This blog is concerned with my Postgrad work of 2011 for more recent audio and visuals please visit
See What I'm Saying...?
performance notes
performance notes
Radio, live transmission.
Radio, live transmission.
Listen to the silence, let it ring on.
Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun.
We would have a fine time living in the night,
Left to blind destruction,
Waiting for our sight.
Radio, live transmission.
Listen to the silence, let it ring on.
Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun.
We would have a fine time living in the night,
Left to blind destruction,
Waiting for our sight.
Joy Division, 'Transmission' (1979).
Part One
The project wager/map
For this piece of 'extended writing' I intend to undertake a furthering of my investigations into how a practice-based degree can continue to be used to break down the norms of form in terms of assessment and presentation. To this ends I have chosen to integrate the theoretical/artistic appraisal and reflective approach in an intercontextual light I have taken to my work throughout this MA with the assumed dissertation form.
Using the initial aims and objectives I set out for this final project as my guide in conjunction with the criteria I used to excavate the previous module with, I intend to challenge the accepted mode of assessment here and continue on with the new approach to writing about my work I have developed throughout this practice based course.
Linda Candy states in her essay 'Practice Based Research: A Guide' that
“Whilst the significance and context of the claims are described in words, a full understanding can only be obtained with direct reference to the outcomes.” In using the project proposal as a platform for this extended piece of writing it will satisfy the specifications that the AHRB, 2000 as cited by Candy have set out to support a doctoral proposal in the area of practice-based research,
“Creative output can be produced, or practice undertaken, as an integral part of the research process. However, the outcomes of practice must be accompanied by documentation of the research process, as well as some form of textual analysis or explanation to support its position and to demonstrate critical reflection.”
Taking this understanding of practice-based research on, the conversational mapping of the subject voice in the last module is continued here and yet it is subsumed into the overall excavations of my practice as a whole so the exchange between my work and the wider world can now include other essential components of my practice such as the self and identity.
Following directly on from my last 'mapping' of the subject of voice, I have chosen to name this written form 'performance notes' as a reflection of what my last piece of work put into place and as a nod to Retallack, who wrote in the 'Poetic Wager' that
“Since a genre lives first in its composition and then in its realisation by those who ‘perform’ it (I take writing and reading to be performative acts), the essay text, like the poem, like the musical score, is nothing other than notations for performance”.(2003, p49)
As such these 'performance notes' and a spoken lecture of the findings my theoretical investigations have uncovered support the underpinnings that any practice-based research supports. To quote Morris on the idea of essays, the aim here is to undo
“The stuck stopper the essays in this collection work to loosen is not visual but aural. Our aim is to give the reader an earful”. (1998, p2)
This unravelling of what form an essay 'should' take is all part of the experimentations that have led up to its variant compositions in light of the maxim that the practice is the theory. From the letting go of the ownership of my written texts to its performers, to giving myself permission to allow for slippage both in terms of my own performance acts as well as those of the performers, the process uncovered here is one of trying to understand what is happening in the work rather than trying to direct it. This final piece of writing then is set out in a format that requires the reader to engage with the subject it is a mapping; it is not prescriptive as are most 'essays' and it does not point to any 'truths' on the matter apart from in terms of questions the work discussed here have unearthed and the research that supports it.
This piece of writing will be looking to discuss the two main parts of the project undertaken the first being a study of voice in radio and the second a study of voice as a visual representation of the self. What brings these two parallels together is the idea of autobiography (real or constructed) and an overarching mapping of 'self'. The methods of exegesis of the 'See What I'm Saying' project reflects approaches taken by artists such as John Cage when delivering spoken lectures on silence and by sound artists such as
Alejandra Perez who in her 'Bending Informational Circuits' essay suggests that
“My lecture performance will be using radio content and micro FM radio transmitters using the following bending strategies: retransmission / cut-up / overflow / persistent use of discontinuity / silence / recursion / recycling”.
The idea of speaking about sound/voice in terms of a lecture is in no way new but it I feel it carries great weight when putting these impalpable impressions under the microscope. Getting to the essence of that which is being discussed on the page and excavating the voice for analysis is after all what the 'See What I'm Saying' project was concerned with in the main.
I consider the spoken version of this text a furthering of the collapse of the boundaries of practice and theory and thus the definitive version of the two. It is also more effective in terms of elucidating the questions raised in a more qualitative sense and allows for ideas of the sense of what is being said on the page to come across. I use the term 'sense' here to convey an embodied sense of the text: to get over that which Jean-Luc Nancy describes in 'Listening' as being “the profundity of a reverberation chamber, that is nothing other than the body from end to end”. (2007, p27).
It has been published here on a blog in order that all the component parts of the project can be accessible to all; to keep them all in the one place in one archive.
To start with I'd like to discuss the nature of the 'Chiaroscuro' project – so named as a reflection of it's 'self portrait' counterpart. This piece has been aired on Soundart radio 24th August-7th September and is to be broadcast on the internet radio network Radia and in Japan in the near future. It comprises a series of 8 readings of a script I composed for broadcast. The interesting thing about this project is that I have engaged in the main non-performers and have at no point edited or changed any of the original readings so as to keep a sense of the person reading it at the forefront of the piece. The final week's broadcasting leading up to and including my final piece incorporated editing interventions on all of the texts broadcast but in the first instance the readings were displayed as they were first given to me.
The second piece stems from the idea of seeing how the historical self portrait is echoed in the social media frenzy that is society today. In setting up profiles on various media one can now represent oneself in any number of ways (some even fictional, imaginary). It asks the question as to whether these representations the new self portrait and requires the audience to create a spoken version of themselves in that moment for translation into an image form. These pieces of audio were never intended for broadcast and this was flagged up in the text I gave to the participants in order that their responses were less impacted with anxiety.
Both these projects are looking for that which makes each voice distinct in each of its participants; they both seek to 'excavate from the mouth' ideas of the threshold between everyday language and a 'speech act' as described by J L Austin. In doing so both pieces uncover an anxiety in voice; a place where this liminal space becomes problematic and where ideas of those 'Phonic Gaps and Gasps' as described by Allen S Weiss are embraced and explored by the listener and in the instance of the sonic self portraits only by myself for further translation into an image that reflects the content given to me. Questions around this particular process will be discussed later.
