Outline of activity and aims:

My proposal to the SofA PhD ‘take over’ was:

1. that I wanted to test out some work in a space using speakers and projectors; I had not previously had an opportunity to set up any work as a multi channel sound piece, I wanted to:

• check out the technology, if I could set this up and if the equipment available would do what I hoped.
• to explore the idea of smooth spaces as spaces of hacietties and quedidites - and linking with micro perceptions.

The plan was to bring together elements and layers from a space and situation and put them together to make a new ‘thing’, which was ‘of the space that it was from ‘, but not a direct representation of what I had experienced there - and if it worked, I wanted to think about what communicates in a space and ideas of affect and affecting communication. The material I was going to work with was that which I gathered in the Cairngorms.

2. A discussion / talk with Simon to explore  how we were thinking about sounds in different / common ways particularly  different ’types’ of sound gathered in non standard ways.

3. That I would host a viewing / listening session generate  feed back which would help inform me how others understood the things I was putting together / in the spaces and what worked / wasn’t working so well.

School of Art ‘take over’, July 2^nd - 6^th 2018  (event from 26^th June to 6^th July)

This is the link back to the Carngorms gathering sheet

Notes from talk with Simon:

I started by outlining what we were going to do, Simon talking about somethings he had been thinking about and me talking about the things I had been putting together in basement over the preceding few days. 

(I will transcribe useful parts of what I say and also some of what Simon says mainly bits that are in discussion with me)

Notes from MTS 00026 (first in the series of recordings)

AR: That its a discussion about process, practice and sound - and how I am currently thinking about sound….

AR: When opportunity came up to have some space and test things out - I thought that would be useful in so many ways…. What I have been beginning to think about and work with, (my PhD is about making embodied sound installations) theoretically I am thinking about affect and micro perceptions.. Non linguistic bits of communication, how things are passed on / around ….. Micro perceptions, the idea that things are made up of lots of things, lots of ‘little’ elements

AR: In terms of gathering I have been thinking about ‘how to’:

exploring some things around ambisonics, (a way of collecting and working with sounds in 3d) and that the bits I have done I have found ‘problematic’ or that they didn’t do what I hoped and wanted them to do; it was to direct a representation of a place - which I am interested in in some ways - but it was too absolute, all there, if done well it gave you a sound ‘field’ just like the one the mic had been sat in…. No gaps, no things you filled in = just all of it… it was quite amazing - but didn’t do some of the things I am interested in….and thinking about. So I have been pondering what it is that I do want, how I might gather it and how / why it might work….

AR: I had an opportunity to go on a weeks field recording field trip in the Cairngorms earlier in the summer so I set myself some tasks.. To collect sounds / images in spaces with the idea of testing out who / why that might be put back together and feel somewhat 3dimensional - but wasn’t this sort of absolute representation of something - that if felt different, that it had some of those qualities I was looking for, that there was an openness in it, gapes and spaces that open possibilities. So these water sounds are not materials I would necessarily want to use to make pieces of ‘work’ but they were things I knew I could gather and with which I could give a certain type of space, feeling, situation that people might also have prior knowledge of - so that I could play with these materials and see what people felt about / from the spaces that I created - so thats what I have been doing over the last few days.

AR: What I realised last night as I was leaving - is that I had made the sounds to be heard from ‘here’ - sitting behind the desk - so what I am going to do is ask you to come and sit and listen t it from this point…..

End of first recording…

MTS00027 - second recording describing the set up….

AR: The sounds and layers of sound are 5 mono tracks - so no stereo sections all monorail separate tracks recorded from different areas of the stream / river… so:

AR: This one is the top area of the stream - looking down stream (speaker on table to left of ‘viewer in seat (their left)) so its what you would here about here - indeicating to middle of down street screen- 

AR: This one underneath is a track recorded just by a rock that was by the side of where I was sitting and by the tripod.

