Links text:
This chapter outlines my making of new work for The Twin, Coventry Biennial, 2019. Extending previous work through the exploring of qualities of haecceities and quiddities in the sound/stuff, looking for the specificities and how they might inform and support how we understand microelements in the soundscapes. Microelements of sound and imagery were gathered at Twin Spaces, and the process is described through reworked autoethnographic commonplace notes from the time, and I reflect on ‘me’ in the work, both as embodied researcher and as part of and activator of the sonic-environment.
I go on to consider the dual spaces and haecceities and quiddities, link these into my investigating of the Smooth and Striated (Deleuze and Guattari 2004), and the potentials of spaces to shift from structured to place of affect; that image might scaffold an understanding/way into sound, and how theses always emergent and developing ways of doing continually bring new elements into my approach.
The scaffolding of text for the drawing together of the first draft of this chapter and Research Catalogue page, informed the final configuration of this thesis, and I reworked the materials into a dule screen piece for a later exhibition, and constructed presentations and an early introduction to chapter tests in the developing of my thesis/RC approaches.
(this chapter does not have 'background gathering audio' - as the undercroft audio starts on entry - emulating the way you could hear it as you went up the stairs to the space it was shown in and is audio of/from my gathering in that space)
Reflections and discussions:
I visited the space several times after setting up my work, the earliest of these, just before the show opened, was the first time I saw my pieces with the rest of the work in the space. During later visits there was opportunity for informal discussion and feedback, making available to me what others saw/experienced in my work. My own reflections were mixed and included: recognising that some aspects of the set-up were outside my control; that the space was damp, so the images kept curling and therefore I needed to repeatedly try and ‘resolve’ the issues with them; considering if the images would have worked better separate to the speakers, possibly in a book or as larger prints; that this work was not an installation, but more sculptural sound emitting clusters; that the visual linking between stands, players and wires made them a ‘constellation of stuff’ which spoke back to setups of earlier works, but visually they didn’t sit well with everything around them.
The sounds were active in the spaces, moving through them and merging with the sounds around. The seepage down the stairs, linking to previous works made, drew people up, not quite knowing what it was they were hearing in the sounds from The Under Croft. The Row sounds combined into the space differently, this was where they were from. They included traffic sounds recorded with transducers on the window, and traffic sounds were also ‘live’ in the space, but the work additionally brought in sounds of drilling, banging, making, voices, discussions, decision-making, so that haecceities and quiddities of/from the prior activity of the space was coming together with the now in the space of exhibition.
Comments included, “the images on the speakers, meant I leant in to look closer and then could hear that track and its details more than the others, so I then moved around and closer and back… experiencing all of it together and then parts individually”, for some then, the images activated movements and shifts. Another comment was that The Rowwork was “more inviting”, and that The Under Croft felt “oppressive”, which might describe qualities of the spaces and the differences between group human shifting activities towards change and a single person in a closed space with electrical and recording equipment.
Details and images as links:
I am not making mimetic pieces for people to understand as a representation of ‘an idea’, I am making spaces that trigger affects and memories/responses, that are active, seep and merge with, alter and are altered by bodies and the environment they are in. I worked with the qualities of this/whatness and added images as a scaffolding for ‘recognising’, to set up a push/pull loose tethering. In the informal feedback, the comment that the images made someone move closer and lean in to hear the detail, reenforces this as an approach for eliciting an active (both physically/bodily and mental) engagement.
Haecceities and Quiddities in the mix of approaches:
In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I had encountered the description, ‘Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, plateau 1440). It spoke to my interest in spaces of/for affect and the ways this links to ‘event’; additionally it introduced me to ‘haecceities’ ad while exploring haecceity, I noted its synonym quiddity, both terms from scholastic philosophy. The descriptions of these terms felt redolent to part of what I am ‘looking for’ as qualities in my microelements. These are similar but different notions, which simply explained are the ‘thisness’ and the ‘whatness’ of something. The ‘thisness’ in my gathered materials are the qualities that make something distinctly as it is and linked to the specifics of the location and time; the ‘whatness’ links it and gives it a kinship with similar things, making it recognisably what it is. These are of significance to my research, as they relate to how we recognise and distinguish ‘things’, and as parts of how we are ‘linked into’ materials where there is no narrative. These therefore must be explored and ultimately utilised in relation to the making of spaces of/for affecting atmospheres and embodied response.