I consider both these projects to come together in terms of Idhe's idea that society is mainly dominated by an understanding of the world through what we 'see' (by which we mean we understand). This 'ocular' notion brought the title into the light: the term 'see what I'm saying' is the perfect highlighting of how we translate speech into visual analogies everyday.
As the essay 'Inaudible Postscript'' by Rev Dwight Frizzell and Jay Mandeville observe in 'Experimental Sound and Radio', “ As always with radio what you hear is what you see – the relationship between the observed and the observer is radically altered. The 'virgin ear' is immersed in democratic clarity”. (2001, p85). It is this idea of using a medium that throws this embedded sense of 'sense translation' into light that led me to take this project onto the airwaves. Moving away from simple pieces of audio that were designed to initiate a response from the audience alone, the 'See What I'm Saying' project takes on issues of translation/intervention/assemblage/listening/control and to some extent collaboration in order that the practice/the 'conversation with voice' can move forward.
Having done a considerable amount of research into audience participation since the beginning of both of these projects it transpires that both contain unwittingly echoes if you will Migone's 'Describe Yourself' (1991)piece devised for radio in which audience members phone in and do just that. While Migone's piece represents the 'active' (live) voice on radio; in many ways it reflects that which in both projects I have hoped to uncover; a true expression in the moment from a participant in the project.
There is a sense however that Migone's piece could be considered in many ways the opposite of what the traditional slef1 portrait 'does' in society; after all given the technology attached to these responses it's clear that as Weiss is suggesting they may not always have been created from the audience; how would we as listeners know?
“ The response of one of the callers might well serve as a biographical portrait of the perfectly schizophrenic radio artist, or perhaps also of a particularly astute schizophrenic; …........ every radio personality is self less once the self has been broadcast. In any case, can we know whether this is the voice of another person, of just another persona of Migone? This uncertainty principle is the central aporia of travel on the airwaves” (1995, p100)
This 'uncertainty principle' is where the difference between the 'See What I'm Saying' project and Migone's exploration of autobiography lies; all of the texts/readings I have worked with are genuine and whether individuals have chosen to fictionalise themselves in response to the work is not my
concern; I have not generated the responses on their behalf.
Prior to this course my voice related work had an aspect about it that was redolent of Duncan Speakman's 'Subtlemob' work; of giving a directive to my audience to create a definite ends. My previous issues of control were left at the starting block for this project however once I threw off ideas of the 'right way' to create a voice piece in the PW105 module. This final project not only found its genesis in that loosening of the reins on my work but its concerns with the recorded voice Vs the live voice are reflected here in terms of the audio I collected and my having spoken on live radio of the project.
Both halves of this project then are concerned with sound primarily -if only as their starting points. Interestingly it seems that when a lot of art theorists and critics speak of silence -often considered the opposite of sound and therefore its counterpart- Susan Sontag describes its essence as being a space where one could explore “emptiness reduction, sketch out new prescriptions for looking, hearing etc.” 1969
John Cage goes further suggesting that, as quoted by Weiss
“We each discover our own silence (since one always hears the coursing of the blood and the hum of the nervous system), we each recreate silence as a metaphor. From noise to silence, from panic to quiescence, from catastrophe to calm; the very existence of silence both depends upon noise and permits noise to exist”.
(1995, p54)
Critics, artists and even philosophers such as Deleuze often go on to make historical comparisons in art to speak of paintings as a marker of how expression can be given to something that is at times all pervasive and yet is intangible such as silence. Whether we look at to Toop's observations of 'A Woman Descends the Stairs' (2010, p73), where he posits that the painter can embue an image with silence, or turn to Deleuze's observations the “asyntactic limit is not external to language as a whole: it is the outside of language, but it not outside it. It is a painting or a piece of music, but a music of words, a painting with words, a silence in words, as if the words could now discharge their content: a grandiose vision or a sublime sound” (1997,p112) it is clear there comes a point where expression before speech fails.
Should we then turn to the Futurists such as Carlo Carrà's insistence that all paintings before the 19th century are silent and that in order to paint with sound “We Futurist painters maintain that sounds noises and smells are incorporated in the expression of lines, volumes and colours just as lines, volumes and colours are incorporated in the architecture of a musical work. Our canvases will therefore express the plastic equivalents of the sounds noises and smells found in theatres, music-halls, cinemas, brothels, railway stations, ports, garages, hospitals, workshops, etc.”, it's clear that sound and image are without doubt inextricably linked even if only in terms of metaphor or as a means of delineating the other it is also clear that what is missing from other forms of artistic expression is speech.
These observations on paintings as silence tie in with both parts of this project as both deal with the ideas of conveying a sense of self , both also deal with representing oneself in a particular light and both contain integral silences. The radio project for example had built in silences conveyed to the performers as white space on the page and the self portrait project has turned a person's representation of themselves into a silent painting.
Despite its lack of spoken expression, painting/image making is integral to this project: even name of 'Chiaroscuro' piece is a reference to painting. The painter Paul Klee gives it a definition in his essay 'On Modern Art' as being “tone value, or, as it is also called chiaroscuro – the many degrees of shading between black and white”. I gave the piece this name to convey the sense of the dark place the character finds himself in and the general atmosphere the piece creates especially once it is spoken.
Interestingly when trying to define or explore the notion of 'sound art' in 'Sonic Arts' Brandon LaBelle also alludes to paintings and to a particular mode of painting. His initial definition of sound art suggests,
“It is art that both uses sound as its medium and addresses sound as its subject of concern. In this sense, sound is both the subject and object. This at first glance can appear quite limiting ― that such a statement forms a kind of loop or self-enclosed container (sound is a sound is a sound…). Yet, as I am proposing, such a loop is far from being self-enclosed, contained or limiting, for it necessarily opens out onto what can be called "the acoustical."
he goes on to say that,
“In proposing that sound art is art about sound runs the risk of strictly being a formalist activity, not that formalism is unappealing or should not feature in the vocabulary of sound art (for certainly formalism can offer an alternative to the burdens of "meaning" and the “expressivity” inherent to art practice). Yet, to limit it to such a vocabulary would be to overlook its ability to address what is outside its own internal properties. To unravel the formalist reading is simply to open up sound art to the domain of the acoustical, as both a perceptual and social operation, for to utilize sound as a medium is to confront an excess of input: sound necessarily exceeds itself, washing over spatial borders, disturbing attentive listening. It is overheard, agitating conversation and waking one up. It exists not only within but between and around objects. In contrast, formalist painting defines itself within a limited object (frame and canvas) and determines a contained field of attention, namely, the painting and its intrinsic properties: flatness, colour-field, etc.”.
