Photos from a sound-walk, Whitechapel, London

The day I was in London exploring various galleries showing John Latham’s work, I stumbled across a wonderful sound-walk. Janet Cardiff’s (1999) The missing voice (case study B) was something I was aware of, both because of an exhibition of her work (with partner George Bures Miller) at Modern Art Oxford (The House Of Books Has No Windows), and a paper by the geographer David Pinder, ‘Ghostly Footsteps: Voices, Memories and Walks in the City‘:

This paper is concerned with urban walking and the work of contemporary artists and writers who take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and paths in the city. The focus is on an audio-walk by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff entitled The missing voice (case study B), which is set in east London. Connections are also drawn with other recent projects in the same area by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair. The paper discusses how these artists raise important issues about the cultural geographies of the city relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Cardiff’s audio-walk in particular works with connections between the self and the city, between the conscious and unconscious, and between multiple selves and urban footsteps. In so doing, she directs attention to the significance of dreams and ghostly matters for thinking about the real and imagined spaces of the city.

It was just a sign on the wall, and so I went to the reception to enquire. I was asked to fill in some paperwork and required to leave my credit card at the desk. In return, I was handed an iPod Nano with a set of audio files pre-loaded on it, pointed in the right direction and politely told that the first seven minutes or so would not make sense as they were recorded before Whitechapel Gallery was renovated. With this in mind, I stood to one side and got my notebook and camera out. I am not entirely sure how to write about the walk, but I would encourage anyone to do it if they can. The sign said it would take 50 minutes, a fairly decent approximation, and is well worth your time. I took photos as I walked, and jotted down notes and thoughts in my notebook. The binauraul recording is disorienting at first but leads you through the city as if it were holding you by the hand (perhaps it’s by the ear instead). For more information on the piece, see Cardiff’s own site, or Artangel’s, who funded the work (and also host the audio files, if you wish to take your own MP3 and headphones).

Rather than write about the walk, I’ve instead included a collage of snapshots of my journeying (above) and transcribed my (at times nonsensical) notes for posterity.

Shop, KFC | ambulance? Siren | Dogs barking | rhythm of steps | [unreadable] | uncanny timing | Brick Lane – sound and smell | unexpected details – “I ate here” | pause at crossing | find myself turning my head, taking headphones off, wondering if people like me… | mapping different paths – details | no average sign (Eat + Drink) | go past station | fancy men’s clothes – smart suit (uncanny) | church shut – sit on benches at the site | I ready myself, but she comes over, sits down | no tulips or smell… | story is composed of little snippets | took a wrong turn – Bathhouse | McD, weird lights | watching people from railings

Recording, installing and performing sound in space with Matt Rogalsky

The following day began with a presentation by Matt Rogalsky, ‘Recording, installing and performing sound in space’, and was followed bu a practice session. Matt opened with an 11-minute video piece which was beautiful: slow change over time, stasis with movement within it. A real-time video which resembled a still-image, except for the chance movement of leaves and the sound of ice melting. Drawing inspiration form the experimental musicians Alvin Lucier and John Cage, Matt outlined his interest in process-pieces and embraced chance and the accidental. Learning by doing, he showed us some of his work which were rehearsals of previous experimental pieces (repetition and difference?). It was more than simply showing on a screen though; Matt wanted us to experiment ourselves. Asking us to blow up a balloon (I’m normally terrible at this) and then hold it carefully, we would walk around the room we were in as stereo speakers would play a sine wave. Where the waves meet there are patterns of interference and lines of silence. I was so caught up in exploring the vibrations and waves that I failed to take what must have been a very funny photo of a room-full of people moving around with balloons in their hands (and plugs in their ears). The following session involved Matt firing a gun to produce impulse responses of the the different spaces we were in (the earplugs came in useful again). An impulse response is a short recording of the echo of a particular impulse (in this case the gun being fired) and can be used in conjunction with audio software to recreate particular sound-spaces. For example, film crews may take impulse responses of the different locations in case they need to add lines later and make them sound as if they were spoken in the same place.

After lunch Victoria Claire Bernie presented her work (‘Fieldworking films and fictions’) and discussed her on-going set of questions which drives her art. The various sub-headings of her talk were strikingly geographical: ‘On landscape and representation’, ‘On mapping and truth’, ‘On mapping and fiction’ and ‘On seeing differently’. Victoria mainly talked about her most recent project ‘Slow Water’:

a project to map the present condition of water in Scotland through the device of a site-specific visual arts residency at SAMS, the Scottish Association for Marine Science’s research laboratory at Dunstaffnage, near Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Designed to operate between the disciplines of visual art and research science, the residency is an address to the representation of knowledge of place in art and in science. It is an attempt to learn from the intellectual, material, physical and conceptual logics of the other; to deploy the resources of digital video sound and image installation, photography, drawing, interview, ‘found’ sound and image collection, collation and representation in the realisation of an inhabitable map.

