Links

A second page currently contaning the 2 re worked videos.

This is the link back to the introduction page

Twin ideas:

Haecceities and Quiddities; coventry biennial of contemporary art 2019

The ‘author’ ('me') in the work..

Through the doing I became (again + increasingly) aware that all these processes are very much mediated through me – I exist in them, I chose what I gather, I chose what I put together. So, there are no objective decisions, they are all subjective – if anything they are a document of ‘my’ engagement with an environment and are about my position at that moment – in that point in time. As I am working I try to consider these how’s: how do I try and ‘notice’, how do I try and leave space for movement, how do I follow an affective nose and not lead? How do I approach this with an openness towards being affected, which is what is asked for when one acts to make with something or someone else?’ (Yves Lomax – the twittering tree?)

They are also at times – ‘things’ made from or including the sounds that I generate when I am working – when I am doing /thinking – as I am acting. In the making of this work, what was brought to the fore at the row site was that I am making the decisions, was deciding what kit I would use, where it would be, what it would be attached to, what I would gather and there were occasions where my activity could be heard – but at the under croft the sound were the sounds of my activity,  sounds that were caused because I was there. 

•The air transfer system was turned on, so were the lights – because I was in the space… and I could not be in the space unless they were on… 

•The sounds of me in the space, moving equipment, clattering, my movements, shifting position, writing – doing things. 

The sounds were generated by me or my presence. There are bits and snippets of my presence in similar ways in other pieces (or more than that in the 20 mins of listening and a sort of ekphrasis…) and I am often quite aware of ‘me’ in things – but this was really just me and the sounds I generated through being present/ my doing. Me being present, absolutely, up to my eyeballs…. Even in my decision to gather and use the sounds of the equipment recording the sounds and images… so I am generating those sounds? In a knowing way, there are some bits where I am still, so you get the air system etc. but they are on because I am there… everything is linked with me bodily being there / present; my breathing, me moving, me taking an image, me moving equipment, me recording…

I am not trying to hide my presence, suggest any objectivity. This is not a documentary pieces or a study with the aim of distancing – this has me right in the centre of it and recognises my involvement and influence.

The TWIN spaces:

I was interested in gathering in places where things were happening, were occurring (a nod back to the About work) and that were becoming something else. I did an initial site visit with Ryan Hughes, CBCA director, and looked at a number of posable spaces.

It was decided that I would work with The Row, a site being transformed  from a disused NHS clinic into one of the main exhibition venues for the Bianally  and The Under Croft a left behind cellar of a no longer existing merchants house from the C17 which is now part of the city archives and is under, and accessible through the Hubert Museum and Gallery – they ‘were’ (past tense) spaces of use and activity – and were both going to be used as exhibition spaces (my work to be in The Row) But The Under Croft is a sort of museum space and The Row about to become the hub for the project and be transformed over the coming months into an exhibition space – I was interested in these differences and twin / common situations.

The Under Croft – a medieval merchants house cellar – left behind as the city developed, now underground and part of the city archive, it is sort of berried like a bubble. It is silent except when someone enters – then an air flow system is turned on which preserves it and allows access, every move you make becomes a really noticeable sound – I was really aware of how much noise we were making on my first visit – we became the makers of its auditory atmosphere. If there is no movement after a time the lights go off…. I found it an interesting space because of this sort of cutoffness – a sort of quietness – even though there was constant noise (from the air transfer and lights) and that every sound I then made in it became very obvious. I ended up doing, was recording myself being in the space; the devices I had with me being moved around, me moving, me writing, the devices recording data when I sound or image gathered… 

I used a coil microphone to capture the information transfer when an image was taken or a sound recorded –and the electric hum of the lights. Omni microphones to record the  – the images, details of the space, an alcove where I put things, my note book, cables, the lights and lit parts… I became quite interested in the accretions on the walls, salts and other stuff, I think the walls are old read sandstone, a reddish soft stone and there was this sort of crystalline build ups  on the dusty surface – from the moisture seeping through? Coming through the stone or coming from the surrounding soil. It was covered in the very beautiful crusty layer, and almost scabby surface that seemed to have been pushed out and built up from the inside of the walls like it had come out of the stone, with areas of these delicate crystal structures that would crumble if you touched them and small piles of reddish dust and flakes at points on the floor and in the corners of the alcove, where the surface had been disturbed and crumbled due to people or air movement – but the space was not dusty… it was a different type of environment….  A lot of the images I gathered were of this surface of the space; some with edges and bits of my equipment interrupting it – or the image disappearing into darkness at the edges of the lit areas… and the sounds – are of my being in the space and the space being ‘switched on’ because and by my being there….