Finally he goes on to establish that though the idea of naming sound art as 'art about sound' in terms of Formalist painting in this way and uncovers the problematic of this approach; that the “painting functions as a stable object. In contrast, a work of sound art may confront a wider field of possible interference or input (noise) varied perceptual and durational experience (hallucination) and architectural imposition (vibration) all of which contribute to an area of attention that may exceed a strictly formalist approach and the object of attention.”
Both paintings and radio speak are representations of slef, so I am looking to give my performers heard or otherwise the chance to become 'Expressionists' in a sense. I am breathing a new life into this well established form here in terms of voice work as I have asked the audience to express themselves while considering allegorical self portraits from the Expressionist era such as 'The Scream' by Munch as well as pointing to more recent phenomena such as Facebook's 'shaping' of a person for public consumption.
When looking for a platform from which to step off, there were of course other more recent expressions of self portraiture that have hit the headlines to consider such as Mark Wallinger's 'Self' sculpture which in terms of a performance writing perspective are also pertinent to this project's aims. Transcribing oneself into a few words or sounds for most people is (as been seen both in the response to this project and can be seen in terms of a textual exploration of the subject on many an online dating profile) as problematic indeed. However Wallinger's self portrait speaks of much more than a textual pun; it represents how important text is in terms of an expression of the self. The all-imposing I at once reduces us to a 'character' of the alphabet and conveys an 'image' of the individual to the other reading it”.
Cindy Sherman also takes on 'slef' portraiture but this time with a twist; she is positioning herself as a character every time and challenging the viewers expectations of who she is with every image. This is to some extent what my work has always sought to do; to create a fictional autobiography that explores notions of identity and individuality without truly revealing my voice/image/self.
The self portrait part of this project however is concerned more with concealing the self entirely; to create an image from a text -to bring speech to life- as it were. As the counterpoint of works such as
Futurist sound poem 'Dune, parole in liberta', by Filippo Marinetti (1914)where we see text liberated for the first time and transferred to sound it looks to immerse the self and to draw out a sense of the person without directly pointing to them.
If it were possible to write a short overview of the project that would serve as a reference point I would say that the self portrait pieces look to suppress the voice and the text whereas the 'Chiaroscuro' readings aim to achieve the opposite effect though it would seem they do overlap even if in an undefinable difficult space.
Having said that there is without doubt something that exceeds image in terms of speech and this is confirmed when we consider the Phenomenological state of speech according to Ponty who states that“Even if a linguistic meaning can never be delivered of its inherence in some word or other, the fact remains that the expressive process in the case of speech can be indefinitely reiterated, that is is possible to speak about speech whereas it is impossible to paint about painting” (1962, p221)so speech as a phenomena is without limits; it opens up possibilities that other forms do not allow for; we can never exhaust speech. In this respect the spoken half of this project does more than provide an opposite of the silent aspect of painting -of the visual- as displayed in the 'See What I'm Saying' project in a gallery of sonic self portraits it moves to endlessly expand upon that which is being suppressed and transformed into silence in these portraits.
This space, this 'fixing' of the self that this project achieves in image and recorded voice was first experimented with by Charles Cros during the 19th century who considered a machine to fix time the 'paleograph'. Speaking of this machine and its ends, Weiss describes its aim to “inscribe a past become infinitely representable and malleable. Immortality would be achieved at the cost of disassociation, decomposition and decorporealization – beyond any possible resurrection of the body” the paleograph would “avail itself of a particularly simulacral relic; the eternally perpetuated voice of the beloved”. (2001, p10) While 'See What I'm Saying' was not set up with the Romantic ideals displayed here; (the saving of the voice of a loved one for posterity) it does achieve these ends thanks to the wealth of technology available at this point in time and perhaps my recycling of old work into new that all of these texts will form a part of in the future could be viewed as in line with Cros' need to 'inscribe a past' by recording a voice.
I would like now to explore the work further using the aims and criteria set up in the proposal for this project to see if either achieved those aims and how successfully.
part two
Out of Thin Air
And we would go on as though nothing was wrong.
And hide from these days we remained all alone.
Staying in the same place, just staying out the time.
Touching from a distance,
Further all the time.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
And hide from these days we remained all alone.
Staying in the same place, just staying out the time.
Touching from a distance,
Further all the time.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Joy Division, 'Transmission' (1979)
An Artistic Philosophical and Cultural Criticism
Aims
To elicit responses from performers
This proved more problematic than I had anticipated. After the first rush of energy and enthusiasm I experienced from the performers I had chosen for the first readings of 'Chiaroscuro', few were happy to engage with the next piece I had devised which was named 'Conveyor'.
The 'self portrait' piece was deemed to be problematic for a number of reasons first as the audience recognised my voice and found it disturbing in some fashion then they seemed to decide they didn't like the second voice either. In the end I found myself explaining the project less from a text-based perspective that I was happy with and more from a social media context i.e. this is how you present yourself on Facebook now imagine you had a voice tag that accompanied this newest form of self portrait.
The main problem people experienced time and again with my 'free' approach to responses was to ask 'what did I want?'. Unhappy to commit their voices to recorded form and experiencing some level of glossophobia, most were happy to speak with me on the subject of radio, portraits, silence etc. until I asked them to record those responses.
The most obvious examples of anxiety at the threshold of everyday/performed speech there seemed to be a distinct change of atmosphere once the voice recorder was brought into play and most participants no matter how eloquent they had been in the moments leading up to the unveiling of the technology seemed to experience an element of stage fright as described by McCallion as the experience of,
“ Is a form of panic reflex this takes the form of pulling the back of the neck closed, almost as though we feared a blow to the nape of the neck.
Abundance of energy which the fright of anticipation has produced in us, and then we may experience a reaction the other way in proportion to the severity of our reaction to danger
Stage fright can have its uses in keying-up our survival mechanisms to a fine fighting pitch. One of the two major nerves responsible for our breathing takes as its point of origin the third fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. If we badly upset the relationship between these vertebrae, the uninterrupted and continuing exchange of in breath for out breath the rthymitycity of our breathing cycle is adversely affected”. (1998, p33)
To look at the relationship between time and space in terms of silence on the page especially in the context of a broadcasted piece
Happily my experience here was more positive. In all of the experiments conducted where performers were asked to read a text it was pointed out that the only direction was that white space was to be translated into speech as silence. Thus I left none in the 'conveyor' text and and few spaces were included in the final pieces' text.
