(4.13.) Gathering - not taking:
Early on, while thinking of my approach, my process, I realised that what I have done in previous works, and what I want to do in this, research is to record; record audio and record film and take images (and here already is that tricky terminology of take…) and to work with that material. I began to think more about this process; thinking about gathering, things around situations, transitory points, moments that will not exist again - not in quite the same way. Something that keeps coming up is this idea of ‘gathering’; I don’t want to own, I don’t want to take, take stuff away from somewhere else – this is not that – it is a ‘gathering up’, a collecting, but not collecting in a way that has connotations of ownership, it feels quite different from that.
It is a being in a space, and even though my presence there, of course, affects that space, alters it and changes it in ways, it is a sort of observing, but an observing that includes the possibility of …. holding … I suppose…. a gathering up of things that are happening in that / those moments, in that place, linked with a way of sharing that moment or ‘stuff’ of that moment with other people, more of a relationship. A trying to be aware of the small things, the little things. A way of moving this ‘stuff’, without it being a removing, not a taking, owning, it feels like the words gather and hold seem to make more ‘sense’ and be a more appropriate sort of terminology. It is also a bridging relationship between the where from and where it will be.
This brings me to a text that is key to my understanding, which I came to a number of years into my research, but helped me see what I had been thinking about in relationship to gathering more clearly. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Ignota, 2019 Introduction by Donna Haraway
Le Guin takes the name from the carrier bag theory of evolution, the idea that our World technology wasn't made by the dramatic, that Society didn't develop because of killing, stabbing, hunts and the taking and overthrowing and ownership,
but the technologies developed through the ability to collect, store and gather. A gourd to collect water, or grain or to keep berries in; things in which to transport, and containers in a wider notion, families, homes, villages - things that hold you. It is the development of these that is really important to the development of our societies and our systems of doing.
Le Guin beautifully describes in the book a story of gathering barley, then going and drinking water and pausing to watch newts and then finding another patch of barley, and that this is nowhere near as exciting a story as the hunting of the mammoth, so the stories told, the stories recounted were the dramatic things. This speaks to me and my work in a few ways and feels from a similar place. My thinking of gathering, and the commonplace, it is not the big dramatic pillaging, killing, stories; the things that are seen as exciting - that are the things that helped us develop and build the structures, relationships and shared experiences that make up social systems. It is those everyday more mundane more Commonplace activities - that glue things together.
Another thing is Le Guin's description of her own practice: she says on p35 -, “so when I came to writing, I came luging this great big heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and clutzes and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously un knotted are seen to contain one blue pebble an in pertubably functioning chronometer telling the time in another world, and a mouses skull, full of beginnings without ends and initiations of losses, transformations and translations.”
I describe what I collect as ‘stuff’, stuff of the world around us, and the idea of tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed - these little, tiny things that are elements of the world around us, and the not seen as consequential, that between them these make up a full bag of stuff.
Le Guin also speaks of things not always succeeding, saying how her books are full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail and people that don’t understand.
I think that there is something really beautiful in this exploring of things that have not gone to plan, and an awareness that that’s how the world works and functions, and that out of those things - sometimes come other things, that make things make a different sense.
