Exercise Four

The Soundscape.

Found at The Spotless Mind.

'Sometimes it is a relief to be told what to do. About our most joyful and even profound experiences often come when we are following other people's instructions.' (Fletcher, July 2007). With this particular exercise, we unfortunately did not have this 'luxury'. The instructions, as such, were quite broad. But in this subject, I feel like this is a good thing. There are no limits to our creativity. One of the main ideas behind this exercise seemed to be to work with a form that you may not have used yet, and this is why I decided to play around with a soundscape.

Initially I had no ideas whatsoever for this exercise. I knew I would struggle, mostly because of the sheer broadness. But talking about it with others eventually led to the occasional lightbulb moment. I also decided to go back over some of the topics and concepts we had explored so far and kept coming back to a particular section in Alan Kaprow's (2003) 'Just Doing'. In it, he shares these words of wisdom: 'Experimentation...involves attention to the normally unnoticed. I scratch my ear when it itches. I notice the itch, notice my scratching, and notice when the itching stops, if it does. I attend to my raised arm and my fingers pulling at my ear (it's the left one), while discussing politics. But mostly, I scratch itches without noticing. I learned as a child not to scratch an itch in public, and now that I intentionally notice that I do so anyway, the whole action looms large. It's a little strange, and my conversation about politics loses interest as itching and scratching shine brighter. In other words, attention alters what is attended. Playing with everyday life often is just paying attention to what is conventionally hidden.' (p250) Inspiration hit. I'm not one to normally experiment with sound, and I think that's because this is a particular aspect of life that usually goes 'unnoticed' for me. I notice if I hear a sound that I like, whatever that may be. But aside from this, general everyday sounds escape my attention.

I looked over my portraits that I'd presented and noticed that each had quite a distinctive sound to match that could be played with. The sound of chewing for Monday, the sound of kneading dough for Tuesday, turning paper pages for Thursday, squeaking glass for Friday, a camera clicking for Saturday and the sounds of a bustling cafe restaurant for Sunday. Wednesday was different, however, as I had dubbed it 'nightmarish', and it's accompanying sound needed to fit with this image. I have not seen David Lynch's 'Eraserhead', only the trailer, but it was instantly what I thought of to match with this nightmare. It was simply a matter of picking the right moment of sound to match the gif.

I feel like the result is quite ominous. Dark, even. But maybe that's just my feelings after spending countless times watching the Eraserhead trailer, and forever associating the two now. Just as Kaprow said, after undergoing this activity of recording the sounds and arranging them, everyday actions and the sounds that accompany have begun to 'loom large'.

The second aspect, which was to be very different, I struggled with even more. It took more looking over of past readings for inspiration to hit. Again, I found myself back in Kaprow's instructions. 'Play, of course, is at the heart of experimentation' (p250). We have spoken a lot about play in this subject, which Kaprow describes as 'open-ended' with the potential for everybody to 'win'. But I needed more than this. Bourriaud described society as a place where 'human relations are no longer “directly experienced” ' (p8). This quote is taken from a piece that discusses relational aesthetics, which I don't believe my work is wholly engaging in (aside from the interdiscipline-arity), but this singular concept got me thinking. Thinking about society now, and where society could be in the future. Eventually, the very distant future. If we're living in a society where human relations are no long directly experienced now, what will this be like in one hundred years? One thousand years? I combined the aspect of 'play' and the 'unearthed artist depictions' were the result. I tried to make our distant future seem bleak and sanitary and controlled, in a lighthearted way. Perhaps to make people think? Perhaps without even trying. Perhaps I'm just reading far, far too much into all of this.

REFERENCES

Bourriaud, N 1998 Relational Aesthetics, translated by Pleasance, S, Woods, F & Copeland, M, Les Presses Du Reel, Dijon. 

Fletcher, H, July, M 2007 Hello, retrieved 5 May 2013, < https://lms.latrobe.edu.au/pluginfile.php/1259451/mod_resource/content/2/Miranda%20July%20and%20Harrell%20Fletcher.pdf >

Kaprow, A (2003), 'Just Doing', in J Kelley (e.d) Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, exp. Edition, University of California Press: Los Angeles, London, pp. 247 – 251.