For 'Chiaroscuro' however there was a dirth of white space as I had imagined the idea of a 'series of radio pieces' appealing more to a radio station than small fragments of text. The silence that was then transcribed into every one of the performances would then prove more dramatic; more difficult for the listener and more a a challenge to the medium. I had hoped that the main challenge would be to the expectations of the audience; that dead air as we all know is what radio traditionally tries most to avoid. This is why when you listen to radio pieces by Samuel Beckett such as 'Embers' you'll hear the sound of the sea crashing in between dialogue; to let you know the receiver hasn't failed. To assure the listener it is intentional and not a loss of signal that has led to the lack of noise on air.
Air is of course a hugely impactful influence in terms of both speech and radio an impression of its importance is laid out here by Nair when talking of Irigaray on air,
“It is an unrecognised ‘place of all presence and absense’ and ‘no presence is possible without air’. Irigaray talks about breath specifically and for her, air is breath can the place of no breath is the place of disappearance. It plays between presence and absense, between life and death, between significations and their perception and between representation and its experience. This imperceptible materiality of air is the ‘forgotten material mediation of the logos’. It is the mediation of all reflections including perception, language, thoughts, imagination and the faculty of action”. (2007, p44)
Silences 'on air' then leaves the listener in the space between life and death; hence the term 'dead air'. There are a lot of aspects of radio theory -the disembodied voice /the dead speaking in the now /the ghost in the machine that make for what Weiss has named 'Phantasmic Radio', but none can be more significant in terms of the eerie in actual broadcast than silence itself.
Having implanted white space on the page and asked each performer to consider that space to be translated as silence when reading the text, I did not determine how long that silence should be just that it ought to be there. This is how the resultant readings range in length from a mere 5 minutes to an astonishing 28 minutes. Having made silence an entirely subjective concept and given over the responsibility of transcribing that idea to the performer, in this instance it is thanks to each performer's understanding which results in the broadcasted pieces which are widely in terms of audience feedback considered to be 'hard to listen to'.
To ascertain how performative a Performance Writing essay can be
The format of this writing, the presentation of the project as a whole in blog format and it's performed counterpart should go some distance to discuss this notion I hope. Having discussed the various theories and positions that have informed my decision to speak the text and to submit text only as 'performance notes' I feel the only idea left to be interrogated here is the decision to publish all of the text on a blog. The title of this whole project is given as 'See What I'm Saying' but I also had a notion it might be called 'Out of Thin Air'. This last reference to voice was somehow appropriate for the radio works but did not point to the portrait idea as well as the first and given title. The idea that this project only exists in thin air still has a lot of substance however as all of its
foundation has come from exactly that and since none of the series of broadcasted works in August nor the interviews I have given before the and the 7th of September (save for the first interview I
gave back in June) have been recorded, it seems most of the bulk of this project has also disappeared into thin air too. This disappearance of the work has been compounded by the fact that the radio station Soundart does not have a 'listen again' feature thus keeping radio in its original impermanent form, transmitting signals only once. While this proved problematic in the sense of the timing of the work within the schedule -most my expected audience were at work- I feel this sense is in keeping with the project as a whole and so is in keeping with ideas of impalpability expressed here.
In fact this sense is summed up by Phelan when she states that,
“Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representation; once it does so, it becomes something other than performance”. (1993, 146-49)
The idea that this text for the project only exists in cyberspace in blog form then makes perfect sense; each facet of this project is transmitted within this blog including any audio you might have missed. Audioworks can be found in appendix ii, recordings of interviews found in appendix v and the paintings can be found in appendix I. While the images themselves cannot be transmitted here again this works within this context as they are a visualisation of the invisible world. The manifold paradoxes that this project deals with can be summed up nicely I feel by the phrase “the anarchy of the chiaroscuro of the everyday” as cited by de Certeau (1984, p199) of Lukacs.
To produce a live show at the end of the project that either explores voice or is a performed piece that uses voice as its vehicle.
This has been undoubtedly a success though it's been a slow process getting here. The piece I will broadcast on the 7th which I consider to be my degree piece is a cut and paste work that uses all the voices that I have spoken with/heard throughout the 'See What I'm Saying' project. Moving away from straight readings of the same text in such a covert manner I aim to manifest a large part of text given to me/written for this project into one mass of voices. This again will put a further 'ear strain' on the listener but having worked through the idea of listening to the exact same text time and again, then to the same text layered then to some of the other fragments in previous broadcasts it should not come as a surprise as such more of a challenge to discern any distinct text.
This idea reflects the notion of radio as Weiss suggests (1995, p79) as being,
“Radio-phonic airspace is a necropolis riddled with dead voices, the voices of the dead, and dead air - all cut off from their originary bodies, all now transmitted to the outer international and cosmic airwaves, only in order to reenter our inner ears in a ‘mad Totentanz”, of creating echoes of things that have gone before.
To let the work in progress process guide me toward a final show.
When beginning this project I already had a notion brought to bear that work in progress that was to underpin what I was about to produce was already in place. The idea of the sonic self portrait piece began back in PW102 when I explored portraiture in a page-based module working again with the idea of a fictional auto-biography. By the same token the work undertaken in PW105 informed where this work was projected to have gone and crucially my previous reservations about speaking/performing publically had been worked through in time for this huge undertaking. Both of the pieces were to continue with fractured self and identity and aimed to create an overall state of,
“Aesthetic expression confers on what it expresses an existence in itself, installs it in nature as a thing perceived and accessible to all, or conversely plucks the signs themselves -the person of the actor, or the colours and canvas of the painter -from their empirical existence and bears them off into another world” as Ponty (2002, p212) would have it.
During the project I did not as I say interject upon the works given to me though I took on board the criticisms given to me about the audio text for the self portrait piece and tried to adapt it over time to suit the audience and facilitate responses better.
Once I had collated all the input I decided that I would call the 2nd September the cut off point for input and from there I would no longer ask for responses but use what was in my dispositif to create the final works.
To get a better understanding of how sonics and engineering can help me to achieve these ends; to understand does the way in which a piece is recorded change its outcome?