It is not only the story in the book that spoke to me but the whole. From the moment I read on page 1 of the preface, ‘A language for the unknown, summoned by Audre Lorde as the ‘Nameless and formless. About to be birthed, but already felt’.’ I thought that there might be something in what the publishers were aiming to do that might meet with my interests, feed my thinking and understanding; the rest of the preface continued to fill me with joy, a feeling of being somewhere like ‘home’, somewhere where the unknows are to be shared and explored, a space where binaries are to be avoided, ‘a space of possibilities’, and that ‘Any hope of ‘salvation’ must depart from the ‘linear, …To listen to the whispers of the trees and the disposed, the echoes of Grandmothers’ tales and what we already know in the deep, dark stanchion place from which intuition rises;….’ (Pg 4)
Like Haraway, who states in her introduction ‘it (the book) undoes and redoes me’, I feel this book ‘touched me at my core’; and that is all of it, the preface, the introduction, the story. It makes me see what I have been doing / am trying to do, anew. It helps me, make it to make sense, it gives me the understanding of the ‘bags’ I am using, and the why retelling small stories might have use, and that gathering things together into my ‘story sack’, things that ‘bear meanings’ in a container that ‘enables relationships’ pg 11
I am not sure that I see the ‘technologies’ I use, the sound recorders, the cameras etc. as the containers, I think that it is much more that I see the ideas of knotting and weaving containers as an analogy of how we carry things with us that we experience – they are not my ‘carrier bag’ but a useful tool to aid the gathering (not even my ‘cultural carrier bag’ pg36, that is different). It is the ‘stuff’ that holds bits of stories / can tell a story that I am concerned with. I am not the storyteller (or only in small part) I am the gatherer of stuff; I try and knot it together to make ‘visible’ the relations I have seen between them. I also, in part (many things in part) want to tell the story from my ‘wild oat field’ share my sensings, communicate from this outside space I feel in, to make me part of the ‘vast sack, this belly of the universe’ (pg 37).
I am not, in my current research, trying to tell great stories, or the types of stories that Haraway outlines so clearly in the introduction; stories that are needed in our world now; the stories, we tell stories with, of the worlds that re world our world. I am trying to feel matter and what feels like it matters to me, to see if I can move the things I seance with me, so that these little micro elements of the world around me can retell their own stories. (mediated by how I put them together, I know) but it is their stories I want to be heard. The small things I am working with are not from places of importance, not even always from places that are important to me. They are from places I have an access to, that are around me. Some have more interested as sites for me, some less – but that is for another part of the story, the part around the sites I am working with. This part of the story is about when I realised that I was gathering; and that this gathering is important. It is important in the frame of I am not taking, capturing, shooting; I am gathering things into a sack where they can create relationships. My works are made from the things in my ‘great heavy sack of stuff’ (pg36) and like Le Guin’s description of the ‘fitting shape of a novel might be that of a sack, a bag.’ (pg 34) my works come together in temporary, permeable containers, sacks of spaces with doorways and windows and the passing through of people.
Le Guin also says – “it was hard to make a griping tale of how we wrestled the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible and whoever said writing a novel was easy.” And I suppose that is something that I feel keenly at times, that it is hard to make a gripping tale of what it sounded like in a room, as people moved about outside, as daily life is happening - but it is not impossible….and it might be worth trying.
'Early Tests and Experiments'
Link to the introduction page
4.12. Gathering, Stuff and Microperceptions:
I gather, what I gather is concerned with the very important ‘unimportant’ everyday. I make things that tell a tale, but which are not narrative. Quiet things from quiet ‘stuff’, exploring small elements of the world around us, things that are there all the time, but we do not think about. I gather a range of materials (sounds, texts, thoughts, images and observations), things that spark interest in me as I move through the world. I use these materials to construct sound sculptures, presentations, and ultimately my doctoral thesis. My approach is instinctual, personal, subjective. I respond bodily, working affectively, following my nose, and exploring what might begin to happen when I put elements together.
Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, pg183) and Massumi (of Microperceptions ad micropolitics208, pg8)– talk about microperceptions/shocks in relation to affect and affecting encounters. Massumi (ref) talks of shocks, but shocks that do not need to be dramatic or big; that these shocks 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 thing. These bodily responses to a something – before a recognised understanding of – but that hold a recognition, are maybe parts of a triggering of memory. These points of felt encounter and awareness before understanding; are what I am trying to follow. I ‘want’ to be physically engaged with spaces and ‘stuff’ in them.
What do I mean by ‘stuff’? The ‘stuff’ is ‘Material to work with or upon’(from the middle English stoffe from Old French estoffe ‘material, furniture’ (OED – date mine at home?)I gather to make things? I think it is the ‘stuff’ of affect that that Massumi refers to as ‘microshocks’ (ref). ‘Stuff’ that is disregarded and overlooked, that is there all the time, that we feel, but do not think about; half-known fleeting encounters with things that are just out of focus, just out of reach. The shocks are not dramatic, but they trigger a non-conscious physical response, perhaps linked to memory? These shocks are the ‘stuff’ that makes our bodies (re?)act. Massumi (date) describes them as things 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, Of Microperceptions and micropolitics, 2008, pg 4).
