Claudia Molitor / From our environment
‘…the way artists engage with the environment they find themselves in…’
Farai / This is England
The 'theme’ of this collection of works is a somewhat preposterous proposition… the way artists engage with the environment they find themselves in is vast, ranging from works that deal with global environmental issues through to work that considers intimate sensorial encounters. So I am limiting myself to work that in some way uses field-recording… but what do we understand field-recording to be? It can, most obviously, be a recording through a microphone of an environment, though I would argue it could also be a record through spoken word of a social situation, as in Farai’s brilliant This is England.
“Theresa May, do you know how it feels to count days and hours till payday?”
“...the seven days life cycle of a cowslip form the basis of the musical score...”
Christine Ödlund / Stress Call of the Stinging Nettle
“It’s a new development: research is being done into the ways in which plants communicate. Mostly how they communicate chemically, but also acoustically…My new paintings are a continuation of the plant studies…a kind of heraldry of the plant kingdom…the idiom is related to chemical symbols (chlorophyll) and abstract charts of photosynthesis, the process through which light is converted into chemically stored energy. However, they also serve as symbols in graphical notation for a piece of music…I often think in terms of music when I create pictures, and vice versa.” — taken from interview with CFHILL.
The Spike. 2018. Plant pigment, tempera, and mixed binder on paper.
Molekyl. 2018. Plant pigment, tempera, and mixed binder on paper.
Clorophilia. 2018. Plant pigment, tempera and mixed binder on paper.
Amina Abbas-Nazari / SpeculativeSpatial Design (workshop)
“For this brief we collectively imagined that the surface of the world has been devastated by an environmental catastrophe and the only inhabitants left on the earth reside, sheltered on the London Underground. This community of people have re-built their society around the constraints of the tube train with each carriage designed to fulfil an essential human need e.g. a green space, parliament, launderette...Each student designed and made the interior of one carriage to be arranged together to complete the train.”
Amina Abbas-Nazari’s speculative scenario based workshop for 16-18 year old Central Saint Martins' summer school students, studying spatial design, with thanks to Lisa Marie Bengtsson.
Marja Ahti / Vegetal Negatives
Vegetal Negatives is a game of sonic mutations, mimicry, inversions, and association inspired by a text called "On pataphotograms", by the French writer René Daumal – a quasi-metaphysical essay that toys with breaking the conceived separateness of natural forms through poetic imagination.
“Let us unfold the animal outward: the bronchia will become a thick foliage, keeping its respiratory function, but in reverse, naturally (CO2 absorption), reversed also concerning colour, from the tint of calves’ lungs to its complementary cabbage green. The digestive system will become roots, maintaining its role of drawing in nourishment from the outside environment. […] for each animal form there exists a corresponding vegetal form. The man who would find his vegetal negative and unite with it would restore the integrity of the cosmos.”
Cathy Lane / Listening to not listening to voices
We live in sound, it is all around us. We are implicated in the social relationships and ideologies that we hear reflected back to us. Sound art offers the chance to critique the world that we hear, and to produce new and different possibilities. Are sound artists taking up the challenge of offering new ways of knowing or changing the world, and does this need new ways of listening and understanding? Can sound art act as a tool for radical change by ‘de-conditioning’ our listening and helping us cross linguistic, cultural, geographic, ethnic, gendered, specied and sexual prejudicial borders? This audio paper will consider how new listenings might lead to a richer, more inclusive sound art, that can embrace and celebrate difference.
Corey Mwamba & Tom Ward / Rhizome
“To think that a living web resource should be complete is to misunderstand the nature of the World Wide Web”
The Rhizome is a generative data environment, one of a number of free resources about musicians of the improvising persuasion in England, Ireland (all of it), Scotland, and Wales.
None of these resources will ever be complete. To think that a living web resource should be complete is to misunderstand the nature of the World Wide Web.
Greater context comes from the user, not the resource; if you use these resources, you can refine your personal context from the wider context of the resource. This wider context is given in the first sentence on this page (in bold). Stated plainer: the contexts are improvising, music, and the geography of Britain and Ireland. There is no hierarchy; everyone is equal in size on all the resources.
Annea Lockwood & Bob Bielecki / Wild Energy (2014)
Wild Energy is a multi-channel outdoor installation which the artists describe as giving access to the inaudible, vibrations in the ultra and infra ranges emanating from sources which affect us fundamentally, but which are beyond our audio perception, many of which are creating our planet’s environment: the sun, the troposphere and ionosphere, the earth’s crust and core, the oxygen-generating trees — everything deeply integrated, forming an inaudible web in which we move, through which we live and on which, therefore, we depend. It is our sense that through these sounds one can feel the energies generated, not as concepts but as energy-fields moving through one’s body.
It is a fifty minute loop which begins with solar oscillations recorded by the SOHO spacecraft, sped up 42,000 times, and ends with ultrasound recorded from the interior of a Scots Pine Tree, slowed down 10 times, to make them audible to us. Silences between the groups of sounds allow the ambient soundscape of the location to move into the foreground.
Sounds & sources - solar oscillations, kilauea volcano, chorus waves & whistlers, sei whale, earthquakes, trees, hydrothermal vents, bats, AKR waves.
Wild Energy is now permanently installed at the Caramoor Center for the Arts, Katonah, USA.