This week I added and refined some elements of my research journal and responded to feedback from this week's tutorial.
Sound files:
I have, in my research many images which in themselves have a certain haunting similarity with one another. In my tutorial, this point was raised and the importance of these images questioned me if I might use them in a way that I have done in previous projects: to run them through the Virtual ANS synthesiser and retrieve from their visual information, sound.
In a completely contrasting way to silent haunting, sounds haunt when they are seemingly produced by objects which we are not used to observe as producing sounds. The sounds retrieved from a photograph, falls within the category of a disjunction of experience, as we are experiencing something in a way that we are not supposed to experience that thing. By hearing visual information as an audible experience. And therefore within this category, I would place this type of sound within the 'incongruous field of haunting'.
I have produced a database of sounds created from key images to my project, which can be found in the menu or from the homepage. Also here is a button that will take you there:
A reflection on this process:
- First, because so many of these images had such large areas of white, and the software reads lighter values as loud sounds, and darker values as quieter or silent, there is a clear association between the walls of the white cube and a certain loudness, where it would hope to be silent and neutral, but also a more defined association with white noise. An association which first emerged in my practical research experimenting with the haunting nature of silence.
- Second, I found that the higher the pitch, the more clarity the sound would capture, but the lower pitch, the more that the sound would merge and create these fantastically spectral forms.
- When importing the sound file back into the system to reveal the image from the translation as sound, I noticed a striking graininess, that I wasn't expecting. This associates back with Xenakis' Granular theory as exploring the sound waves of seemingly uniform audio, revealed an image of tiny grains of sound.
- When importing the image of Yves Klein back into the machine it immediately struck me as the form of a man in this spectral image immediately looked like a ghost. The gradient from his feet to his head as getting more defined (due to higher and lower tones); the way that the lower tones gave his feet a gaseous apperance as if the figure were floating; the white colour against the dark background; and most unexpectedly, two eyes in the head. An especially haunting feature as the figure has his back turned in the original photograph.
- The dismantling of these images also gave Huyghe's timekeeper the appearance of an eyeball.
- Renzo Martens' white cube became a sanded pyramid tomb.
- The image of Adolf Hitler merged all of the nazis together into a ghostly ensemble, whereas the artworks exhibited seemed to be much more full of life than the visitors.
- Works that tried to add as little to the space as possible like Rauschenberg's white paintings and Davis' micropaintings became oceans of emptiness with an immediate attention to the ceiling, floors and lights.
- Finally, Xenakis' Granular composition became exactly that, a granular image of sound, constructed within the graphic rhythm of bold grid lines.
Seance:
I have now refined the seance element of my research journal. Adding Fisher's Spectre of Nostalgia to the dialogue. I have three phantoms which I will be soon adding aswell, but it made me realise that perhaps just two spectres are not enough and so I am thinking of doing some introspection and propose some more spectres into the work.
Here are some ideas:
- The Spectre of Revolution - perhaps similar to nostalgia, but specifically the theme of change and development with association to the origin of hauntology and goal of both O'Doherty's critique and my own research project.
- The Spectre of Sound - Perhaps it would be useful to think of sound itself as a spectre within the context of the white cube as it is that dialogue with the enclosed sound that I want to reignite a feeling of haunting into the gallery space.
- The Spectre of Colonialisation/ class - Martens discusses this association in his documentary, but I have not much researched into it, perhaps this could be another spectre that haunts how we engage with art.
- The Spectre of Silence - while in the white cube gallery space we feel like we must reduce ourselves. Perhaps we can understand these ideological effects on how we traverse the gallery space as the result of being silently haunted by the ideologies of the institution.
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980):
The Essay of Mark Fisher's that I was reading on his take on hauntology wrote about Stanley Kubrick's Hauntology, so I decided I would watch it as a case study as I had not seen it before.
One thing that struck me was how sound was used throughout the film. The score constantly makes the audience feel on edge, with unexpected sounds consistently simulating the paranoia and fear of the characters we are watching. I feel it is through this disjointedness with the film, that the movie does not attempt a choreographed foley soundtrack, but freely explores a whole other dimension of the movie's narrative.
There was a resemblance between some of the sounds and my radiator Hauntology composition which I did not expect. I was recently given the feedback that only that piece really felt haunting on its own. I feel this may be because of its unpredictability (Incongruous haunting) and its association with a real sound (psychogenic haunting). These makes the sounds more relatable and unpredictable and will be pointers I will use to better compose from now on, likely using inspirations from the score of this film.
The film explores a certain clairaudience as well as the characters engaged with haunting spirits in subjective hallucinatory experiences.
The hotel site was itself clearly haunted by time, the very feeling of time, through repeat events and overlapping time periods, certainly align with the hauntological model, especially in the scenes where the ghosts from the past would engage with and influence the present, literally and figuratively opening doors and avenues of conversation.
The Hotel was also full of liminal spaces, showing the haunting contrast of anthropological spaces within liminal spaces. The corridors that the child cycled through haunted in an anticipatory manor. Because of the liminality of the space, the child felt more endangered by their solitude, as if they were being watched.
Comments