The other space was The Row – an old NHS clinic across 3 floors and above a row of shops in the city centre, was being converted to be used for the exhibition and as space for workshops. Some rooms were small individual clinic / interview spaces, some had been waiting areas and records spaces, some offices – there were storage areas and corridors – many of the windows are overlooking the shopping street and a roadway or other buildings and roofs. The windows had that odd film on them – so you can see out from the inside, but you cannot look in.  There was a mixture of things that were to happen and the space was being used also as the central organising point; so there were sounds of meetings and discussions, deliveries and planning, the taking of some partitions and structures out, keeping of others, building new / blank walls and spaces; keeping some of the indicators of its previous use but removing some to accommodate the works that were going to be shown there.

I recorded the changing of the space – and the sounds of the city through the permeable windows – and the shifting through the stairway of noises of many sorts…. I recorded the activity; caught the edge of meetings, drilling, sawing, banging – the putting together of the new elements of the space and the knocking out and pulling up of things being removed…

I wanted to gather the particularnesses of both spaces.

I approached them differently in terms of visits, what I recorded and how – in some ways – but there were also commonalties in approach, methodologically and technically.

The Under Croft I recorded being changed by my presence – but on 1 visit 

And The Row I visited a few times and recorded its changing and being changed by others in the space….the photographs were things that were sounding, or where sound was gathered, but also details of things being removed… things changing, marks on the walls from previous activities, sticky tape and blue tack – but also the marks to show where something was to be put or what was to be removed… scraping of the floor, things being put together – the images and sounds of the activity in the space…

So a space of activities and actions At The Row, the construction of spaces, the cleaning and clearing of areas – the doing mixed with the sounds of the city, through the windows – the sound from outside……….a bit like the low hum of the air conditioner at the under croft – but much more varied and human and full of activity – separated by the window glass from the city around – and a space preserved and below the city’s modern surface – a ‘quiet’ space – that is made ‘noisy’ by the air system –its sandstone walls and gritty floor which means you cannot move without a crunch, but the absence of other sounds which meant I was aware of my making even small sounds; skin against skin, fabric moving, shoe sole on floor – and when I got out a book to write, the pencil on paper was so loud. Every movement of tripod and release of shutter – the hum of the lights – that shut off after 15 minuets, again an electrical sound; the recording of data, the transfer of information; all of these sounded in the space and were recorded as I recorded and every recording I made, written, image or digital sound – was also recorded as an activity in the space. 

As the work developed I became very tied up with the twining – the linking of the images with the sounds…. I wanted to try and make things so the sound would come through the images – the speakers would be speakers – but also recognised as what they were in a slightly different way – that they would be sounding objects in the space – pouting sounds out into the space, and you would be able to see where ethe sounds were from and the direction they were coming from…

Haecceities and Quiddities: (Haecceity -  thisness / Quiddity - whatness)

These are both terms from scholastic philosophy, I am interested in haecceity as it apereas as a descriptor of some properties of smooth spaces 

‘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’s The Smooth and Striated (plateau 1440; 1000 plateaus,) 

and quiddities are a similar but different notion of properties, they are not opposites or synonyms and most simply put they could be described (and often are) as the thisness and the whatness of stuff and things.

The Oxford Dictionary of English describes them as:

Haecceity: Philosophy that property or quality of a thing by virtue of which it is unique or describable as ‘this(one)’. 

The property of being a unique and individual thing.

Quiddity: Philosophy the inherent nature or essence of someone or something.

A distinctive feature; a peculiarity: his quirks and quiddities.

The specificity of things…. These details, qualities, of the stuff – the thisness and whatness… are especially interesting for me in relation to the quotidian stuff of our aural environments. These are qualities that make a sound particular – to where it comes from, to this day this moment. But also, what is it that gives it its links, what gives it a kinship with similar things…The things that make it recognisably what it is, the things that make us make connections to other similar things. This balancing between the particular and the relatable – which is part of how we experience, how we understand and how memories are made and triggered.

