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This is the first of the ‘practice’ chapters. In it, as in the following ones, the practice starting with a micro residency ‘grasslands’, is interspersed with theoretical concerns and developing approaches. This is a journey through considering the ordinary,  everyday and commonplace; work made as part of a recording workshop in Norfolk, the influence of an Ed Atkins work, and how the practice developed further on a recording trip to College Valley. This was all informed by an emerging affective approach, that considers gathering, reflecting on what did not work in materials from a recording trip to Washington State, and the usefulness of scaffolds in all this praxis, including writing and presenting a paper on this.

Link to the title and content page:

Beginning to think about scaffolds: 

Through these early practice/praxis works, I understood I needed some form of structure or plan for the activities and to support the approach; that this would ‘help’ in the process of gathering and working through my affect heurist/embodied encounter, and give some form to what I was doing until the ‘work’ began to emerge through the drawing together of elements. 

I was additionally aware that I needed to share my journey and what I found along the way. I needed to be able to explicate what ‘happened’, but as ‘this bodymind’, I am someone who does not find text easy. I considered strategies I had seen in other practice thesis, particularly Newman’s thesis, Locating performance: textual identity and the performative. 2001, This was written in 3 volumes, the text in the first a performative self-interview where Newman asks questions of themself. I can see the use of a ‘plan’, an approach that makes the doing of these tricky things more possible in this, and at this point myself was considering a ‘plan’ or scaffold as an approach that might support the working with text and the materials. In June 2018, I put a proposal together for a conference paper which was accepted, titled ‘this is an of itself is a structure’, it was a film with audio that I spoke over live.  In and through it I was thinking about mutable, permeable, scaffolding, as structures, a ‘plan’, to hold and allow spaces to open, to support all my working/research, considering the nature of affect, sound and ‘me’.

Chapter Four

Early Tests & Experiments: developing an approach through praxis. 

Grasslands: Birmingham, April 2016, a micro-residency. 

Early on in my doctoral research, I undertook a micro-residency with the aim of gathering materials and making test pieces to share. I wanted to be thinking through doing, and through that develop what I might do next. My initial approach, a binaural recording technique which would give spatiality in the recording, attaching microphones to myself and recording as I walked through spaces: domestic, garden and the streets nearby. These recordings captured the environments passed through, but the movement made them feel ‘transitory’; I wanted something that ‘held’ my attention, caught me up in a moment. 

I tested filming/recording close stills, audio and video. These ‘locked off’ areas of recording, produced something that felt much more interesting. The materials which I used as they were, just trimming ends - no abstraction in the editing; an area of pathway, the bottom of a hedge, giving an audio visual ‘window’ through which to ‘look’. Within this the commonplace details seemed to jump out in all their specificity The images subtly shifting and the audio giving context, they felt redolent with affective potential - talking, cars, birdsong, wind – the mundane, every-day, unpredictable stuff of the world. 

These tests gave me a clearer idea of what I was ‘looking’ for - static materials that ‘hold’ some of the commonplace and everyday of the spaces and highlighted the importance of researching through/with practice.

A Field Trip to Washington State, April 2018: 

I had the opportunity to undertake a field recording trip in Washington State, USA. I wanted to continue to explore the form of the one-minute sound/image piece. I had very limited kit with me, just a simple sound recorder with built in microphones. The works made were not very successful, the sounds all ‘merged’ and muddy, but this did mean I recognised the need for a more considered approach to recording, that it was not just a gathering of everything. I need ‘parts’ to work with, to layer up ‘accretions’ of sounds from a space/place; understanding this was useful to my planning and future approach.

The short pieces, ‘paella’ (to the right), which foregrounds unextraordinary sounds, familiar to many, of cooking with others. This brought my thinking to “What is felt is the quality of the experience… the felt transition leaves a trace, it constitutes a memory. Consequently, it can’t be restricted to that one occurrence. It will return.” (Massumi 2008 p2), and a beginning to consider memory as a form of embodied, nonconscious, response and something that can inform what I gather and am ‘looking’ for. 

Ordinary/Everyday/Commonplace:

I am considering affecting encounters through the quotidian, the things around us all the time, exploring the gathering - the utilisation of these in the artworks I construct. As I noted down thoughts from initial practice tests, I was not quite sure (as is often the case) which word I should use: ordinary, everyday or commonplace. They hold similar, but not identical meaning, denoting things around us that can be overlooked, but, and this is a concern of this research, can non-consciously (Massumi, 1995, p. 85) affect us. 

Ordinary: is regular, unremarkable, of the usual order of things, it has an always thereness, a consistency. 