AR: That one is up to the air up stream (so above the water surface)

AR: And these 2 are slightly different in some ways - that one was done with a parabolic, and also with a hydrophone and the other is contact mic’s under a stone at the edge of the stream 

AR: The parabolic is a plastic dish that picks up very particular areas - so its got bits of close surface noise in it but the hydrophone records underwater and so gives you those more basis sounds 

AR: The contact mic’s - because the area has lots of feltzspars and granites - quite hard rocks - you get a quite ‘hard’  noise. Basically I put some contact mics between 2 stones and the water hit the stones and the vibrations are transducer and recorded - and then and the hydrophones might be described as non standard sound recording techniques and maybe pick up things that are ‘there’ but not quite in our hearing range / area - I am also quite interested in those things, the sounds that we feel but sit just outside our hearing, things I think we are very aware of and experience, might not consciously be aware of - but experience bodily. 

So basically I spent part of Monday and Tuesday tangled up in cables…

End of recording.

MTS00028 - begins with Simon talking about his Phd and the objects of the museum and his thinking and interest in the sounds of them…. Very interesting about how at V&A recording sounds in the movement of museum objects to record changes in humidity in them etc….

MTS00029

Simon - starting with Walter Benjamin - the dynamite tenth of a second

Thinking about the ‘affective dimension’ Timothy Morton - refers to infrasound as the sound of context exploding

I comment at end about the contact mic stuff from under the rocks - that they are sounds that you can only ‘hear’ on recording - but that I think you feel and experiences at other times in other ways…..

MTS00030

Simons sounds of the release of energy - 

MTS00040

Bits of people listening to the sound picked up by the ‘coil’ mic

MTS00041

Starts with Simon - talking about time and how time is used (about conservators being so close to objects) 

MTS00042

Begin to talk about the distance between what we (Simon and I)  are interested in and what we are looking at (and what we believe) is really quite narrow - so any bit that ‘doesn’t match’ - seems quite ‘big’ and particular.

Jacob asks what happens to sound - Simon speaks about John Akomofrah Film essayist (Black film makers collective) and that in one of his film a child asked that question - and the adult says (and this is of course a political thing / context) that with out a sensitive listening device it just dissipates out  - Simon then says that you need a culture device - and includes your body in what that ‘sensitive device’ could be…

I talk about my belief that sound ‘goes on forever’ it just gets quieter and changes and gets mixed with other thing, bonces of something, changes in frequency, moves, shifts - that sound- will be different and changes, and that at different points its different - it becomes and is transmogrified and is affect and affects and is shifted and moves.

Overview:

The event was a  Phd ‘take over’ of spaces at the school of art as a research lab. I was involved over a week, testing a multichannel audio and video set up made from materials gathered in Cairngorms. I did a joint  talk /discussion with Simon Flury about commonalities and differences in our research / interests and an individual session ‘looking at’ and discussing the piece with a internal and public audience.

Second event: 5^th June. Open discussion / listening / viewing. Attended by Phd students, Staffa and public. Approx 11 people.

I outlined to people where the material was gathered from and how - and that I had gathered this material so I could make some tests, that I had picked the waters edge for the reasons I have described previously and that I had tried to gather elements of the sounds using a range of techniques and mics - so contacts, omni mics, hydrophones etc. That it wasn’t so much about the material - but was more about the ‘material stuff’ and what I could do with it and what happened when I put bits of it together.

I then asked the people present to sit in ‘my seat’; so they saw and viewed what was there - from what had been ‘my position’. 

One of the first things that came up was that ‘you/ the viewer’ then became, at the centre, as I had been. I had left things such as my pencil, my book my coffee cup there  so it was as if you were (and you were) sitting in the seat that had just been left by me; I was residually still there, in part because of these objects.  I was also asking people to sit and be looked at in the centre of this collection of stuff. People also went and stood or sat in different areas or the spaces and listened and looked from different points. This positioning of the viewer, almost as the author was interesting and how people sat in that and other spaces, listened, often with closed eyes, taken / going to another space.

The positioning in the B21 spaces under the window was also discussed - so with the street and the traffic behind and above you, the stream in front and below . Making you / the audience between, in a liminal space hearing the ‘real’ and this re - representation of another spaces simultaneously in a slightly subterranean dark space. The positioning between the street /the  commonplace day today ness of the city and this steam opened up the sense of slippage; the porous carfare of the sound scapes, things moving between; the seeping edge of the virtual as massumi says.

