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On the cover: Ali Bosworth, Untitled, 2012, 86.68 x 28.58 cm.

To purchase a copy go to the BlackFlash Store

Issue 30.2 – A special issue of BlackFlash magazine featuring five fold out posters.

Artists featured:
Heather Benning
Ali Bosworth
Kate Henderson
Biliana Velkova
Chih-Chien Wang

An interview by Wayne Baerwaldt

Starr Artz, from the series All About Star, 2009, pigment on photo rag, image courtesy of the artist.

Wayne Baerwaldt: You’re well known for your photographic examination of inner city working families in Winnipeg but I feel you’ve re-established your vision as an artist over the last two years or so. Do you consider your 21^st-century large-scale portraits of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan cowboys and cowgirls from the last two years something of a departure for you? Technically there is a new level of perfection and conceptually you’ve broken new ground by capturing your subjects in a state of mild expectancy, as if they’re about to transform themselves. Can you comment on your artistic practice of the ’80s and your practice today?

Sheila Spence: Mostly my portraiture has been an exploration of my own community. My earliest portrait work was drawn from family, friends and acquaintances My body of work which focused on inner city youth was a departure from my earlier work in that I did not know the subjects of the photographs. This work, Portrait of a Neighbourhood, was motivated by a desire to meet the youth in my neighbourhood and see for myself if they deserved the negative media attention they were garnering at the time. I used the portrait project as a means to meet and to interact with the neighbourhood youth. All About Star is also an exploration of community and, like Portrait of a Neighbourhood, it is a community that I knew nothing about at the outset of the project.

Taylor Anderson, from the series All About Star, 2009, pigment on photo rag, image courtesy of the artist.

I began All About Star at the Alberta Gay Rodeo Association’s (AGRA) rodeo in Strathmore, Alberta in 2009. A random sampling of discerning friends had suggested that this queer event was worth attending. Being a member of the queer community I have attended my fair share of queer events and the rodeo focus of this event intrigued me. I was raised and have always lived in an urban environment. I had never been to a rodeo and I definitely held a number of assumptions about rodeos. So when I was contemplating attending the rodeo in Strathmore I decided to take a portable studio and take portraits of the rodeo participants. All About Star began in much the same way as Portrait of a Neighbourhood began. Both projects were, in part, a vehicle for me to learn more about new communities and cultures. In both of these cases the communities I planned to investigate were communities with cultural traditions often represented in media by outsiders with sparse firsthand knowledge of their cultural norms.

After three days at the Strathmore rodeo I was prepared to give up on this project. Logistically, I did not have access to the rodeo participants and much of my time was spent taking photographs of audience members and their friends. I felt alienated from the event’s constructed and increasingly artificial feel to the queer rodeo community. I had not furthered my understanding of the rodeo experience and I had very few portraits that I would consider showing publically. The project would have ended after Strathmore had you not convinced me to stop in southern Saskatchewan on my way home and take in the Wood Mountain Stampede.

What the AGRA Stampede lacked in authenticity Wood Mountain had in spades. The Wood Mountain Stampede is the oldest running small rodeo in Canada laying claim with a motto that goes something like “121 years running and still going strong” Audience watch from a grandstand covered in poplar boughs for shade or from a ring-side beer garden. Rodeo action is so close you can taste the dust. Ranchers outfitted in their best regalia are transformed into the cowboys and cowgirls that I, as an urban dweller, had come to believe existed only in legend.

Getting back to your question of whether the work was a departure from the portraits of inner city families last century, I would say it was and it wasn’t. The work followed a process of inquiry that I have used in the past. Capturing the images for All About Star was much more condensed than any of my past projects. For example, Portraits of West Broadway was photographed over a two year period on a weekly basis. Relationships with the subjects along West Broadway in Winnipeg were a long time in the making. People were guarded and untrusting. Even after we had become familiar with each other the relationships remained fragile. Although All About Star was photographed in 2009 and 2010, the photography took place over brief periods of time on very few days. The working cowboys and cowgirls at the Wood Mountain Stampede were open and welcoming to newcomers. My project was accepted with very little explanation and did not suffer from a lack of interest or lack of community participation. Succinctly, I felt included in the community’s celebration. Peter Block writes that the key to creating community starts with a shift in our mindset about our connectedness to others. This sense of connectedness was palpable in the gathering at Wood Mountain.