Whilst in Scotland, she was involved in both lab-working and field-working with marine scientists and her work was both graphic and photographic. The accompanying ‘practical’ session was a challenge for the participants to take seriously Victoria’s technique of storyboarding, which she employed when creating videos. The storyboard for Victoria was a preparation for what she might see, a preparation for the field, a preparation of planned creativity or ‘designed opportunism’ as she put it. With a logic of recording as construction, she urged us to think the storyboard as an object for focusing and/or generating dialogue. We watched the opening 16 or so shots of Krystof Kieslowski’s (1993) Three Colours Blue, instead of reading a text on how to do this. We were then asked to walk the city for an hour or so, and let Edinburgh tell us a story or find one ourselves. We were allowed to take no more than 20 photos, which could be annotated, and each would give an idea of a particular shot (still photography as a way of thinking/creating moving images). Since then, I’ve been keen to experiment with storyboarding and thinking about shooting moving tableaux, rather than photos…

In the evening, a short film programme, ‘Fieldwork’, was arranged and curated by Matt Lloyd. The films all engaged with space and place in some way, and were fascinating (see the list below). In particular, John Smith’s film Blight was incredible and Takshi Ito’s Spacy was something else! Blight

revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. The images in the film record some of the changes which occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people¹

and Spacy is:

an odd experiment: … simply 700 photographs of the inside of an empty school gymnasium, shot in various different orders, frame-by-frame².

Pollphail | Matt Lloyd | UK| 2009 | 10min

Cobra Mist | Emily Richardson | UK | 2008 | 7min

Seven Primary School Spaces | Ben Ewart-Dean/Michael Gallagher | UK | 2008 | 12min

Replay | Matt Hulse | UK | 2005 | 9min

Blight | John Smith | UK | 1994-96 | 14min

Spacy |  Takashi Ito | Japan | 1981 | 10min

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Hanging thread, Black Box

Patrick Harrop and his group of students from the University of Manitoba have recently left Montreal, having spent just over a week here visiting various studios and working on a couple of projects down in the Black Box. I was able to join them on a few of their trips, including a visit to Chris Salter’s studio, and was made to feel welcome in the basement. The students had been working on recordings, comprised of of eight different channels, and were able to experiment with the high-quality speakers provided by Hexagram. Projects included recordings of: the vibrations of a window, water pipes (using an ultrasonic recorder!), an underground intersection and a moving car. These compositions were presented to Patrick, Shannon (a PhD student at Concordia), Gerard (an improvisational musician) and myself. We would listen to the arrangements, then hear how it had been done (and why!), before listening to it once more. What I found most interesting was the way in which these architecture students were thinking about sound and space through resonance. They were looking at how buildings move, vibrate, change.

A different kind of scaffolding? Black Box

Patrick also had a project he was working on in the Black Box with Annie Lebel, an architect herself, also with an interest in resonance. We set up a kind of scaffolding, hanging wiring from the ‘grid’ (the patchwork of cables just below the ceiling, fom which you can attach things). We did this by filling ballons with marbles (four or five small ones) and then throwing them so that they would go through, and back down, the grid. The wiring was a translucent green and very hard to see; most of us ambled into some of the suspended wires and pulled them right out. It was very much a hit-and-miss exercise, with several attempts needed to throw a balloon hard (and high) enough to reach the grid and then go through it, but it made for an elegant randomness. From this simple infrastrucutre, other (yellow and orange) wires were attached to run across the green wires and were connected to small motors. These motors would then give life to the transversal wires, creating oscillations and a flurry of movement.

These experiments are very exploratory and were not set up with a hope to ‘find out’ something, other than to play with wiring and see what might happen. Patrick hopes to continue this project, on a smaller scale, within the TML when he returns in mid-November. I’ll be interested to see whether he looks to re-create what he has already done (a miniature replica?) or whether he continues to experiment and push what is possible with just wires, balloons and marbles.

As for myself, I’ve been experimenting with visual methods and include a short video shot in the Black Box. I would recommend you watch it in HD, available if you move your mouse over to the top right-hand corner of the video; the music is from Murumari’s Pathscrubber EP (which, incidentally, is free). Let me know what you think – I’m still learning how to operate my camera (Kodak Zi8) and software (Adobe Premiere Elements 8), as well as the vast array of possible video formats you can produce… I feel that it has taken up quite a lot of time and I’m not too sure what it ‘adds’ to my work. Still, if I’m not prepared to fail then I’m probably not being (becoming?) experimental. Please let me know what you think.

I also include some other photos, which were kindly shared by Justin – one of the architecture students – who has a lovely SLR camera. He climbed a ladder to take a photo of the tables in the centre of the room, and later on, photographed me getting in on the action, throwing a (marble-filled) balloon up to the grid.

The hub from above, Black Box

Throwing and hoping, Black Box