( these slightly incongruous bits of video, sunny shots of up and down stream and whats to the side of you, almost a dystopian notion of re-creating in ‘a future where it doesn’t exist’, a re setting up so you can experience with this cobbled together set up of old technology)

We also discussed the messiness, this tangle of wire that you were at the centre of, almost as if the wires and boxes made a diagram of themselves /the process; you could see on the screen the audio tracks with the play head moving giving a feeling of being able to see the sounds and video flowing through the devices, tracking the movement across and through. The being in the middle of the activity. Also the idea of a making a manual of the activities, as a way to show the process , doing and thinking; and being sat at the table was being ‘in the manual’, in and of its self (linking to the paper given the week earlier at the PGR studio conference) The how is not hidden, there is no magic about the process, kit or materials being used; its all just there to be seen (and even so it sort of transports to another space)

Another thing talked about was having this session; to gather feedback and response and through discussion and writing it up in a very straightforwardly, using this idea of a manual of what done, why and how; including diagrams and pictures, to build a collection of gathered materials from what done, that then put together as an explication of doing, a way of writing things up (again this is and of itself….  relating to the paper of only a week before, of having a structure as a way of recording what I was doing and how I was doing it.) so this session really helping me think through and plan how I might record the doing.

Thoughts and notes / critical review: (still note form) 

There were a number of useful things that the SofA ‘take over’ allowed me to be able to do:

• to bring together the elements and see/hear them and be able to change them live 
• to have time to change things and sit with them and think about what was happening 
• These all really helped me move my thinking and work forward. 

1.  The importance of brining together the different bits of sounds as elements and seeing that them being separate bits of the sound allowed me to shift and move them so much more; and thinking about the different elements and there detail, thats something I need to come back to and explore further, (especially now - being able to think about this at this longer distance in April; post making the Stans piece)

2.   The setting up of the piece in the space and being able to follow that heuristic nose of what seemed to be interesting and working well; having a bit of space and time around it allowed me to realising that there was interesting things in the set up, how it positioned the viewer and also the using of this ‘desk’ / spaces of experiment and work; (being able to run with that and explore how it worked. The table as part of the constructed pieces; seeing the residue of artist activity and thought process was interesting; being able to position an audience in that way - I need to think about this maybe as a technique to use at Dyffryn?) A way to take people into ‘my ‘thinking maybe? So nothing is hidden; no magic transposition to another space - but knowing that it was constructed and made. Nothing hidden. The space and how it was set up with the audiences was interesting, but I am not sure that it is something that needs to happen in all pieces; it was really useful for me in terms of how I explicate and write up - but I think what was more important was the not hiding of the doing - so the cables and kit being to the fore visually; the cables and showing the movement  - the transmission / transit of the sounds - that I am not making spaces of ‘magic’ where your inexplicably transported to another spaces - but the construction is visable, I am showing the structuring and laying and showing the purposefulness and activity in that. 

3.   becoming very conscious of the slippage of the sounds from the road; the positioning in thisspace that was between; between the ‘reality’ of the street and daily activity and trafficoutside, and this odd re created spaces of a stream and a sunny day slightly below. Thisliminal space of slippage and seepage.. But most of all this movement and interactionbetween the sounds I put there and there sounds there with ought me; (this fed into how Irecorded at Stans and also how I set up in the foyer at the SofA - really useful thing to havehappened - showing that point of experimenting and experiencing in the moment is soimportant - this material encounter between what I put in the space and the sound in thespace around)

4.  The idea of entanglement; in a smith messy, space of shifting stuff - that people had to moveand position themselves in - there wasn’t an ‘easy’ point of external viewing - it was ‘easier’from ‘within’. People said they thought this worked very well.

5.   The idea of the discussion as well, talking about things, the explication of what washappening and process and the thinking and doing; and recording it. This moved meforward in my thinking about how I would write up and record my resurch and its practice; 

6.   It was interesting having only a week before given a paper about the idea of scaffold tosupport the wrangling of stuff and how this then ‘really’ made me see it - the smoth and thestriated as symbiotically entangled - setting up a premise and then doing it and recording itand this idea of a structure as a way to pick up and gather the other things; that fitting somuch with my practice as a gathering of materials that I then work with and edit through totry and make something that communicates something of the thing that I am exploring withought it being a ‘direct’ documentation….. The other things that get added and come in tothe spaces and how that has to be allowed / allowed for. So the premise of the school of arttake over as a structure in which to set up these tests and discussions and this being a way towork through the thinking, the materials and wrangle stuff into things…