I am including here some of the research that I conducted with the musician/producer Ross Knowles and musician/producer Nick Keeling. Their insights into how recordings can effect the way a piece is perceived were very insightful. First I asked Ross why on one of my 'final show' recordings there appeared to be a ghostly echo behind the performer's voice...
if she recorded it in a certain way... sometimes the microphone can pick up the sound coming out of the speakers and record THAT too. "feedback".
[14:59:34] Ross Knowles: if there was a delay between the recording and playing back... introduced by a computer or gadget... then it would sound like a ghostly...echo in the background of the main recording
[14:59:58] Ross Knowles: that's why in studios you wear headphones... else you would record the recording as it comes out the speakers and do your head in
[15:00:23] Ross Knowles: OR... it can be added deliberate as an effect... with a "delay/echo pedal"
[15:00:43] Ross Knowles: which makes a delayed copy to mix in with it.. hence... ECHO ...ECHO...Echo...echo....echo...
Here are his thoughts on how a 'dead room' can effect the sound of voice in terms of recording and in terms of it's outcome:
From a technical point of view, and developing from a sound engineers need to control (as much as possible) the characteristics of any given sound (instrumental/vocal), recordings are made so as to capture only the vibrations from the source being recorded. This is termed “dry” in that it is an attempt to capture the direct sound with as little disturbance from the environment around it as possible. (isolated)
A modern recording/broadcasting studio to this end, is often constructed as to minimise the effects of environment – leaving only the voice captured by the microphone. The ultimate environment for a recording of this nature is an anechoic chamber - A room that is constructed with angled walls, and from sound absorbing materials in an attempt to silence the reflection of the sound sources as they travel around the room from the source.
Once captured, this “dry” sound can then be processed in a myriad ways using mechanical, analogue, electronic, and digital means. Ironically, often this includes the addition of artificial reverbs. By adopting this method, the concerned recordist can control more readily the chaotic nature of the sound by lessening the reflected effect of the original material captured. The downside to this is that a voice recorded in such an anechoic may be technically more accurate or pure, but can and will sound disturbingly alien to our ears. It is less lively, less “airy”, and much more constrained. The subtraction of the reflected sound leaves our brain with no information regarding location or environment. A voice speaking in a lively church hall is clearly heard as being IN that location. A “dry” recording does not – it is disembodied.
The reflection of the sound in its performed environment is clearly part of the “transmission” of the material. Not only do the “physical components” of the performers body dictate the sound (deliberately or otherwise), but so to do the many variables of the location”.
Here also are the thoughts of fellow musician and sound producer Nick Keeling on sound production
“A dead room is a specially prepared room where the walls absorb the sound of the instrument. There is no reflection of sound. The only way you can hear an instrument being played in a dead room is if there is nothing between you and the instrument. It is common practice to record the voice in a dead room.
In terms of understanding psychoacoustics and the voice, visiting a
dead room (there's bound to be one around here somewhere) is
rudimentary, I should imagine. When you hear yourself in a dead
room for the first time, it makes you realise just how little of your
voice is actually your voice. I mean, it's drastic. It takes a lot of
practice to be able to sing in one of those rooms. When you speak in
there, as you are obviously not standing in front of yourself, you can't
hear yourself properly. However, what you can hear is a resonance of
your voice through your skull. Yuck! Concerning the acoustics of the
voice, the bones in your skull significantly affect your perception. .”
dead room (there's bound to be one around here somewhere) is
rudimentary, I should imagine. When you hear yourself in a dead
room for the first time, it makes you realise just how little of your
voice is actually your voice. I mean, it's drastic. It takes a lot of
practice to be able to sing in one of those rooms. When you speak in
there, as you are obviously not standing in front of yourself, you can't
hear yourself properly. However, what you can hear is a resonance of
your voice through your skull. Yuck! Concerning the acoustics of the
voice, the bones in your skull significantly affect your perception. .”
Objectives
To produce a final voice piece
I feel this has been more than achieved given the series of works and interviews I have had over the course of this project that have led up to the 7th. Despite my misgivings at the programming having gone awry in the last week – the piece intended for display on the Monday was not played until the Tuesday, throwing out the intended progression of dissemination and contextualisation for the final piece on the Wednesday, my choice to go live on air and talk the pieces through starting with the expected final piece first followed with the other two works being discussed and contextualised on air meant I hopefully regained ground with the listeners that remained. You can hear the recording of that piece in my blog, appendix v.
This final piece is then going on to be broadcasted across the Radia network in 20 countries later in September.
To become more involved in the understanding of how sound works in any particular space and using that knowledge to pick a space (whether formal or outside) that is appropriate to the text.
Having experimented in the last module with live voice in both inside and outside contexts it seemed obvious to me that the next space I wished to speak to was radio. This project has followed a linear form of experimentation to some extent; asking people to listen to a piece of recorded audio and leave their responses on a dictaphone was a tack I had worked with during my BA and one that proved very successful. I feel however that this success was in a larger part due to the context in which it was undertaken; in an arts college during a degree show the audience were more ready to take on the ideas I was conveying and respond without the concerns of 'doing it right' or of 'what do you want me to say?'.
I appreciated having this echo of a previous project on board in this one as it highlighted the lack of this kind of singular audience on tap and proved a good stepping off point for the rest of the project; it also provided a layer of anonymity to the participants who were reluctant to say the least to commit to speaking and definitely not to giving their names. Somehow the fear that I might do something with their voice is far more terrifying than if I take a random photo of them...
Rather than approach random members of the public with an idea that took them out of their comfort zone I would ask friends to read scripts I had written specifically; this way I could contextualise it until each felt comfortable doing the reading.
So the radio was a new kind of space to work with that while it held limitations; not many people wanted to be on the radio offered up a means of exploring spaces with voice that meant I wouldn't have to go anywhere. The listener can of course be anywhere doing anything while listening so the text's relation to any particular space may never be uncovered directly to me it will be to each audience member.
The choice of radio space is also a further echo of my work's use of concealment of voice. This concealment has taken the form of changing my voice, of attempting to create an acoustical listening of the audio and of talking with a false accent. In terms of the radio pieces I have chosen to speak through someone else again and although I have given live interviews on air to contextualise the work I have never yet made a live reading of the work on air; this would be the logical next step in my experiments with radio. Interestingly concealment is a theme that the performers adopted of their own free will in some readings; I have had assumed accents, song and actorly voices spoken throughout the project though the ultimate concealment of voice is literally seen in the self portrait paintings. The concealment here is total yet the exhibitions' position in a radio station is an attempt to create a notion of the synchresis of the sound that is going on/has gone on in that space; a visualisation of voice -albeit separate to the actual voice being heard- at that moment.