In this praxis I intended to gather sounds that were the ‘thisness’ and the ‘whatness’, that felt particular and specific, and so linked and gave a way in to ‘themselves’/what I had constructed with them. Additionally, I had in mind things drawn from the previous investigations, including: working with/for affect, microelements, moments, event, details, multitudinality and working on the edge of knowing and through my affect heuristic. I utilised different types of microphones and camera set ups to gather a specific detailed ‘view’, as well as the surrounding atmospheres, the generality of the space. I planned to make a work where I brought sounds together, while retaining a separateness, not being merged, but merging, while also moving and shifting to inhabit the space.
Affect, sound and text:
I spoke earlier of the way sound is often described by what makes it e.g. a bird singing. During discussions around the work in Coventry, I recognised clearly the link between the describing of sound and affect - which is often explained via a description of what triggered, or a retrospective understanding of the emotion as a result of, the affective ‘moment’; as an example, the sadness in watching an animated story of a melting snowman (Massumi 2009)
Sound and affect are somewhere in a place of not being seen directly, while being seen too directly. Bhunnoo describes ‘materialized sound’, which ‘operates’ in the ‘gap between the experience itself and the language by which we articulate it’ (Carlyle and Lane 2013 p183). I am trying to find this space for/of a ‘materialized’ affect/sound language, one that does not ‘squash’ and remove the ‘nature’ of the stuff am working with, but which gives a possibility of sharing with others the thinking and experiencing. In early tests for this chapter, I explored if chapter may be video essays of sorts, considering my presentations and papers, but this still felt to ‘set’, too far away from the form of the ‘practice’.
The TWIN spaces:
The Row, a disused NHS clinic across three floors in the city centre, was being converted into the main hub and an exhibition space for the biennial, made up of a mix of what had been small interview spaces, waiting areas, offices, and corridors, with windows overlooking the shopping street, a roadway and roofs. The activity/sound was a combination of the reconfiguring of the space, meetings, discussions and deliveries. My work was shown on the second floor of this space.
Across several visits, I gathered with different microphones and photographed details. I used contact microphones on the windows and on boards used to make the new space, with omnis on walls open to the space, and a coil mic for gathering electric hum and buzz. I recorded street sounds, carpet tiles being removed, sawing, drilling, hammering, snatches of conversations and meetings, batteries charging, light switches, and water heaters. I photographed the floor, windows, residues of previous use. In the materials, both the micro and macro of a space in a period of change and flux.
The Under Croft, a medieval merchant’s house cellar, left behind and underground as the city developed, is silent except when being accessed through the city archives when an airflow system and lights are turned on. I was acutely conscious of being the maker/instigator of the auditory atmosphere I experienced on my single visit, in my notes describing the visit as “mainly hum, me in space moving, photographing and writing,” an “interesting hour of disappearing into what I was doing with no one else in the space”.
I gathered the space and me/my activity simultaneously: hum, breathing, shifting the tripod, the camera shutter. I positioned the omni mics and camera at ear/eyelevel. I paused, considered my activity, set up a hypercardoid mic, and sat and wrote in my notebook; I recorded the sound of me handwriting notes that became parts of this text. Then with a coil mic I recorded the lights, my camera and the sound recorder - ‘recording’ the internal sounds of the recording.
Scaffolding text:
Considering my scaffolds for textual activity, and while re-reading The Smooth and Striated, thinking about the folding/transformation of spaces between states, that this informs my making of spaces in the art works, and that it additionally holds possibilities in relation to the notion of an ‘okay space’ to write in for this ‘bodymind’. I have practised a free writing, autoethnographic, note taking approach that feels ‘doable’, with later structuring and editing. The scaffold of, and which supports, the later editing and restructuring activity allowing for the initial open approach. This led to my working on the text in a freer way and with an approach that through the movement from one state to the other, it could then ‘hold’ some of the felt sensed stuff, while the later structuring would support the ways the text explained my developed knowledge and thinking to the reader.
In the considering of my approaches to writing this up, the texts I have read that have made most sense are ‘Ordinary Affects’ (Berlant and Stewart 2019) and ‘The Hundreds’ (Stewart 2007). They have several commonalities, such as small ‘chunks’ of text, positioned with others, which correlates with my making of spaces in installation art works. I began to develop further my approach of scaffolding the ‘thesis’ with a how I ‘make’ and learning from the papers and presentations I had already delivered.
Recognising that as text is a ‘not making sense activity’ for me, I must twin it with - pin it to - an activity that I ‘feel’ and know. I began to approach my texts in the same way as my drawing together of materials for ‘pieces’, plan the shape, tone, colour, pace, movement and shifting; listen/watch elements of the works and materials gathered so to ‘be’ in the space of the doing and thinking through my ‘bodymind' again - and write there. This also consolidates the holistic approaches working across all areas of my methodology for making with/for affect and I opened myself a space for ‘making’ this text.