7.  Not sure the bright daylight video work so well; maybe I should have been braver and takenit away. It was incongruous - (and in some ways even more so in RBC?) in this between semidark space.. In this semi subterranean space it was quite odd - but also very possibly tooobvious - it then took you very much to that space on a sunny bright day (and possible thennot another space? Too much information?) it dint necessarily allow you to be in the spaceswhere it was….The video / imagery -  what also have come up for me around that is that Iam still interested in the relationship between the images and the sound - and that possiblyin the show in May I explore this a bit more an dhow it works - as well as these tests I amdoing with printing threads from images and them being woven together to make no‘images’ from the elements and colour - and maybe this takes me back to the looking andthinking about the ‘colours’ of the sound… and that the images need to maybe saysomething thats slightly separate - and so doesn’t just ‘show’ but adds in more elements…interesting going to Nottingham to see the Elizabeth Price show and thinking about theimages and sound in that and that they doint alway relate and that its interesting because itthen slips you and moves you through spaces and times…. 

8.  Gaps and spaces became important, leaving gaps and spaces for other sounds to comethrough, things coming to the fore and moving back - but not a moving around of the space -an ebb and flow? Things not being continues - and this not being ‘real’ a reprentatin - butallowing ones bran to shift and move between the elements and notice them more and less atdifferent points and differently in relation to each other… it made me more aware of theelements and again brought me back to the idea of having these surface sounds, and thesedeeper below carfare nots and putting them together; not in a way that was completelynaturalistic or about them having occurred simultaneously - but different elements fromdifferent moments in a situation / space. But by having different speakers positioned ondifferent things and tilted, so on a table, a chair the floor - it gave them an other spaciallayering that worked well and allowed even more for this entanglement - both visibly and ofthe sounds while still being able to pick up on individual bits and them changing inprominence in the soundscape. These things worked well and I need to re visit them in howI make pieces ( feels like it might be especially pertinent for my early thoughts around how Imight gather and set up the pieces for coventry)

To carry forward:

Explore how I pick up the sounds in future - this looking for elements and how to gather elements of the sounds from the pl/sp ace 

That I want to make visible the ‘technology’ - the cables and links between elements

(But that I dont nesecaerally need to make so visible ‘me’ in it - or put the audience in the position of being me in it)

That the idea of discussion, notes, diagrams, sketches, photos as a way for me to write up and explicate what I do 

(and even the point now of going back and thinking about this as I write it up , reviewing it and what then comes up, has moved me forward in the process even over the last few weeks - the idea that these are maybe not pages in a book - a manual - but more of a mapping and maybe I do do these big sheets as in the online research catalogue but also I make them into big physical sheets that can be folded up and un flowed, so you can look to it all - or look at elements. Something like that - its yet to be fully developed, it needs to be worked on and developed further.) 

Its interesting - the link between the striated and the smith spaces and having structures set up in which I can mess around with these things and explore them and experiment with them - but that it gives me a ’structure / places / way / system to do that , to get feed back and also it begins to help me sort out a structure of how I write them up and share them  - that there are bits of notes made at the time and discussions - and then this system / structure that beginning to develop around how I do this which will mean some things get done more at the time and less retrospectively. But that its always emergent and changing and developing. 

I was trying to explore the possibilities in exploring the sound in this multi layered way; also this building of a new event and spaces; and having picked up these reasonably specific elements - how I could layer those and bring them together as well as the interesting things sounding the world and the ideas of sounds in the landscape that would be good o bring in here as well as Libnitz water as micro perception but also potentially crowds because I think that there are other things that happen when things move and shift and move passed each other. What also came in was smith spaces, spaces that shifted, that were not quite known and the slpage of sounds between that ‘space’ and the space around it - the seeping edge as Massumi put it but this thing that sound does all the time where there are shits between one sound and the other sounds around it - or in this case the interplay between the sound I have put in a spaces and the other sounds around it in the environment already. I also was thinking about how you gather sounds, what mics , what decisions you make - moving away from the more general and towards these specifics.

people talked about being interested by this being between spaces and in the otherworld of cables while listening to a completely different space. Being in the centre of the material.