To have gained a better understanding of how different sites and contexts e.g. in relation to the radio how time slots and pieces determine content
Having experimented with definite spaces as discussed, the ethereal space of the radio and the huge swathe of listening opportunities it creates were the natural progression. While I imagined trying to create an audio work that demanded the audience's attention with a recording made to be heard through earphones in a specific space, I had already taken this approach on a number of occasions. The idea of freeing up the work to be heard however the listener has determined was much the same as the idea of freeing up the work to be read as the performer determined. It was a challenge to my own propensity to take ownership of the writing to a greater extent and to let the project unfold as an aleatory enquiry rather than to take control of it by any means.
Allowing for the listener to determine how to experience the work meant embracing all that Weiss describes when he says that “A universally public transmission is heard in the most private of circumstances: the thematic specificity of each individual broadcast, its imaginary scenario, is heard within an infinitely diverse set of non-specific situations, different for each listener; despite radio's auditors' putative solidarity, they remain atomized and the imagination is continually reified”. (2001, p5)
This new approach to the positioning of the work meant also letting the station dictate when the work would be broadcast and at what time. While all the slots I had hoped for (late evening/night time) were taken I was offered a 10am slot that wouldn't change throughout the proposed time scale. This did mean that my ideas of how the work was to be 'viewed' were radically changed but in the spirit of the whole project I committed the work to a definite time slot so it were more easily found within the schedule.
The only regulations that Soundart had put in place about content was that there was to be no swearing so the text was free to take whichever form it wished and was free to be expressed as the performer wished and would have remained the same no matter what the hour. The context of working with a local arts radio station was incredibly freeing and took away a lot of concerns I would have had about the work being broadcast at this hour on any other station as the listener of a station such as this knows the work played has the potential to be challenging no matter what the hour.
What of the materiality of voice in spoken work? What has been lost in translation in terms of materiality from page to speech and what has been gained ?
While my discussion of what has been lost in transference from page to sound was explored in the PW105 module it's worth pointing out again that while in making this translation of the work we have lost the feel of the page but we have gained Weiss' notion of the “teratology of the voice, whose monsters arise by means of liberating all those vocal 'accidents' that hitherto blemished the pure sounds of bel canto” which he speaks of in his essay 'Phonic Gaps and Gasps' however they manifest within each reading.
Specifically in terms of this project what I was looking for was the point at which as Deleuze elucidates
“When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer... then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. When a language is strained in this way, language in its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent”.(1997, p113)
This analysis of the self /of the body rather than of a tangible white space is what is being explored here and here we turn to Ong to understand why orality is concerned with the sonorous, “The oral word never exists in a simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or contrived in oral communication, but is natural and even inevitable. In oral verbalisation, particularly public verbalisation, absolute motionlessness is itself a powerful gesture”.(1993,P67)
The idea of gesture as part of speech is also discussed here by Connor, in his essay 'The Strains of The Voice'
“The voice also induces and is taken up into the movements of the body. The face is part of the voice's apparatus, as are the hands. The shaping of the air effected by the mouth, hands and shoulders marks out the lineaments of the voice-body (which is to be distinguished from the voice in the body). When one clicks one's fingers for emphasis, claps one's hands, or slaps one's thigh, the work of gesture is being taken over into sound, and voice has migrated into the fingers”.
This bringing about of the body in terms of speech is helpful in trying to understand the difference between page-based texts and what we are experiencing here. The gain we have made of the corporeal also allows space for a of the imagination. When employing a medium without directive image this freedom can in light of 'dark' texts such as 'Chiaroscuro' convey a sense of the eerie of something unsettling. This comes about both in terms of the silences found within the work, the spaces between what is being said but also in the idea that Weiss quotes Novarina as saying,
“It's suicide by waves; a man who disappears while speaking. Something that speaks to nobody. He's a man who disappears while speaking”. (1995, p65)
In creating projects that are orientated around the most definitive yet most illusive part of identity; the voice that which is escapes us it is clear that we are dealing with two fold problematics the 'signal and the noise' of the project as a whole. As we already know, the very essence of the voice is -unless recorded- is impalpable yet ties us to who we are to the extreme. After all, as Migone states “once the voice is excavated out of the mouth, you get recognised by strangers” (2001, p43)
There are of course plenty of issues of translation to be uncovered by the radio pieces here not least of which is the question of one of the texts being read in Japanese. Although this in itself is a translation of the page in the most literal sense, once again it's Migone who points to the most important translation of any sound text; the listening.
“For us as readers/listeners,the approach to these texts must be without caution. The passive is pacifier; it numbs. In is anal retentive. The entry point is the act of interpreting/translating. For the reader to develop ears is only an introductory step as Whitehead unwittingly points out the ear is “just another hole in the head” (2001, p48)
It should also be acknowledged that I myself have imposed some translations of my own upon the work when employing the cut and paste technique. Confirming what Burroughs said of this method as quoted by Jim Andrews in his 'Audiology' essay in 'Radiotexte' (1993, p67) when he said that “cut ups are a basic key to the nature and function of words”. I have simply followed his instructions to type out the text of all the spoken pieces, cut them up and made some new work from them. I have translated my own and everybody else's words so that the endless possibilities of transcription and translation are just one aspect of what has been gained by making the work aural.
How is 'performance anxiety' present in the work? What does it 'do' for the work?
Migone cites in his 'Malfunctions and Dysfunctions of an FM Exciter' essay from a handbook on voice training that “The well adjusted speaker will conceal from his audience any sign of tension or discomfort” that this is the accepted means of speaking publically he then goes on to affirm that in terms of radio specifically “the concealment of vulnerability is how the game is lost. Learning to hide can occur either via a subtle transformation or an overt mutation”. (2001, p43)
The idea of not hiding one's voice is what the 'Chiaroscuro' readings are hoping to encourage. Each performer was asked to only read the script twice and then to record themselves speaking the text. The idea of rehearsal would have detracted from the sense of the 'live' voice that I hope to capture and it would have certainly have detracted also from the sense of 'anxiety' that comes over from a performer unsure about how to read the work.