I relate these microshocks to the small elements of sound, the ‘stuff’ that makes up the ‘acoustic ecologies’ we inhabit. My everyday acoustic ecology will have commonalities with other city dwellers, car-drivers, university-workers; but my responses to these microshocks of microelements of sound will be singular to me, and so are always extraordinary. I can observe others’ responses when I share my work, but the work is built on the way I encounter the world. This gathering, collaging and constructing with stuff is an attempt to create what Massumi might describe as ‘intensities’ (ref). It is these affective sensations that I seek and that interest me. I want to construct felt awareness (not a documentation or a replication) of an instant; which, transposed and added to other instants builds into a multifaceted sensory (auditory?) ‘image’.
4.7. Grasslands:
Birmingham, April 2016 - micro-residency.
Equipment used:
Olympus LS100
Canon D5III - Macro Lens
Roughly ten weeks into my doctoral research, I was involved in a micro residency, this gave me an opportunity for the first practice elements of the research, my aim was to ‘gather’ some materials and make test pieces to share. I wanted to be thinking through doing, and through this develop what I might do next.
Initially, I recorded binaurally, an approach I had used previously and was interested in the spatiality of these types of recordings; walking through domestic, garden spaces and the streets nearby. I felt the recordings didn’t give me anything that sparked my interest, so I began filming/recording close-up stills, audio and video. These ‘locked off’ spaces produced something that felt much more interesting. Recording from a small area; a bit of pathway or the bottom of a hedge, it gave a visual and audio ’snapshot’, the detail in this commonplace material seemed to jump out in all its specificity. The images changed in the light and breeze, while the audio gave the wider context of this suburban space. These bits of sound and space, these unimportant places, felt redolent with affect; talking, cars, birdsong, wind – the mundane, every-day, unpredictable ‘stuff’ of the world. (link to examples?)
I had been interested in journeys through spaces, but realised that what I was finding more interesting was in the location of sounds, focusing as a way of ‘taking note’ of a moment, of a passing situation. To look closely at these normally unconsidered events; not to document them, but to be able to ‘hold’ something of them, to pause over them in their detail.
This initial testing out ideas, drew me towards a clearer path of what I might ‘look at’, and how the elements of practice/theory/doing might all link and move together. It took me to a slightly different place than I had thought – and that is why it’s so important – that this is Practice Research. In the actively being engaged with and working through – I was drawn towards something that ‘made sense’ of/with what I had been thinking. A new route, a different journey, not a walking through spaces, but being with them. I realised that detail – what I might later think of as microelements – was important; and that I would be looking at details that were specific to particular places and moments.
4.14. A Field Trip to Washington State:
USA, April 2018
Equipment used:
Olympus LS100(internal mics)
iphone
I had the opportunity to visit Washington State, USA; this allowed me to explore environments very different from those I had previously in the UK, but only with very limited equipment. I wanted to further explore the form of one-minute sound pieces with an image, I thought of these as ‘soundcards’ and sent some back as part of a group show while I was away. (We don’t Talk any More – Strix gallery Digbeth) .
Richland, is semi-arid sage brush steppe; trees along the river, some irrigated farmland, and shrubland reaching into the far distance. The huge ninety-mile vista across a river valley was vastly different from anything I had tried to record before in the UK. The wide-open space with little foliage meant sound travelled, you could hear a goods train from thirty miles away and while I was there, there was also a dust storm. We were visiting my father, so as well as these expansive spaces I also wanted to gather domestic environments and activity. We flew in through Seattle and also stayed a few days.
I wanted to record ‘stuff’ from moments that would give me a feeling of that particular time and space. I recorded my dad playing guitar, the top and bottom of Candy Mountain, the semi-desert sagebrush steppe, a dust storm, my dad cooking paella; and in Seattle, the Museum of Modern Art and a Happy Hour in a bar.
