Microperceptions: 

‘Microperceptions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) or Masumi’s ‘microshocks’ inform/trigger bodily response and are parts of what make affect occur. These do not have to be dramatic; microshocks are the things ‘that populate every moment of our lives….a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision’ (Massumi 2009 p3). These shifts of attentions, interruptions, are not consciously noticed in themselves, but we are aware of the affect, as the ‘concept of affect is tied to the idea of modulating occurring at a constitutive level where many somethings are doing, most of them unfelt. Or again felt only in effect’ (Massumi 2009 p4). In our moments of being aware of ‘its’ effect on our bodies, we want/need to turn and look or flinch, these things that “act upon us” and “make us act”. 

Singularly, microelements may not represent or tell us much, but when combined, a ‘picture’, an atmosphere, builds up and begins to emerge, just as the sea is the sound of many drops, pebbles, bubbles etc.. Leibnitz also describes the sound of crowds of people; sound happens because something active, an event, occurs. This is made of many small parts, generating affects in the bodies of those who are part of them. No event or response can be static or the same; these are moments in time that cannot be repeated. We do ‘remember’, and then these things can be ‘reactivated’ in us at other moments. I consider my microelements stuff of our everyday sound ecologies that cause ‘microshocks’; things we encounter, experience and respond to, opens an approach for gathering and informs what to gather. Adding to this that these microelements can be constructed into a ‘picture’ which has potential for ‘an event’ to occur and might bring us to memory; opens up a combined new approach for my gathering, and to making spaces of embodied encounter.

I see a strong link between the description of ‘microperception’ that Massumi gives us as non-conscious and on the periphery of awareness and how we experience our everyday aural landscape, how it non-consciously informs us regarding the world around us. When I was first learning about spatial sound recording, it was suggested I swap around my headphones, experiencing the audio of the space ‘back to front’, and even though the visual information told me that something was dropped to my right, I looked left. Goodman describes sound in the context of ‘microperception’ and relating to ‘pre-cognition’ and a ‘wholly bodily’ response; he uses the example of a wasp in a pitcher plant and its response to/’microperception’ of a resonant frequency of sound, triggering the release of pollen, a ‘…. sound-as-vibrational force coursing through ecologies at pre-subjective, pre-content and pre-contextual levels’ (Goodman 2013 p3). 

Sound is a physical thing, the movement of molecules, a traveling as others are ‘moved’. This physical, bodily process links very closely to Leibniz’s descriptions of petit perceptions; but sound is not only that (and maybe other) physical sensation/s, it is also what we make of those. My process is centred in my personal bodily response as a subjective crip/neurodivergent ‘bodymind’.

Murmurations, Spittle of Glenshee:

This body of work and research began with a six-day field recording trip with artists Jez Riley French and Chris Watson to the Cairngorms National Park in June 2018. To expand on understanding advanced through Early tests & Experiments, I planned to gather materials from a few locations, concentrating on recording in several ways from a specific point at each, at some, potentially returning across the trip. I wanted to have ‘clear’ ‘elements’ of sound from each place recorded using a range of techniques and equipment, so I could layer them up and develop what I had learned from the ‘Norfolk’ piece. I used structures: a map, or parameters, to help bring form to the transitory and shifting elements and ‘draw out’ the spaces I recorded in, later utilising that ‘mapping’ as a starting point for how I might construct the spaces I put the elements into.

This trip gave me concentrated time and access to equipment to extend my recording skills and develop my approaches to my gathering. It also gave an opportunity to discuss work and approaches with the others there. The recoding locations were somewhat arbitrary, not necessarily where I would have chosen to make work about, but this gave the possibility of working with them more dispassionately; I could think more technically and explore techniques and approaches to recording different aspects of the sounds. I ‘gathered’ at several locations, wood ants in a forest, wildflowers with insects and by a stream. There is a ubiquity of water sounds in the area, so recording by the stream felt very much ‘of the environment’.

Leibnitz in the ubiquities and never singularness of water: 

The decision to work with/around the water was in part pragmatic, the sound being so omnipresent in the environment, and the proximity of a stretch of the Shee Water to where we were staying. My recording position was just before a small, arched, stone road bridge, a point where it meandered, faster moving in the centre with shallows over stones at the edges, giving access to a wide range of water sounds. I was ‘looking’ for the many-faceted and fluctuating multitude of microelements of sound to gather and then work with. Water as is sound, is ever-moving and shifting, mingling and merging.

Leibnitz outlines petit perceptions through the sounds of the ocean, describing it as being made up of a multitude of smaller sounds. a common with my microelements, these ‘little’ sounds are a grain of sand hitting another, a water droplet hitting a stone. Lambert (2013 p. 89) describes this, saying Leibnitz ‘uses the example of the sound of the wave. Although we hear that sound, we do not precisely distinguish each drop colliding into one another. If those micro-collisions were not providing a sound however, we would not hear the sound of the wave globally.’ This concept of a ‘microperception’ as elements of what becomes a global sound, informed my thinking when trying to record the many points and parts of the sounds of water. ‘The mind must be slowed to catch the million transformations of the water, on sand, on shale, against driftwood, against the seawall. Each drop tinkles at a different pitch’ (Shafer 1994, p16), which is redolent of Masumi’s ‘manyness’ of affect, linking them as multifaceted and multitudinal in form. 

I recorded over three days at The Shee Water, reviewing and reflecting as I went along, gathering in different ways at each visit - under the water’s surface with a hydrophone, sounds of pebbles and stones being moved, sounds of the water’s surface splashes with a parabolic microphone- testing out approaches to gather different parts of the sounds. My aim, to gather microelements and to then ‘construct ‘, ‘compose’, ‘orchestrate’ them into new moments of event.