I began to develop Research Catalogue pages as chapters, not a housing for the practice, but as spaces that could ‘hold’ the work and is more in keeping with my wider praxis. These are spaces where the diagramming, the materials, the text elements and my voice could come together in a shifting and open way, containing potentials for active engagements with the ‘reader’. This chapter was the first that I made ‘test’ versions of in this way, and the diagram on this page is from that.
Commonplace/autoethnographic descriptions, discussions, thoughts and processes of reviewing and drawing the work together:
During the visits to gather, make, set up, and while the exhibitions were open - I wrote ‘commonplace’ notes as I worked giving an autoethnographic account of my undertakings and thoughts. I used the ‘common’ equipment I had for Dyffryn and About. The spaces I was working in were both concurrently ‘everyday’ and very specific.
I reviewed the gathered materials in the days following visits, working quickly as I had six weeks for gathering, making and installation. Quickly recognising microelements in the materials that could make details and atmospheres, I began to build tracks based around ‘points’ in the gathering spaces. The work developed into two clusters of tracks. The Row atmospheres were from contact mics on the windows and open mics of the space, and details from close recordings of clearing, moving and building. The Under Croft atmosphere combined the hum of the space from air conditioner and lights, with some of my movements, the detailed close recordings of my activity, and the electric buzzing and clicking of the camera and recorder.
Through discussion with Ryan Huges, the biennial director, the siting of two elements of the work was arrived at, but what would be around them as part of the wider curation of the whole, I would not know until everything was installed. There would be two groupings of speakers playing mono tracks in different areas on the second floor of the row building, The Under Croft, near the entrance, the Row, near the windows. The set up I conceived as one which made visible the linking and carrying of the sound and where it was from. It involved simple speakers on stands, with the audio players and wiring visible; and images, details I had photographed in the spaces, covering the front of the speakers.
The sounds and the images:
The mix of the ‘everyday’ haecceities and quiddities from the spaces in the sounds gave some routes into the audio, but I felt the ‘viewer’ might need a gentle hand to know ‘where they were’. I had images that I had gathered alongside the sound, visually recording details of the ‘things’ making sound or surfaces that I attached mics to. These correlating details of gathering gave me a visual scaffolding, here less direct than the windows in Dyffryn, but points of reference physically entwine with the sound when on the speakers, which I was beginning to think of as ‘sound emitting objects’. This correlation of points and details of gathering across the auditory and visual led me to consider that the sounds and images should/could physically be entangled, and my use of the equipment as ‘part of the work’ produced subtle shift in my thinking, from the kit being seen just as ‘kit’, to it being parts of the environments and spaces made in a more active way.
In March 2019 I had visited Elizabeth Prices’ exhibition ‘FELT TIP’. The show was across two rooms, both contained multiple elements. The space with audio visual works, which were two projected pieces, KHOL and FELT TIP were of considerable interest and relevance to this research. Price often makes works following research into a subject or place, ‘collecting’ up materials and ideas that link to the core consideration of that enquiry, but sometimes tangential. She then works them together into complex audio-visual pieces with multiple layers, constantly shifting and changing, with mixtures of live-action, images, motion graphics and audio edited rhythmically. The pieces were separate but by proximity linked. Depending on where you positioned yourself, you could see them both concurrently, or move/shift between them, but you could always see the ‘light’ flicker of the other and the audio mingled within the space.
Unlike mine, Price’s work is narrative; ‘Her richly layered narratives explore social histories and the shifting terrain of analogue and digital cultures’ (exhibition guide). The audio in the work is very different from that in mine, but I recognised, in my own response to the works, that I would shift to ‘look’, and then ‘listen’ as a result; the visuals and audio entangled triggers directing my attention. When I was making the Coventry work, I was considering this in relation to elements in my work that ‘links’ the audience in; the images on the front of the speakers as a way to momentarily catch attention in a particular direction, which then takes you to the linked sounds.
In an interview related to the exhibition, Price says ‘All fiction is promiscuous, in that you can have many kinds of things in a single story: discoveries, surprises, arrivals, events, etc” (Price, Raven and Pys. 2019). I think of/describe what I am making as non-narrative, but that does not mean that there is no links between the elements within the works. These works of mine, even though of a place, are not ‘documentation’, and there is no objective observing within them. They are things I have gathered in my ‘bag’ (Le Guin 2019) of stuff from a specific space/place, and are embroiled with the stufffrom all my travels, so maybe I am also weaving fictions? For my spaces to draw a body in, there needs to be a ‘hook’, which in part can be an entanglement of the image and the sound into something that is half recognised, and that you then want to understand more. That ‘want to know more of the story’ is at the intersection the sounds and images.