The outcome of this work was some very dense bits of sound that got a bit muddy. Without specific microphones the possibilities for constructing new audio experiences from specific isolated elements of sound were limited. The Seattle bar at Happy Hour – a minute of linear recording with the recorder on a table – has no ‘cocktail party effect’; everything is even and merged, a noisy hubbub . But the dust storm is an amazing puller of memory; it takes me to the balcony of the house at dawn. To others, it is a common wind event, but I had never experienced anything quite like that auditorily. The cooking piece ‘paella’ foregrounds unextraordinary sounds familiar to many; but they remind many of the people who have heard it of cooking with relatives. Similarly, the bar in Seattle is very familiar, sounds from a city in the USA that could just have easily been from London or Berlin. The Seattle Museum of Modern Art was the same – generic museum sounds that could have come from anywhere. The Seattle recordings were from an audio ecology I know well, (but as I edit this in January 2021, these bar and museum sounds are things that feel a long way away – so have a different relevance and link to memory at this point than when I recorded them or than they might by the time I complete), Ross Brown describes the area in the head where sound is processed while cycling through a city thus, “ a think-space that has an up, a down, a back, a front: the inner surface of whose sphere is a diorama of urban noise-scenery that vies for and fragments my attention with its perpetually fleeting panorama of moment” (page 95 – “The Human Auditorium” ‘on listening’ 2013) This speaks to my feeling of sounds all around me all the time and feels especially pertinent while listening to the city or recordings of cities. I quite like these dense, un-filtered recordings I made in the USA – but I have the memory of being there attached to my response - I am also always very auditorily aware of the world around me and the layering of things in it - as I write this, I can hear my partner running a tap and the water pressure altering in the pipe; a cat jumping off a windowsill onto wooden floorboards; me tapping a key on my keyboard. I am writing now, at home in Birmingham in 2022. But I have to distinguish between the comforting presence of a familiar soundscape that cushions my worlds and the things I am trying to construct. These ‘soundcards’ trigger memories that link me to something experienced. They are unsophisticated, and not much edited, not ‘successful’ pieces, but they do make me think about Massumi saying;
What is felt is the quality of the experience. The account of affect will then have to directly address forms of experience, forms of life, on a qualitative register. Second, the felt transition leaves a trace, it constitutes a memory. Consequently, it can’t be restricted to that one occurrence. It will return.” (Of Microperceptions and Micropolitics, 2008, pg2)
And reflecting on these test pieces also makes me aware that I do need to record with more control.
4.8. Ordinary/Everyday/Commonplace:
I'm not really quite sure, as is often the case, what word I should use; ordinary, everyday, commonplace; they sort of mean similar things - but not quite the same. I think my work and I sit in these nuanced spaces.
The ordinary, everyday and commonplace things around us are oft-overlooked, but I think we can be nonconsciously (Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect, 1995, pg 85) affected by them; I want to explore utilising the affecting qualities of these in the construction of my artworks. Considering possibilities of affecting encounter, through things that are everyday, opens up the nature of affect as something that happens all the time. That we are affected by things which surround us but of which we often pay little attention.
The Commonplace: the not unusual, that there are places we may have in common. I am hoping to put the things, the stuff, into a commonplace; a place that we can all access and experience, even if we understand it in different ways. I am also quite interested in the idea of A Commonplace book, another description of journaling or an older description of a scrapbook, and maybe some of the sort of writing I am doing through my thesis is the writing of ‘A Commonplace Book’. A straightforward way of recording a situation, the equipment I used, the decisions I took, what I thought at the time, somewhere to put things together so their affects on each other can be considered.
The everyday: it is regular, it is repeated, but the same things may be different on a different day, as we move through time and space and as time and space move through us. Some days I am in my studio and some days in my house, or the school of art, or some woods, or driving in my car, and some days I am sitting in a hospital. Some days I am with people and some days I am alone. Everyday is different and everything in everyday has a unique ‘thisness’.