Dawson Stover, from the series All About Star, 2009, pigment on photo rag, image courtesy of the artist.

WB: Can you discuss how you chose your subjects? What was it about each that appealed to you? Which portraits are most important or successful?

SS: Cowboys and cowgirls are easily recognized by iconic clothing; a cowboy hat, a cowboy shirt, jeans with a wide leather belt and large metal buckle, and cowboy boots. Any doubt on this matter can be laid to rest by conducting an internet search asking how to look like a cowboy. I chose my subjects based on wardrobe. Age, gender, body shape and size, ethnicity were not considered in my selection. At the AGRA rodeo in Alberta, it did not always follow that the clothes defined the subject. Many of the spectators or audience at the AGRA rodeo dressed in cowboy garb. However, at the Wood Mountain Stampede this selection criteria proved accurate. The majority of the people attending the Wood Mountain Stampede were part of a ranching community so they were conceivably working cowboys and cowgirls.

I attended both the Alberta rodeo and the Saskatchewan rodeo with a group of friends and colleagues. In between watching events, eating and visiting, many of our entourage would solicit subjects to be photographed. I had a printed piece which we distributed briefly describing my project which also contained my contact information. In this way I photographed a random sampling of people at both rodeos who looked like authentic cowboys or cowgirls.

Still, after working in the photographic medium for decades, I am intrigued by photography’s ability to freeze time, particularly in a portrait of an individual. Fifteen-year-old Jared Parsonage, in the image taken in 2009, is teetering between boyhood and manhood. If I were to revisit a portrait of Jared now he would be changed. The two years that have since passed would yield considerable difference. His skin would likely bear the shadow of a beard and his body posture might reflect the confidence of a man approaching 20. As he appears here Jared is frozen between the awkwardness of a boy and the self-confidence of a man. He wears his hat low on his forehead, half hiding the perfect unlined face of youth.

Rhett Fitzpatrick has the intensity and the conviction of a young man who has left youth behind but not so long ago. Rhett’s gaze meets the camera and, in turn, the viewer, in an almost confrontational stare. His crossed arms underline his sense of self. Shawn Mulvena also emanates a sense of self confidence and in a manner that differs from Rhett Fitzpatrick. Mulvena’s body posture is relaxed, his thumbs hitched into his jeans pockets. Mulvena’s face is sunburned and sports a day or two of unshaven beard stubble. He meets the camera with an openness that suggests he has nothing to hide from the viewer and nothing to prove. I interpret Shawn Mulvena’s confidence as a sense of self that comes with age.

Individually the details of these portraits describe qualities and nuances of not only the subjects, but also ourselves. As a collection the images describe our lives, individually at different points in time. In viewing these portraits we have an opportunity to stare closely at the subjects, something we cannot do with individuals in real time. Looking this closely we recognise gestures and expressions that we then construct into a narrative that aids in an understanding of ourselves. If I were to choose a favourite it would likely be Alma Lessard. When I asked her if I could photograph her she answered, “Why would you want a picture of an old cowgirl?” I see and hear myself in her question.

WB: Technically there is intriguing consistency to your rodeo portraits. Can you deconstruct the technical aspects of your portraits? If you were to continue the series would do anything different?

SS: All of the portraits are stripped of context intentionally. They are photographed in front of a black background to force the viewer to search the subject for nuance and detail. By removing context the viewer looks instead to the subject for clues to construct a narrative. The studio lighting removes the variables of natural ambient light creates a universal commonality for all of the subjects photographed.

Having explored cowboys and cowgirls individually I have learned they do, in fact, still live and thrive in the 21^st-century. Cowboys and cowgirls are ranchers. They work long hours raising cattle, often on horseback, on vast tracts of land. The events that we see at small rodeos are the skills that are mastered in the practice of ranching and their manners and postering appear to be closely linked to work, the land, and their interdependence on one another. I would love to continue this series on a ranch.

Wayne Baerwaldt is Director/Curator, Exhibitions and Outreach at the Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary. He has curated numerous projects including Iran do Espirito Santo: “Wall Drawings”, Glenn Ligon: “Some Changes” (with Thelma Golden) and “Death of Tom”, John Gerrard, Richard Boulet: “Drawn and Stitched”, Adam Pendleton: “BAND”, Paul P: “Something Clear, Something Cloudy”, and Dawna Rose: “I’ve tried to be happy”, among others.