What I wanted to do was test out gathering those sorts of sounds –the sounds that felt to me to be particular in ways and redolent in ways…and what that would allow me to then do in the sound pieces that I made, thinking about them being different sound elements. That’s what I wanted to explore in Coventry – the details of the space through these separate bits of sounds; recording them in different ways, different positions, different types of mic’s – and putting the ‘together’ (but not merged) to re make a feeling and atmosphere of the spaces, but with separate channels of sounds (and background / bed / wild tracks) so the 5 channel piece from the row has the busses and the traffic (recorded with transducers on the window – but that was also ‘live’ in the space all the time as well), sounds of drilling, banging making (through transduces on structures as they went up as well as from room recordings), there are voices, discussions – other types of activity and thinking…decision making, there was scraping of floors and taking down as well – which had come before the construction – so a layering across times… all in that space – things that made up the ‘activity’ of that space – and in those sounds there was both the H and Q – the specificity of a drill on that day, into that material – and the general that we know (but maybe don’t think about…) sounds we ‘recognise’ – I was ‘looking for’ sounds that were either / or / both

 To use / utilise as working elements…

And when we are listening to sound – there are things that make it really specific to that place or things with in it but there are also the things that make them like other sounds like them and in lots of ways makes us ‘know’ those sounds, understand those sounds as something when have experienced before… that we relate them, we ‘remember’ similar or like things previously encountered. They are not abstract to us; they are from things we recognise even if we don’t know (don’t clearly recognise what they are) So the H and Q are useful in knowing and recognising. This also I feel links with things I have also looked at around microelements – bits of stuff that relate to micro perceptions or micro shocks – the moments of stuff…

The thisness and the whatness – they are particularities that make something distinctly what it is but also the what gives it a kinship a commonality with others… that give me a way of thinking about, of approaching what I might gather / am gathering. That I am listening for, the sorts of affects (on me) that I am trying to respond to – the – I know that feeling or the ohh that’s particular and distinct? The things I recognise (maybe clearly maybe not), the things that I am not quite sure of but that link / draw me towards a thinking of a moment before, a something else, another place / space / time ….

It about the links between these details, these bits, these elements – and the way we respond to them, respond to them because they are distinctly like they are, because we ‘know’ them, have experienced in a different moment something akin. Knowing through distinctness and knowing through commonalities. And this  thinking and listening for, with the aim together, is something to carry forward when I am gathering clo

Affect and Sound and Writing

The usefulness of dialogue and discussion came into focus for me again (a thing I have been interested in through the research – informal discussions as a way of seeing what others see, a seeing of moments of what others response is….? and as a way of clarify for myself some of my own thoughts ) when I had a supervision at Coventry  – one of the areas discussed was that the way we often describe sound is through what makes the sound (I looked at this in early text pieces, Heidegger links to this? ) so what makes the sound or it is attached to… say - bird song… and that this is similar to writing around affect it is often a describing of the things that triggers affective response… so the animation of a snowman melting in Massumi – or the affect when it becomes part of cognition, a retrospective recognising that something has affected you. The sound and the affect are somewhere within these, but not being seen directly? (Need to look at Foucault and his text on difference between writing and objects…?)

Which brings me back to thinking about way of writing – especially in relation to (both my neurodiversity and) affect and being interested in the writing in both Ordinary Affects and The Hundreds. An idea of the small piece, positioned with other small pieces – which sits within what I also was thinking about with the making of the work in Coventry…and gives me an approach to writing, editing and positioning of elements that also sits with the gathering and the processes I utilise when working with video and sound. And that for now seems like a useful plan.

The sounds and the images:

Thinking about the relationship between the sounds and the images…. 

……I was visually recording surfaces that I was recording sounds from or around – so where I was using transducers on the windows – I was also taking images, where I was using them on the wood constructing new spaces, I took images of the wood – this was very much how it worked at The Row…. The Under Croft was different in some ways, there was less possibility for that direct connection, the walls were not things I could attach to or gather sound from – but the walls made the sound of the space as it was, so there are images; there was notebooks and edges of cables, edges of the pools of light and the electric lights themselves that the coil mics gathered hum from …. So, at both sites, images were from things that made noise, the noise was gathered from, or that effected the sound …. As well as some other details… 

                                                                                 the twining of sound and image

This correlation of points and details of gathering were what lead me to the thinking about the speakers being ‘seen’ as object emitting sound (not hidden things) and that the sounds and images should physically be entwined.