The ordinary: I feel encompasses the ideas above, but without relating to place, situation or day, but that something is ordinary, it is unremarkable. Ordinary has an always thereness about it, a consistency.
Words are elusive, writing, thinking and doing this research makes me notice this again and again. I am still trying to unpick and think about what works and if the words will change and overlap through the process, I don't know what I will end up with, or if I will end up with one; at the moment I am using everyday, but thinking about ordinary and commonplace.
4.9. Ed Adkins, Bastards:
In June 2014, several years before starting my doctoral research, I saw Ed Atkins’ three-channel video and audio installation ‘Bastards’ at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. (3 large-scale screens with speaker arrays, spaced through an area of the building, with text elements
https://palaisdetokyo.com/en/exposition/ed-atkins/ accessed 24th March 2019.)
The imagery in the work ‘Ribbons’ 2014, was a mix of digitally rendered visuals with high definition video. It was, at the same time, both unreal and hyperreal, I found the imagery and sound mesmerising. Nothing felt completely specific, yet the images were explicit and involving. Things were recognisable and understandable but not explained or sequential. The work rolled over me – a wave of singing, speech, chanting, and music, with very bright imagery - in the rather tatty grey space that the Palais de Tokyo is. I shifted bodily from place to place, led between these non-specific pockets of ‘stuff’, yet actively feeding parts of myself into the experience, doing the work of making links and meanings without any sense of narrative, nothing felt either closed or complete. The piece would shift, I would shift. I would not quite know where I was, it was sort of scary, sort of melancholic, sort of bright, sort of worrying and very beautiful – all at the same time: I experienced it as layers and levels of being. As relationships and positions changed, I never felt lost, because everything felt familiar, and I had autonomy to move and shift within it.
There was also something about the text panels at the beginning – with diagrams and notes. I don’t remember the content, but there was something of the idea of the artist ‘hand’ in the additions, that stayed with me and comes to mind at times when I am thinking about text and things always being annotated. (which I have done with ‘this’ again and again)
I was left with a sense of having participated in an event that affected me personally. The experience stayed with me, sparking ideas as I planned and thought about how I wanted to make work. ‘Bastards’ gave me an impetus to research and think about how to construct environments; how you set up and give installations space so that the viewer can consider things in relation to their own worlds, but also be in an experience that is not narrative.
4.15. Tricky things:
What I am thinking and working with is the ‘stuff’ of affect, and affect sits outside the linguistically describable. We can say that it is not a representation, nor mimetic, but affecting atmospheres are more the stuff of ‘things’, a part/elements of, a multifaceted view into + of something. But this trickiness is also part of what makes it fascinating, the not being able to put your finger on it, that it shifts and you cannot quite contain or quantify. There is a parallel between the trickiness of how to describe affect and how to describe sound, often what we resort to / what we do, is to describe the thing that made the sound, and this might link to what Heidegger describes, (Being and Time pg 207) as us not listening for the sounds, but that we interpret the world around us immediately; so we hear the object making the sounds, the wagon, the bird; he goes on to say, that ‘It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. I am thinking of the similarities in how we both experience and how we textually describe and try and communicate, I think it is in that that the problem lies, similarly, with affect we try and describe what happened and how it made us/me feel, but that is after a point of recognition. My trying to ‘make’ something of the affect is a very different approach to trying to describe affect – they are different and maybe opposite things?
But this trickiness is part of this exploration; how to navigate that and how to try and make through/with that – and how to write it, share thinking. Hoping that there are maybe other ways of describing these things and opening them up, and that this maybe comes from, a multiple of points and approaches, and in that somehow, in the spaces allowed to develop, then it becomes more possible to share? And that it’s the affective nature of the stuff that means I need to feel a way through this, that is the same heuristic approach to all my doing, a drawing together of thoughts, ideas and stuff – in the hope of making a thing, or many things of this. Ultimately with the hope of a thesis building, and of it being something that can hold elements together without ‘compressing’ the affect out if it.