The making of a ‘space’: 

In July 2018 there was basement space at Birmingham School of Art made available for the testing and discussion of work in progress. I wanted to use this opportunity to put together a larger piece, further investigating knowledge from Early Tests & Experiments; that for there to be potentials for embodied affective response, the interaction of multiple elements is required, and the set-up should be one where the ‘audience’ is not an external viewer. Furthermore, that I would work heuristically with the gathered materials, bringing (micro)elements together to construct a space using several channels of audio and video, developing the work through my response to what happened in the process.

I had not previously set up audio through a speaker array that I could edit ‘live’. Doing this allowed me to work ‘in the moment’; employing an exploratory approach of not trying to ‘recreate’, but to construct something that felt redolent of my layered experience of the Shee water. This felt an appropriate way of working, constructing a space of encounter, through being in it and experiencing. I set the equipment up around a table on which were my laptop, and a notebook containing my diagrams and thoughts from the recording trip. I could listen to the array as I worked, a very particular set up with ‘me’ at the centre. I experimented with the positioning of: speakers, projectors, the speaker tracks were assigned to, and altered elements and volume in tracks; until I felt I had the beginnings of a ‘space’. There were 6 audio channels/speakers and 3 video projections (documentation images and film around this text). Through the process I considered/held in mind how microshocks might occur through the bringing together of smaller ‘elements’, and that these might make ‘something’ of affect. 

Working with the snippets and glimpses of microelements in the channels of audio and video, exploring the shifting and movement in relation to each other, ‘I constructed a place, I channel a presence, as a frayed palimpsest of notated experiences, anticipations, recollections’ (Casella in Carlyle and Lane 2013 p85). The ‘desk’ was the middle point from which to experience the work; people sat in ‘my seat’ and ‘became’ me, had view of the software, my notebook, pencil, and coffee cup, or they sat and stood ‘in’ the projected flow of the water; I was residually still ‘there’.

The discussion around my piece was very informative, allowing me a moment of critical distance, to see the work as the ‘audience’ did and reflect. We discussed: the audience being ‘me’; that the set up made a sort of ‘expanded diagram’; that as everything was visible there was no ‘magic’; and that the positioning under a window meant you could hear the street and the traffic behind and above you, with the stream in front and below, putting the ‘viewer’ in a liminal space, between the commonplace day-to-day of the city and outdoor space with water -  ‘the seeping edge of the virtual’ (Massumi 2002 p43), in the porous surfaces of the soundscape. There were comments regarding the light of the projections in a semi lit space being a bit like wading in water, and that shutting your eyes meant being taken to this other place, but with eyes open the space felt dystopian, the materials from a bright sunny day in a semi-dark basement.

Putting the audience in a position of experiencing ‘as me’, as a way to share my encounter is very apposite. The gathering trip, and this making and sharing of work, where ‘immersive interaction carrying over into reflection and speculation towards new understandings (Gray and Delday 2011 p4). I began to understand, through the ‘doing’ of the making of the piece, my own opportunity to reflect, and the comments of others, the importance of: the spatiality gathered in the audio to ‘carry’ a sense of environment, my layering and mingling of microelements to create affecting atmospheres, and my place in this as an embodied active researcher 

Bringing things together, the never singleness, activeness and event in the practice: 

My thinking was coalescing, I had begun to describe what I am aiming to ‘gather’ as microelements, thinking of this as stuff that is a part of microshocks, that initiates so our bodies ‘act’ and re-act. I am looking for microelements that are parts of the auditory ecologies that are around us all the time and non-consciously inform us about our environment. So my microelements of stuff are parts of or closely akin to what Massumi describes as microshocks, which come from Leibnitz’s Monadology petit perceptions and are described thus, ‘there are hundreds of indications leading us to conclude that at every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection’ (Leibniz 1996, p53).

In this work in the Cairngorms, I was aiming, through my ‘affect heuristic’, to gather sound from one point/location but many angles and approaches, considering the multifaceted and active nature of affect, and the manyness of its forms’ (Massumi 2009 p3). Through working in this way ‘The concept of micro-perception places the emphasis clearly on the act of combining an enactive relational process and the potential – the virtual inherent within this process – rather than on the perception of somehow individual ‘completed’ sounds (a representational process)’ (Goodman 2013 p11). These microelements, can, as parts I construct with, have the potential to activate and make spaces of what Massumi might describe as an intensity, and I describe as an affecting atmosphere.

In the test work Shee Water I was investigating the bringing together of elements - gathered microelements, the table, equipment, the space and its wide environment, taking the materials from a representation/recording to a new and active situation. Transitions, shifts and changes are ‘felt’; it is in part these sorts of qualities that I am ‘sensing for’ as I work, exploring how things come together, in a dynamic situation, bringing the theory into play with the material as I work, so that otherbodies might experience affect.

The Atkin’s piece Bastards, (2014) is an assembly of generated images and sounds that cuts and shifts, partially lets you see into a space, whilst opening another. I was affected by my encounter with the work; I carry it with me. Bodies carry forward with us understanding from previous experience; this “... cannot be but a layered construction of all the thoughts and words and sounds that have been me….my every now, with its load of thens crashing into it”(Casella in Carlyle and Lane 2013 p85) and meeting ‘together’ in a space, always in flux. Massumi says ‘What is in question is precisely the emergence of the subject, its primary constitution, or its reemergence and reconstitution. The subject of an experience emerges from a field of conditions which are not that subject yet, where it is just coming into itself.’ (2009 p. 4). Like the microelements coming together in the works I construct, they are also coming together in my thinking through the doing. The potentials of this bringing together of many elements to “form an affecting entanglement”, which makes an event, reveals possibilities of remediating, taking a gathered sound from a “moment” and putting it with others in a different “moment”, building an experience out of other experiences.