Caroline Bergvall describes the tension present in speech thus, in her 'Cat in the throat On Bilingual Occupants' essay,
“So there is this friction inside the speaker’s mouth. This friction on the throat. The intake of breath, the raspy sound as one clears
one’s throat, the spit that forms and wells up, the sounds that
follow, the words that form: all of this is linguistically where you
are, and how you must begin to understand who you are in
language. Friction brings awareness of connection and of
obstruction, of physicality and of language twitches. Preparing
oneself to speak is part of speaking. Breathing, coughing, spitting
become part and parcel of the linguistic situation. It shows the
sounds of language as explicitly composed of the body’s
mechanics.”
and this friction she expresses is part of the hesitancy I wished to capture in these readings.
The sense of preparing yourself to speak and in this instance to speak the words of another: to become someone's ventriloquist dummy. These are sounds we are not used to experiencing on the radio in particular; if we are to listen to a radio play in a less free context the production and execution of the delivery will not include any of the stutters, the misreadings, the awkward pauses that we experience here; they have been eradicated from the final product before it reaches our ears. Hopefully as the works were broadcast, the audience would have 'got used to the text' and been able to hone in on the difference such as these new additions as well of tone/pace that each new performer brought to the script. Asking new questions of the medium as well as of the listener, the repetition of the same text via different means hopefully challenges the expectations of what a radio text can 'do', even if the text never changes.
How do we read this work? What is a close listening or other?
Given my intention to transfer sound into an object it was fascinating to discover that as Demers explains the idea of the sound object was first elucidated by Schaeffer. To him,
“The sound object was Schaeffer's means of discussing sound material as separate from it's notation, its means of production, and the listener's state of mind. It is the perfect acoustic encapsulation of the phenomenological object of contemplation, the sound in idealized form” (2010, p26)
this idea of 'sound in idealized form' was of course an analysis of the mode of listening employed by the
audience rather than is seen in this project an actual object made from sound. From Chion's notion of three types of listening to Adorno's 'regressive listening' which courts intermittent rather than absorbed listening”, ( ibid 2010,p156) the idea of notating listening as a phenomena is clearly a slippery and awkward one.
While it seems hard to pin down a definition of listening exactly, I do concur with Nancy's understanding of what listening does when he suggests that ‘To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning… resonant meaning, a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only resonance’ (2007, p7), and hope to have suspended my audience in this particular state for some if not all of the broadcasted series.
Who is in control of the work?
There were many forms of control this project was subject to. In the first instance I controlled the initial text then having 'let go' of it the participants took it wherever they wanted controlling pace/tone and text input as they wished. This was true of both the sound and the visual parts of the project.
After this and before the last week of the project, control by radio space kicks in. Here issues of time slots which were very limiting in terms of audience accessibility made a difference to the way the project was experienced. Given the lack of server space and the fact that Soundart has no listen again feature many people did not get to experience the whole of this project. This was a huge concern for the work but the idea of either having a stationary slot on the air or a confusing timetable to hope the audience would follow led the way to falling in with the 10am slot. Then listener takes over; the starting with the piece the audience expected on the degree show day live on air reflected their ultimate control of the work; their ability to turn off/ tune out whenever they choose.
Finally my cut and paste editing takes the work back into my control; I choose the bits of text I like and stick them together to create what Whitehead is looking for in this form when he states in his 'Speleology' essay that “The goal of radio text is not to distort or impress, but to bring deeply buried desires and insights back into the light”.
Where does the performance take place in broadcast work? What are the invisible performatives?
There are many invisibles activated during any broadcast piece; the ear/the receiver/transmitter and even of body resonation. invisible is of course breath. LaBelle describes this airy determinant as,
“As exhalation the voice carries with it the interior of the one who speaks; the interior is essentially externalised to enter the interior of the listener, thus 'pulling them into his (the speaker's) own interior and forcing them to share the state which exists there”. (2006, p111)
This sharing of the air which is an expression both of conversation and of radio works, is what neither can do without. As Steven Connor points out in 'Strains of the Voice' “Air joints and articulates the puppet that is voice”.
Another activated invisible brought into play by broadcast is the imagination.
Voegelin puts her description of what radio asks of its listeners thus in her 'The Anxiety of the Lonely Listener' essay,
“The radio is not one thing it is multitudes. Radio is not innately anything, but is everything it is, dependent on who is listening. In this sense any radio transmission is truly contingent on the temporal, spatial and psychological (understood as an inner dimension) circumstance of the listener. The radio broadcast, emitting from its unsighted box, gives the room it enters different colours; working with the tones that are already there, stretching them in every direction. Sure, this idea of contingency could be applied to other media too, but nowhere is the multiplicity of production and perception more profuse than in the darkness of radio, where no image preserves our hold an on authentic sense of reality, and thus no sense of non-reality limits the imagination of the listener. The temporal flow of radio is a blind stream, emanating from a faceless, boundary-less place. The association of this transitory stream with a visual actuality is produced in a fleeting action of listening. Radio does not produce a certain object, but incites figments of individual imagination. It does not affirm the surety of a location or object but produces its own reality as a perceptual and individual uncertainty”.
The true invisible here is not what we can point to after all (the body/ the transmitter etc.) it is found in this 'face-less, boundary-less place' that we each individually inhabit while the radio is talking to us. It is both hard to pin down and different for everyone that experiences it especially in light of the content being transmitted. It is in fact as Idhe puts forward in his study of the auditory invisibility itself; “No matter now hard I look, I cannot see the wind, the invisible is the horizon of sight. An inquiry into the auditory is also an inquiry into the invisible. Listening makes the invisible present in a way similar to the presence
of the mute in vision”. (2007, p198)
How can a broadcast event and a gallery event be compared?
In the context of this project as a whole we can compare the notion of the Disembodied self of an essence of the project's participant who is not visible yet is still present. In particular this impalpable nature of voice is pertinent as voice was always the starting point for the work. Describing voice and its nature, Alexandra Keller suggests in the 'Shards of Voice essay' that “the voice occupies a liminal status in relation to the body as a whole-as often neither/nor as either/or.” Going on to question “of what is a voice made? When the voice is not voicing, what is it doing? Does the voice have a role in the construction of silence beyond absence or restraint? Radiophonically speaking, the disembodied voice emphasizes all the more the irresolvability of its nature in relation to the body that produces it, and of which it is an essential, if contingent, component” (2001, p23).