Reflections:

I made twin pieces to be shown on the middle floor of The Row – one in front of you as you entered through the door and another across the room by the window – the space was packed with work– there, some with sound – some silent

I liked that you met the undercroft / first part auditorily before you saw it – you met it on the stairs – I could hear my own writing in another space – you felt the activity and the doing – writing, moving, recording (doing / thinking) As you got closer you could hear the aircon and oddness of the sound of the space – and you could see images of details from that space – but abstracted by the closeness of the shots, it was in an odd dark area light by another work – which lead you through to the brighter busier area where you met the second part – a 5 channel piece - a  curved ‘Row’ of speakers (the under croft is a corner of 3 speakers / channels) in front of the window. The window where some of the sounds and images were gathered, giving layers of then and now. The images,  details near the points of recording. The sounds of the activity of the transformation, something you were now seeing the results of, while hearing the doing of. Hearing the gathered stuff from the space in flux, in the space changed – a new moment of encounter and even though busy - still

The sounds I felt worked really well – the visuals suffered – it was damp – the images curled up –and the visual clutter meant they were lost and too solid somehow, all at the same time. But these things are always experiments and tests – we can not know what they do until we encounter them doing it, we can work with mock ups, we can test out, but especially in this sort of busy exhibition, you can never quite know until it’s there, it’s part of the excitement and sometime the pain of making and showing. The positioning and pace they were to be shown in were things I had limited control over and I didn’t see them with the other work in the space until it was all set up. 

Even as I had just made the piece, I was thinking of re workings, for an MA FA talk delivered while the show was still open, I made a new configuration of some of the materials and wrote   “But already I am playing with other things I gathered and wondering about other permutations (and) being drawn back to an intermediate surface and so have put together the audio from the row with a piece of video, just to see and think”

About the relationship between video and text…. editing

This process (writing ‘up’) is also one of realizing / learning ( or re realizing / re learning) working on this section in draft has made me aware again that I need to utilise the approach I have to editing video and sound and use this as part of the approach I have to working with text (the gathering of materials, the processing through – all of it…) This needs to be both as a useful analogy and approach – but also in the ‘nuts and bolts doing’. How would I begin a ‘art’ piece? 

•I would decide on a ‘space’ and begin to gather around thanking about what I might want to explore through the process:

•I would review the gathered materials as I work and when it has got to a critical mass, I would begin to sketch out diagrams.

•a diagram of what will be included, where things go, the time they may occupy – what will be where and what will it relate to around it, also what is the shifting between, what’s the movement and patterning of the ‘stuff’.

•revisiting and reviewing – with a little distance – initially a small bit of critical distance, but using this to re shape things…

Taking a lead from the video / video sharing / conference presentations / video essays and how these have developed, utilising the things that work for me in ‘practice’ and move them into the area of text, that I struggle with…  If I need to ‘over learn’ – if text doesn’t make sense – if it is a ‘not making sense activity’, twin it with – pin it too an activity that I feel, I know, and that works for me as a way of ‘making sense’ (a way of breaking the block… that text often causes?) 

If I can approach my text in the same way as my drawing together of materials for ‘pieces’ for video, images and audio – plan their shape, their tone, their colour, the pace, the movement and the shifting (I feel I did this in the presentation for Newman – in the ‘presenting’, the performing of it – I could give it the shifts and moves, the pauses and spaces – so hold on to this…) and also use my knowing of how to go back – re-visit my videos, look at them and re-shape them… use these known things as a scaffolding for the things of text. But also, then think about the ‘allowing’ them to have ‘shape’, that the patterning and pauses, the tempo the colour is somewhere in them and allowed to show….

Note: Learn from previous doings, the video / sound backgrounds to presentations, the paper with video and reflect and consider the Newman talk, go back to the feedback notes, use it as an example. Trust in it for a moment and let it be of use…

The audio note taking is also proving to be a good way, it seems. to get things out of my head, to get me going with the writing and the listing back is really useful – but ,I think there needs to be more of a diagramming, a drawing up (not a story board) and that is what I will ‘try’ and utilise for this… I also wonder about the ‘introduction’ being audio? This came up in a supervision. So that there is a video around the piece and also an audio introduction made at the end, more multi layered spoken piece, more how I would approach a talk, with pace changing and emphasis shifts…?