Everyday: is repeated, but the same things may be different on a different ‘everyday’, linked to time, and as time and space move through us. 

Commonplace: not unusual, general, that there are places we may have in common. I am intending to put the stuff I gather into a commonplace; a place that we can all access and experience, (even if we each understand it differently).

Ordinary affects (along with commonplace and everyday ones) are things of potentials and awakening, ‘The question they beg is not what they might mean in an order of representations…but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance’ (Stewart 2007 p.3). Words for me are elusive, slippy things; they never feel ‘hold-onto-able’, and so akin to affect. Writing, thinking and doing this research makes me notice this again and again, I am trying to unpick this and consider what works.

As ‘some days’ I am in my studio, my house, the school of art, some woods, driving in my car and some days I am with people other I am not, ‘everyday’ is different and everything in everyday has a unique ‘thisness’ and ‘whatness’, so for now I will use that, but I am thinking about ordinary and commonplace.

Affect as an approach, stuff and Microperceptions: 

As this enquiry developed, it was becoming evident that my praxis included an embodied approach, that ‘What is also needed is a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body’. Through these early works ‘I have tried to learn how to induce an attentiveness to things and their affects‘(Bennett 2010 pxiii) and so be in a position of working with and for affect. 

Deleuze and Guattari (2004 p183) and Massumi reference ‘microperceptions/shocks’ in relation to affecting encounters. Massumi talks of ‘shocks’, that do not need to be dramatic and that these trigger a bodily response/awareness in a moment This might become a conscious understanding, a recognition, but in those initial moments it is a felt encounter (2008 p8). These bodily nonconscious responses, that hold recognition, are part of my ‘affect heuristic’, a being physically engaged with spaces and stuff.

What do I mean by stuff? For me it is ‘material to work with’; stuff that is disregarded and overlooked, that is there all the time, we feel, but not consciously notice; half-known fleeting encounters with things that are just out of focus. It is stuff that makes our bodies (re) act, that “populate every moment of our lives…. a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision …. an interruption, a momentary cut in the mode of onward deployment of life” (Massumi 2008 p4). It is stuff that is enmeshed in, and part of, Massumi’s ‘shocks’.

I equate microshocks to the small elements of sound, the stuff that makes up the acoustic ecologies we inhabit. Relating ‘microshocks’ and stuff as ‘bodily notice’ and to the layered elements in my short piece ‘Norfolk’, I am developing my approach; I am gathering, collaging and constructing with stuff to create what Massumi might describe as ‘intensities’ (2008), a felt awareness of an instant, which, transposed and added to other instants builds into a multifaceted sensory ‘image’. This feeds into The Cairngorms work. 

Norfolk: 

I attended a short sound recording and editing workshop in December 2016 lead by Chris Watson and Jez Riley French, which included practical sessions on equipment use, recording formats, editing and sound design principles. 

On the final day, the task was to make a short audio piece. It was a grey drizzly day in the flat landscape; I walked up a lane to a road. Thinking of the ‘Grasslands’ experiments, I decided to record from a point where there was a tree on the verge where the road dipped, with fields all around, I took a photo. To record the ambiance/atmosphere, I used binaural microphones either side of the tree, a car went past, the recording capturing the spatiality the car approaching, passing, and moving away. I had some wire fence recordings from the previous day at a point very nearby. Back in the building I began working with the sounds, layering up non-concurrent acousmatic sounds from the same place, putting these with the still image 

The outcomes of this technical task was a mix of acquiring new skills and knowledge; I had made something ‘of’ the landscape, more redolent of the particularity of the space than a single linear recording, recognising the potentials of building with non-concurrent elements from a place. When I shared the piece in the workshop, people said the shifting of the sound ‘caught them up in it’, with the crows, bleak landscape, an approaching vehicle, the engine audible before it was identifiable, all familiar, and the fence sounds a noise we half know. 

Through the early test works, starting to consider how the audio makes a space, and how elements can be ‘bodily’ experienced, I was learning to work with a greater range of equipment and editing techniques, allowing me to isolate details, and shift elements around in the things I was constructing. I was developing an approach to working, a scaffolding, a way of working with affect and these materials, to hold them and make a space within which to work. At this stage, it was as simple as: at a place, gather in a range of ways; when working with the materials layer them; work, follow your nose (an affect heuristic); consider making short tests of audio with still images or ‘locked off’ video. 