These questions are at the heart of this project and while it is impossible to compare these two 'events' in terms of space and experience it could be said that questions around 'when a voice is not voicing, what is it doing' form the liminal space at which both the gallery and broadcast events cross over.
Part Three
Wish You Were Hear
Well I could call out when the going gets tough.
The things that we've learnt are no longer enough.
No language, just sound, that's all we need know, to synchronise
love to the beat of the show.
And we could dance.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
The things that we've learnt are no longer enough.
No language, just sound, that's all we need know, to synchronise
love to the beat of the show.
And we could dance.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Joy Division, 'Transmission', (1979).
A reflective response to the work and the process.
What will I do with the texts given to me next?
These will become part of my ongoing 'dispositif'; a starting point for further investigations. Whereas I had thought I might in the final understandings of the project analyse the performer's performances I have come to realise that is not my role within the work; that is for the listener to do.
The understanding these works have elucidated of voice and of the liminal between the everyday and performed speech will inform new practice based research within the area of self/identity and expression.
How the final text was put together writing for this context
“Most writers write in order to make a sound, even if their tree is falling in a forest where there's no one to hear it” Anshaw (1991, p66)
Writing for the context of broadcast (or in the case of the final piece, re-writing) employs a particular and peculiar sense of 'listening' to the work that is not usually engaged outside of a sound piece. For the final piece I wanted to give voice to all the participants who had contributed; even those who didn't want to be heard so I activated the texts written/received since PW105 for sound pieces and used the cut and paste process to recycle them.
An amalgamation of the 'Chiaroscuro' text, the overheard conversation piece from PW105 I also wrote a final script which I gave to a few performers which was inter-cut with snippets of sonic self portrait text. This new piece which can be seen in blog appendix vii creates an atmosphere of forced response using phrases such as 'I don't know what want me to say/ am I allowed to say all this stuff here?' to emphasise how uncomfortable people were with the idea of committing their voice to a recording.
Why take on cut and paste interventions?
There were many reasons why I took on this severe editorial role within these texts. The main aims of activating this process were to vocalise and repeat common phrases/threads of speech and to bring to the fore or for the work to notably take on the sonorous nature of the body. Embracing that which sound artists such as Artaud explores in his work (described here by Weiss 1995, p41), “percussive, xylophonic, glossolalic, and guttural sounds” and in doing so to bring as Whitehead suggests the dark into the light on the radio. My aim here was to create a further deconstruction of the self; a further fracturing of the sense of self the previous broadcasts might have engendered despite the obvious difficulties of the texts used.
In bringing the body into play, not only is there a sense of moving away from received broadcasting into another arena immediately but the listener will have to find a new approach to hearing what he is experiencing too. Novarina encouraged a use of voice in his 'Letter to the Actors' that would include,
“ Mouth, anus. Sphincters. Round muscles closing our holes. The opening of the closing of the word. Attack cleanly (teeth, lips, muscled mouth) and finish cleanly (cut off the air). Stop cleanly. Chew and eat the text. A blind spectator should be able to hear it crunched and swallowed, to ask himself what is being eaten over there, on stage” (1989).
The last area which the cut and paste interventions bring to the fore within the work is the idea of 'play' with accepted volume levels and unexpected pops and whistles as created by the technology employed to make the recordings or incidentally by the body. An echo of Cage's radiophonic work 'Imaginary Landscape No 4' (1951) where twelve radios were employed to create a soundscape, I have employed here a multitude of voices to create a different environment to be experienced via the same medium that vary in volume throughout the piece so that the medium, the receiver and the listener are all questioned throughout.
How did the portraits come into being? What process decided their appearance?
Again I worked using the Futurist's dictum that “From the point of view of colour: sounds, noises and smells can be yellow, green, dark blue, light blue or purple. In railway stations and garages, and throughout the mechanical and sporting world, sounds, noises and smells are predominantly red; in restaurants and cafés they are silver, yellow and purple. While the sounds, noises and smells of animals are yellow and blue, those of a woman are green, blue and purple”, as found in Carra's ,'The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells'.
This platform allowed a sense of the text itself and what was being conveyed to determine how much of these bright colours would be used in the final realisation/transformation.
For example, in the piece 'in a dream' there are plenty of the greens that the Futurists celebrate and as you will hear in the audio piece for broadcast September 6th found in appendix vii this piece was composed by a woman. While the software used to translate the voice to image in the first instance did impose some element of colour in order that one could decode the 'performance' of the voice I did away with colour in examples such as 'my sound is eee ee eeee' to emphasize the harshness of the sound that created the visual. The resultant 'landscape impression' is redolent of the Arctic Circle or of some such cold harsh environment which is very appropriate. This piece of text was then incorporated into the final piece it is found under texts for broadcast September 7th also in appendix vii.
How were the frames for the portraits chosen? How did this process reflect the radio pieces?
As discussed, both halves of this project form representations of self that are intangible for one reason or another. When I had the idea for the portraits I had imagined I might display them alongside the audio so that the audience could get a better sense of what they were looking at. In the final analysis the reluctance of the participants made such display less a study of anxiety and more a question of ethics so the portraits rather than creating the coming together of the image and the sound as described by Chion,
“When experienced at the same time the visual and the aural represents synchresis is the forging between something one sees and something one hears - it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time.”
became more of an exploration of image with sound as its base; an image that was a container of sound rather than an experience of both. When it came to framing the images I once again worked with materials I was given over the course of the project and as with the original texts broadcast I did not even clean the dirty frames I was given; I chose to display all the facets of this assemblage as they were given to me.
Framing was of course an important aspect of this project as a whole as it was understood that some audience members might not be able to see the portraits and others given the time slot might not be able to hear some or even all of the works broadcast. As a result I wrote two framing statements for the two halves to try to contextualise them and once again they are both available via this framing of the project on separate pages.
I am pleased that I have worked through the idea of the sonic self portrait in this project as it is an idea that has its genesis in the beginnings of the course in the PW102 module. It is a work in progress without doubt as is the works for radio aspect of this project but I feel that another reworking of the introductory audio to the sonic self portrait may well be the thing that facilitates easier and therefore accessible to the audience responses.
Having produced two versions so far; one that introduced the 'Scream' painting and another that spoke of Facebook, in the end I chose to put the original audio I wrote for its audience with the gallery exhibition of the portraits to see if having the results of my endeavour alongside this text which references neither would give participants a better sense of what they were being asked to do and where it would be taken. Only time will tell....
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