4.16. Putting together a film, thinking about structures:
Early in the research, I was still part of a collaboratory group, with SOMA projects / Sonia Russel Saunders. We were invited to share work in development at IKON Gallery in September 2016. The work I had previously done with this group, had made me think about a place or a moment in time, about making something that is of a space or situation, without it being a documentary, but as events in their own right. For this presentation, I made a film, combining moments of video from our devising process with text, audio and other images. This was the first time I had thought about putting together a film form to make something that communicated process, I was aware of video essays, but it was the first time in relationship to my own practice, and to articulate research. I wanted to make something that shared not only the ideas, but what moments of the process had been like, so not documentation, but a type of exposition.
I had increasingly been thinking about my/the research’s ‘need’ for some types of structures. I gave myself perimeters; not walks but locations/situations, pre-planned temporal limits of 1 minute, that they went with a still image or locked-off shot of the location. These things have allowed me to delve deeper into situations, understand more about the way sound is layered around us. I was wondering if other ‘structures’ might be of use, and was tentatively becoming aware of Deleuze and Guattari’s, chapter 1440 in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, The Smooth and Striated.
Thinking about this film exposition, the developments in my thinking around the research through the ‘early tests and experiments’, thinking about a structure as a possible way to hold spaces and materials, without constricting them - I put in a proposal for ‘Dialogues’ PGR conference, BCU (Parkside Building) to be held in July 2018. My abstract started -
This proposal, in and of itself, is a ‘structure’ allowing me to consider the potential of using structures in the exploration of affect (+ event)
The paper was accepted, and I ‘built’ the presentation around and through recordings of a group of people coming together to reglaze a greenhouse (my greenhouse). It chimed with my search for flexible, supportive, permeable structures; with my interest in the everyday; with things being different – and similar – over time, it linked to the Grassland suburban garden and shifts in light and sound and gave me new understanding through the structure of a presentation and the ‘structure’ being built around a ‘form’. I used contact mics on the metal frame; they picked up the shifting and moving of the structure, the glass being put into place – and also parts of the voices, sharing instructions, direction – and just talking. And with how things happen when things and people come together. So, I had made a conference paper, (it was presented as a ‘film’ with audio and my voice presenting live, there is a version here with my voice recorded on the day and edited with the presentation visuals.) and in that process, it helped me think about layering; how I think, make, and write. It was also the beginning of my thinking about spaces, and them having a concurrent internality and externality, that these are often permeable; especially by light and sound. Making this paper, helped me begin to think about how I cold share my research, and what it might begin to look like.
4.7. Norfolk:
Norfolk, December 2016, workshop lead by Chris Watson and Jez Riley French.
Equipment used:
Olympus LS100, AKG lavallière omni microphones, JRF contact mics
iPhone image
I attended a 3-day course, which included practical sessions on equipment use, recording formats, editing and sound design principles and approaches. I wanted to extend my knowledge of: sound recording and editing techniques.
On our final day in the flat Norfolk landscape, we were tasked with making a short sound piece. I set off, in grey drizzle, up a lane, in the hope of finding something of interest. There was a tree between the lane and a field, standing above a point where the lane dipped. I stood next to it and took the picture across the landscape, and thinking of my Grasslands experiments, I decided to record everything from that point. The low cloud gave the image a softness and seemed to muffle the cawing crows. I set my binaural microphones either side of the tree low down to record ambience; and then with the mics on my shoulders; at which point the car went past: serendipity. The recording captured spatiality the car approaching, passing, and moving away. Back in the workshop space, I layered up the sounds I had just gathered with some recordings from a wire fence I had made the previous day near the same tree. I call these ‘fence recordings’ probably because Jez Riley French does, they are made by anchoring a contact microphone between a wooden fence post and the fence wire, the mic picks up the sound of the wire moving in the wind; a sound that gives me a sense of distant recognition, it felt like it had the atmosphere of the weather in it. I put the sounds from the two different days together in a one-minute piece to go with my image, in putting non-concurrent acousmatic sounds from the same place together, I had made something ‘of’ the landscape that was redolent of the particularity of the space. It gave me a glimpse of what can be done with elements found in the same environment at different times.