The ‘author’ ('me') in the work, trying to ‘do things with affect’:
This ‘doing’ brought me back again to my being in all the work, increasingly aware that all the processes are mediated through ‘me’. Mine is a deliberately subjective embodied praxis, which informs all aspects of the research - from what I choose to use, where I work and with what approaches. In The Under Croft I am ‘noticeably’ in the work: my movement, feet on a rough floor, my sleeve against the wall, my breath, and my shifting position. Additionally, there are sounds because I was there, the air transfer system, the hum of lights and electricity. I have no want to de-manifest myself from the work, to hide my involvement; there is a sort of self-portraiture in what I am doing, a recording of my ‘bodymind’ and its sensed response to the space, as well as an open acknowledgement of presence. I am in the fundaments of the research; decisions are driven by my response - how a place/situation, piece of writing, discussion or any input touches and affects me, what and how I sense and make sense of all of it, and how I draw it all together.
As I work, I ‘hold things in mind’ that will inform and help me ‘notice’, actively ‘listening out’ for my felt/sensed affect heuristic responses. Included in this is a considering of how to leave space for the other bodies/spaces to ‘meet’ what I make and mingle, become porously embroiled, as ‘Isn’t an openness towards being affected what is asked for when one acts to make with something or someone else?’ (Lomax 2005 p32). I want there to be a palpable sense of my bodily engagement, albeit obliquely, in the works make. My embodied approach is my best means of making spaces of embodied encounter for others.
The Smooth and Striated, Plateau 1440:
While developing Early Tests & Experiments, I read The Smooth and Striated (Deleuze and Guattari, plateau 1440; A Thousand Plateaus 2004). This informed my emergent approach of scaffolds as something to ‘support’ the undertakings of working with and through affect/affecting atmospheres and sound, and then trying to, in part, share my understanding through text. These ‘materials’ have a slippiness, a changing shifting nature, that needed a ‘space to be held’ for the activities. The chapter also links smooth to affect and outlines the constant collapsing between the two spaces, informing my understanding of the potentials of shifting between states. I aim to explore and explain my understanding of and the link between this text and my/the use/usefulness of scaffolds, using paraphrasing and quotes from the text.
I use scaffolds in the construction of my ‘spaces’ so that my ‘mapped/planned’, ‘striated’ outlines - when the (micro)elements I draw together in them are active - might collapse/translate into a ‘smooth space’. This speaks directly to the description of smooth and striated as a ‘nomad’ and a ‘sedentary’ space, not of the same nor opposite nature, existing only in mixture and relationship, and constantly being translated/transformed from one to the other.
The transformations and differences are explored as several simultaneous questions, including ‘what interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passage or combination, how the forces at work within space continually striate it and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits other smooth spaces’ (p552). Considering this in relation to sound, (generally and) in my practise, which shifts and moves, initially relating wholly to its origin, becoming a mingled interrelating ecology, and expanding into other spaces - it becomes something of ‘there’ and ‘here’, both changed and the same. Its porosity and shifting nature allows bodies to meet it and be changed (an event of affect?)
I see the technological and maritime models as most analogous to my approaches. The technological is the process of making fabrics – or the qualities of my spaces. Supple solids, woven fabrics are striated, having two elements - warp fixed, weft mobile, with different functions, delineated edges, and a top/right and bottom/wrong side. Smooth fabric, such as felt, ‘proceeds altogether differently’(p553); it is an ‘anti fabric’, an entanglement of fibres, in principle infinite with no top or bottom, not homogeneous and with continuous variation. The maritime model gives a clear description of the shift between the ‘states’ or spaces, describing the mapping of oceans, planned trajectories and points of known location as the striated space, and the moving between points as the times in smooth space.
My process involves my working in a space with a sensing ‘openness’, utilising my ‘affect heuristic’, ‘looking’ out for the stuff, and (micro)elements to gather, which are in part details and atmospheres containing the haecceities and quiddities that make that space/place as it is/I am experiencing it in that/those moments. With those weaving/constructing spaces, setting these up around ‘mapped’ points, maybe of ‘knowing’ for a viewer, give trajectories and ways of travelling with the materials, into an entangled, heterogeneous ‘felt’, space where stuff can shift and move and shape a space itself, porous to the environment and bodies around, me/us/it shifting from striated to smooth, making something of/with those (micro)elements and being in a place of felt/sensed embodied response.