Gathering, not taking – and making ‘something’ out of the quotidian: 

Reflecting on the work undertaken so far, I could identify that what I do is ‘collect’ and assemble. I record audio, film, ‘take’ pictures… and there it is, that trick terminology, ‘take’ that goes with capture and shoot. So instead, I keep coming back to ‘gather’. I do not want to own; this is not a using of ‘found objects’; I don’t want to take stuff away or capture it. Further to this, I am not ‘setting up’ scenarios to record, or altering (apart from what occurs purely through the act of being there) the space, and I use the materials as they are. They are not representing anything other than ‘themselves’, what I am exploring is the everyday stuff around us, aiming to understand our/my affective encounter with this; I am not looking to ‘generate’ things that might be affecting.  This is a ‘gathering up’, a rematerialising in a different place, and an assembling with.

My notion of gathering was brought into focus when reading The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, (Le Guin, 2019). My praxis is one of gathering and assembling; a ‘fitting shape of a novel might be that of a sack, a bag.’ (p34); my works are made from the gathered things in my ‘great heavy sack of stuff’ (p36), things that I gather and work with because they are things that I encounter and hold something for a/my bodily response. Le Guin names her short story after The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution, the proposition that our society and technologies were not developed because of dramatic events or actions, but through and for the ability to collect, store and gather. “It was hard to make a griping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible and whoever said writing a novel was easy” (Le Guin 2019). This is something I have at times felt keenly; it is hard to make a ‘gripping tale’ (something engaging) of what it sounded like in a space as daily life is happening, but it is not impossible, and I will continue trying.

College Valley: 

I took part in a 5-day field recording trip with Chris Watson and Jez Riley French in Northumbria, June 2017. I planned to record elements of sound (and images) from one area, with the aim to bring them together so they worked in relation to each other - to build an ‘environment’ and develop what I understood through earlier tests. I was also contemplating the posable use of ambisonics and extending my field recording skills.

I was considering details, smaller sound elements that I could use as ‘building blocks’; and linking these to ‘microperceptions/ microshocks’ (Massumi 2008). I recorded water sounds, insects on flowers, the valley, trying to gather the elements of sounds separately, focusing on the discrete areas of sound. The one-minute short form I had used in Norfolk seemed a useful testing ‘structure’. I made three (linked) one-minute ‘sky pieces’, (below), with different layers of audio. In the first, wind gathered with contact mics on twigs; in the second I added birdsong and the third I added a ’atmosphere’/background recording; to explore how the piece changed with the layering of sound. It was the way that attention shifted, that the ‘change’ was mind/body noticed, (and noted in audience comments) that added to my thinking and is something to carry forward. 

I had an opportunity to record and listen back using ambisonics, I found it too ‘absolute’, too ‘documentary’, of less use to my aims of making works of affecting response that the materials I had begun to gather with affect, stuff and ‘microperceptions’ in mind, with these I could change what was more or less noticeable, mediate the materials, share something of my own encounter. 

Reflecting on these early works, I realised their ‘framed’ views, while initially useful, are ‘singular’, an image, a (stereo) audio track. They do not ‘make spaces’ but a ‘window’; you ‘view’ them, you are not in them. I aim to make spaces that shift and move in thought and connections, (thinking of the Ed Atkins piece) and that can elicit bodily encounter. I realised that I needed to utilise my own response to beginning to make spaces of embodied encounter, in my emergent approach.

Ed Atkins, Bastards: 

In ‘Grasslands” I link the locked off shot to the work of artist Ed Atkins. In June 2014, several years before starting my doctoral research, I saw their three-channel video and audio installation ‘Bastards’.

The imagery in the work Ribbons, is a mix of high-definition video with digitally rendered visuals. This I found unreal and hyperreal, mesmerising and disturbing, all at the same time; nothing felt completely specific, yet the images were explicit and involving. Parts recognisable and understandable, but not explained or sequential. The work rolled over me, a wave of singing, speech, chanting, music, and very vivid sharp imagery - the rather tatty grey Palais de Tokyo space accentuating its ‘brightness’. 

I felt bodily led between the non-specific pockets of stuff, doing the work of making links and meanings as nothing felt either closed or complete. The piece would shift, I would shift; I would not quite know where I was - it was some sort of scary, melancholic, worrying and very beautiful – all at the same time. I experienced it as layers and levels of relationships and changing positions. I never felt lost, because everything felt familiar, and I had autonomy to move and shift within it.

I was left with a sense of having participated in something that affected me personally, the experience staying with me, sparking ideas as I considered how I wanted to make work. ‘Bastards’ gave me an impetus to consider the construction of environments and how you set up and give installations ‘space’ so that a viewer can bring in their own self through something that is not narrative.