The outcome of this technical task was not just acquiring new skills; it made me aware of the possibilities of using non-concurrent sounds from a single space to describe it. Layering sounds from different mics, recorded at different points in time, allowed me to make something with and of the space that said so much more about it than a single, linear, audio recording would. My growing technical understanding also opened new possibilities. I began to see audio as ‘material’; I could adapt, and shift; giving some sounds prominence while drawing back others. This was the first time I built a ‘sound sculpture’ that gave a sense of space and environment. I built heuristically on what Grasslands had shown me - a process of doing, responding, and listening. I began to develop a sort of scaffold, plan, a structure, that would allow me to construct something through and of a space.
4.4 Norfolk - I minuet with still image.
Feedback from the workshop and at other times when I’ve used this recordings tells me how shifting sound changes the way people feel about a space; that the crows in the bleak landscape felt ominous; that the approaching vehicle, whose engine is audible long before its identifiable, sounds so common and familiar; how the fence sounds shift the focus again, into a noise we do not know we know. People's responses have stayed with me vividly.
4.11. College Valley:
Northumbria, June 2017: Chris Watson and Jez Riley French, field recording trip.
Equipment used:
2 x Olympus LS100, AKG omni clip mics, mid /side mics, AKG blimp.
Canon D5III, macro lens, 24mm to 115mm lens
This was a 5 day field trip, with the aim of gathering materials – sounds & imagery – from specific points, places or things; I was also considering the potentials of ambisonics and extend my field recording skills. (Ambisonics - a way of listening to recorded sound that placed you inside a 360-degree sonic sphere, so your ears received information coming from all directions, not just from two speakers in front. That could emulate the natural mechanisms our brain uses to situate us in space, and give us a more convincing, immersive and therefore emotive musical experience. https://intothesoundfield.music.ox.ac.uk/what-is-ambisonics - M Gerzon: accessed 22nd March 2024)
Following the previous experiments from Grasslands and Norfolk, I wanted to record elements of sound, that I could use separately, bring together and put in relation to others. Because I was reading and thinking about ‘microperceptions’ (Massumi, 2008 (of Microperceptions and micropolitics)), I was being drawn to details of sound, to smaller sound elements that I could use as building blocks to the ‘affective encounters’ I wanted to construct.
I recorded water sounds (ubiquitous in the Cheviots, as in the Cairngorms – but more of that in the next chapter.), insects with close clip mics on flowers; and the valley – but trying to get the elements of sounds separately, focusing on the microshocks (Massumi, 2008, pg 8 Of microperceptions and micro politics) we notice as discrete areas of sound in their own right. The one-minute short form I had used at Grasslands and in Norfolk seemed a ‘structure’ to use to test out ideas. So, I made a series of three one-minute ‘sky pieces’, using the same piece of video but different layers of audio taken from one place. The first had wind sounds gathered with contact mics on twigs; the second added birdsong; and the third had an additional background recording, sound in the general environment. (I showed the piece in a Group Staff Show at the Birmingham School of Art in January 2019.)
The experiment explores how the piece changes as different layers of sound build up or are stripped away, and controlling that gave me a sense of what I might allow to happen, and how it might happen. The outcome that interested me most was not the way each version felt different (although they did feel different); but how my attention and concentration shifted with each change of emphasis. I had on the trip also a chance to abisonically record and listen back with some equipment Chris had, I found it of less interest than the pieces when I could shift the emphasis and influence what was more or less noticeable. It also felt too much of a documentation, I was not mediating the space through my own encounter and sharing something of that with the ambisonics recording it was much more a document of the sounds in that space at a given time.
As I thought about how and what to record, and how to use those bits of sound, I think I began to understand the relationship between microperceptions and affecting spaces – and how, even though they are gathered sound from a place – it’s a making of an audio ecology, a space of sound (a sound sculpture) from things gathered from the place/space through my response at the time and in the editing and constructing.….. and if microperceptions can be equated with/as elements of sound the that opens up a link between the sounds we hear all the time and affective response.