings are less present because there is a focus on the relation between the vent sound and my breathing pitch.
(Christine Cornwell notes, 17.04.2020)
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You must forget the habitual and utilitarian relationship with objects and explore ways to listen. In this case you’re listening to a response that might come in any way, sonorous or not. You’re more than listening. You’re looking to become aware of the ways you are affected. You don’t need to analyse or search for the cause. Just know that things have an impact and are perpetually changing. The impact is felt as a moment-to-moment change, but don’t obsessively hunt it out. To perceive it you must release something of your own - you must renounce the utilitarian validation in what you’re searching for. Collect without assessing value at the same time. Without utility as a way to differentiate between good or bad, you must find another way to affirm your intuitions. Patiently feel what affects you.
(research notes, spring 2021)
