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This work started as a hoping that some ‘doing’ might get me making again (as my movement forward with making and thinking had stalled though the covid lockdowns). In this chapter I outline the ‘revisiting’ with the materials gatheredat Dyffryn, and how that embodied process felt.
A book work developed through the process, as did a new clarity concerning how ‘qualities’ in the materials can bodily link us to memory, and a recognising of my own desire to share my experiencing thought the artworks I make, and that this is also a sharing of new understandings.
The 'book' is here as a slide show of the page spreads.
The process:
At times I had never liked just being somewhere as much as I liked ‘being there’ in the re-visiting. It gave me a way to ‘travel, I drew into myself all I could from the materials, stepped bodily into them and the journey they took me on. The permeability between my ‘bodymind’, the materials and my studio environment, caused moments of feeling in ‘that’ space (Dyffryn), and concurrently in my studio - as I heard myself type, move my feet on the bar of my stool, aware of the street to my right. At points, I felt not sure what of my experiencing in that moment were ‘in’ Dyffryn or ‘here now’.
This was an entanglement with the materials, and points of wondering what were memories and what were current bodily responses to the sounds; maybe it is that both were informing my affect response: “My memory drives my agency to act upon the perceived, to extend it and give it the depth of its duration,” and “…with references from another time and another place, and my body inhabits in the now of its present actions towards the future that takes it as its past.” (Voegelin, 2010 p187). The materials brought memory to me and made me acutely aware of the space I was in, my body actively inhabiting its now and its past concurrently. In this bodily encounter with the materials, I felt unsettled, but also very present; these I suggest were moments of affecting encounter, are significant to the development of my understanding of these, and potential ways to work with/for them.
Foreground/background, atmospheres/details, edges and text:
The intense revisiting process was pivotal in my noticing ‘qualities’ in the materials. In the images, shallow focus, shifted and blurred images through windows, sharp details, colours and tones. Paralleled in the audio, points that felt ‘bright’ and clear, and ‘atmospheres’ of many sound elements. In the audio these are shifting, new elements coming into play, details becoming merged with others. These ‘qualities’ there because of the decisions I made in the gathering - the kit, the attenuation of a mic or the aperture of a lens. Having at the time gathered stuff in ways that bodily stimulated my senses, I had not until this point, consciously considered my decision making in relation to the materials.
The images giving a ‘frame of reference’ to sound from the same space, the edges become permeable. The audio-visual contract (Chion 1994) is not broken as such, but shifted, image as ‘glimpse’ of where you are, the audio giving width and depth, opening an expanded field of view into a space that you can ‘envisage’, seeing what is not there in this interplay. In the book these come together as something of affect and my interior experiencing (extimacy), differently than in works in spaces, I am maybe more visibly in them.
In the dual modes of looking and listening concurrently, a ‘view’ emerges, a glimpse of the unapparent quotidian things of the space, a detail in the images draws me into the colour, light and tone, then a detail I recognise draws me deeper into the sound. Accretions and layers, things becoming more present, others dropping back, following my affect heuristic ‘nose’, finding and drawing elements together into the across-time shifting of the audio. Working with the decisions made in a moment (of gathering), of what was sharp foreground and what was atmosphere, when brought together yield a betweenness and so movement - which positions a body in an alertness to feel, to experience the elements of stuff, for them to become ‘something’. Understanding through the process and reflection that this is in part the making of affecting atmospheres, and things of encounter, the practice research being clearly in view to me in these moments.
I was writing in response to the experiencing, trying not to ‘think’ it first, aiming for text that can ‘carry’ something of the/my experiencing of the audio with it, and then bringing images and text together as a ‘miasma’ that you might pick a line or word out of while visually shifting between detail and tone. I sought to generate a slippiness, to be in motion as the audio was, wanting the text to be an element that had its ‘own authority, rather than existing as a “surrogate” and as a “document”’ (Cascella 2013) of the sound.
Desire and frisson in the sharing:
As I work, I experience ‘frisson’, as a manifestation of my ‘affect heuristic’, and a bodily indicator of ‘desire’. Batchen speaks of (my paraphrasing) a cultural collective ‘need’, a ‘desire’, linked to Constable and The Romantic Poets, to move from the camera obscura to a way to pause a moment, hold and reproduce an image to share (2002). The process of the revisiting and putting together the book, brought back my ‘desire’ - a ‘wanting’ to hold a moment, a point of awareness, something transitory, temporal in nature, like Constables clouds skitting across the sky; not ‘taking’ it from where it is, but gathering it, and using it to construct something ‘new’ as a sharing of experiencing.
A substantial development in my approach and understanding was seeing through this material, how ‘porosity’ is necessary for affective encounter. I had been intrigued by windows, pool surfaces, apertures and doorways as I gathered, pointing ‘the camera directly into the light, directly at that feature of the room that is neither inside or outside but both’ (Batchen 2002, p9) and gathering image and sounds of between/both. In my ‘Elements#’ exhibitions, outlined in theDyffryn chapter, I had recognised the porosity of the spaces and the sound, but it was in this activity that I really ‘saw’ the porosity of bodies, spaces and time, through my own experiencing of it, understanding that the works I make are full of the tingling of the hairs on my arms, the considering how sound connects us, brings us to memory and informs our understanding, making the works sites of sharing of/for experiencing and knowing.