This week I prepared for my Final presentation and for my submission of my work, But also was able to experiment more with the non-linear speaker and compose more haunting compositions with the recordings from the white cube galleries I've visited now.
Practical research:
Now having been to white cube spaces I was able to compose with sounds from the spaces. I used the recordings I made in the galleries I've visited, as well as going to the white cube gallery in bournemouth town square in order to get more recordings.
I found a Sound editing plug-in from Anarchy Effects called Corkscrew which allowed me to use granular sampling engine to create what is known as a shepherds tone from recorded audio.
A shepeherds tone is an auditory illusion whose pitch sounds like it is constantly rising. This creates an ever constant feeling of unease, that I wanted to recreate after studying the sounds of Stanley Kubrick's the shining soundtrack. This uneasing sound will feature in my compositions from here on as the illusion is powerful and highlights the aspect of time within the work.
For the Parametric speaker I had ordered a higher voltage cable so as to amplify the sounds one could produce from it. However, this would overheat the module, and though it had a large heat sink, I deemed it too dangerous to rely on. The speaker can function for around sixty seconds without reaching this temperature though and could be used for short periods in a live performance installations setting. Otherwise, the sounds achieved from the device at 9V (rather than 24V) should be enough for a quiet room. I also found that the directional beam had a fascinating tactility to it. As the beam could be effectively muted by placing your hand over it, their was a certain tactile control you could exert over it by placing your hands in the beam, reminiscent of a theremin instrument. Also, at higher voltage input, the directional wave was tactile in that the vibrations could be felt on demodulation as almost a soft breeze feeling.
Case study: The work of Michael Asher:
In looking through my feedback from my last presentation I came across Michael Asher, who I have found to be fascinating and extremely relevant to my research. The article I found written on his work by Kirsi Peltomaki begins with a questions of what it means to enter a work as oppose to viewing it or seeing it.
They write that "Entering the work” implies crossing a threshold between two environments”. My thought is that soundscapes are not directional but could be so with directional technologies like the parametric speaker my research utilises, with which we can more clearly interact with the threshold of sound environments. Entering the work might also imply a passage to an altered state. In other words, “entering”: signifies an experience, and it is this idea of experience that we deal with when discussing curation of art.
Asher's works engages with many aspects of spectatorship, here which evokes the spectre of the spectator in my own research dialogue. Asher's works provide a pathway for the viewer to self-reflective situations, where they become intensely aware of their own perceptual and cognitive processes in relation to their social setting as well as to themselves. I believe this is done by subverting expectations, but also through this act of welcoming the spectators into dialogue with the work as they themselves enter the installations.
My research led me further down this phenomenological reflection on the role of the spectator, which will surely make its way into my thesis, especially in how they relate back to the experience of the white cube.
Michael Asher had three works which I think explore relevant ideas to my research project in different ways:
1. Illusionary boundaries of space – In his Documenta 5 installation in 1972, Asher optically sliced a rectangular space into two halves on a vertical axis, painting one half of the walls ceiling and floor white, and the other black. In my opinion this created an illusionary boundary of space between two thresholds of experience. Though simple, in this context of a white cube gallery space, these aesthetics do have ideological assocaitions. The ideologies of the white cube, do not restrict the space to be just white all the time. Any block colour that reflects the attitude of elimating distractions inherently coheres with the ideologies of the white cube. Hence, black walls ceilings and floors have often been used in white cube galleries in rooms for viewing video works. It is in the contrast between these aesthetics, emphasized by their juxtaposition, that they can be better seen as aesthetic objects.
2. Asher’s airflow ‘Spaces’ 1969 – In two airflow works, Asher used industrial air blowers to set up “columns of air” that allowed the museum visitor to be immersed in the work in a highly tactile, yet discreet manner. Asher did not include any visible elements. Instead of seeing art, the viewers were asked to feel the faint breeze against their skin.
3. Sandblaster - In another work at Tosellini in Milan, Asher sanded down the accumulated layers of paint and plaster from the walls, floor, and ceiling in a gesture of “complete material withdrawal” to reveal the underlying material conditions of the physical space normally hidden underneath the white cube. This is ofcourse similar to Huyghe’s timekeeper, but in more of an immersive rather than iconographic way. An act or refusal by which the work is defined by the removal of the white cube from the space.
these images also all conform to hold a certain haunting element, for which I will add them to my sound files aspect of the research blog. Perhaps it is because they depict an aesthetic of liminal spaces, or perhaps its because the documentation of the work, in a way doesn't tell us much about what it would be like to be there in person. Where we are haunted by our limitation to empathise with what is depicted: I.e. we will not be able to feel the soft breeze within 'spaces' and so the the seemingly empty photograph of the space is haunted by something beyond which we have the capacity to perceive and beyond which the camera was able to capture.
Boundaries/ Threshold
The idea of boundaries has come up frequently recently, both in research and in practice.
In preparation for my presentation on Tuesday I used a quote from Davis about what it means to haunt:
Discussing the gallery space as a haunted site allows for epistemological concepts to develop through time in conversation with the space, pushing the boundaries between language and thought (Davis, 2005).
This led me to interrogate the defining of a haunting experience as one which subverts/ pushes boundaries.
Boundaries came up earlier this week in discussion of the soundscape, where entering an installation implies a threshold has been crossed. Sound is usually less uniform, this is one of the points of difference on Sterne's audio-visual litany: "hearing is spherical, vision is directional'. perhaps because we are constantly surrounded by sound, the boundary of the soundscape is blurred, leading to the question of what is the art if it is immaterial. What I argue is missing in my bachelors dissertation is the perspective of a sound work as an installation, where the boundaries of the work are the context it is played into, rather than any digital file or sound object.
With the Parametric speaker, this boundary is made more clear, but it is also subverts our understanding of sounds and haunts through this subversion.
This focus on boundaries then applies to the fields I have charted for haunting experiences in the following ways:
The boundaries of proximity are haunted through Acousmatic haunting.
The boundaries of comfort are haunted through Incongruous haunting.
The boundaries of volume are haunted through Modulated haunting.
The boundaries of sensory perception are haunted through Silent haunting.
The boundaries of kinaesthesia are haunted through Responsive haunting.
The boundaries of memory are haunted through Psychogenic haunting.
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