David LaRiviere speaks with Dustin Wilson: artist, scientist, futurologist.

The Institute for Future Life Regression (installed at Gryphcon 2012, University Centre, University of Guelph), mixed media, dimensions variable, image courtesy of the artist.

Dustin Wilson’s Futurology is an ambitious hybrid investigation that draws on the future by way of wormholes and throwing dice. Now, some confusion may arise in the course of what follows   pertaining to the question of where Wilson is an artist and where “science” takes over in a most peculiar incarnation, one that is variously effectual, grass-roots, serious, critical and even satirical. In point of fact, before the interview began Wilson-the-artist raised the question of whether or not he should remain “in character” throughout the proceedings. Having already been fully seduced by the artist’s strange program it seemed to me the only way to proceed would be in this so-called “character,” but with the understanding that this projection is not a contrivance that is in any way fake. In the proper sense Wilson’s futurologist is a vehicle that possesses very real powers to layer text into the future. Our interview transpired in this spirit, laden with the most advanced time-travel technology devised since the “African Space Program” enacted by Sun Ra. As but one example of Wilson’s technological prowess, the artist throws “dice” as a means to stimulate his “Tachyonic Anti-Telephone” and thereupon deploy a graphic interface to develop detailed portraits of people from the future. Rolling dice to divine the future: such an invention would be a hot item on eBay were it not for its utter contingency and reliance upon the artist as the “medium” that will accept and therefore survive time travel. We must rely on Wilson to produce this particular Futurology, but nevertheless take careful note along the way of the resonance that is produced with the past and present.

I caught up with Dustin Wilson via Skype some time after his opening at Modern Fuel in Kingston, the exhibition that first exposed his dice-device.

David LaRiviere: In our correspondence you spoke of a recent development in your research, namely that you have detected an entity downstream that may be trying to contact you. This is indeed an exciting development, can you describe how this development occurred and just what the hell is going on with this future “Deep Throat?”

Dustin Wilson: What I refer to as a downstream agent is very much a general term applied to some kind of intelligence that is projecting information back to me, if you will. I can try to make an educated guess as to what form that agent will take and what time period this information is being broadcast from … I would hazard that it is being transmitted from around the year 4500 because that is really at the tail end of any kind of information that I am getting. Within the continuum that I am studying the cut off line is really around the year 4500, so I can assume that the information is being transmitted from that point. Obviously the transmission is conducted by an individual or group who possess a fairly advanced technological ability, possibly a blue suit (a being that is a catalyst for many of the changes seen in this futurology, or an agency that imposes mechanistic control over the population),  is rather than what we see as the working under-classes who are otherwise so often depicted. Having said this, there are all kinds of problems in making assumptions about what this downstream entity might be.

DL: I may have been guilty of making one of those assumptions in that I’ve already referred to this entity as being a “Deep Throat” of sorts, which is to say that I’ve ascribed the entity a “will.” From what you are saying I realize that my assumption is far too elaborated, that really what you have is a more oblique sense of this agent.

DW:  There is certainly that potential, but to date there hasn’t been any information pertaining to the intentions of the downstream agent, only that my location of quantum wormholes, the ones that are transmitting, correspond to the other side by what seems to be more than just a coincidence. But the attempt to generate information about future individuals through rolling dice is as much an attempt to somehow promote a back and forth or dialogue with the downstream agent, as well as an attempt to generate further information about specific future individuals, their habits, their way of life. It’s really an attempt to build the technology for that communication so that perhaps I will be able to learn more about the downstream agent.

DL: And his/her/their particular place within the future social order, whether you are hearing from the subjugated, genetically modified working class, or this more elite class, or perhaps an entity that straddles along the edge between the two classes.

DW: Yes, in my darker moments I sometimes think that it might be “misinformation” that I am being fed. In fact, I don’t know if the information is an attempt to prevent the future, or simply to inform, or even if it is a misinformation campaign. I can’t be sure.

DL: Which is an interesting position for you to be in because, while you are continually gaining more information through the dice-throw process, you do not have access to how your presence is felt at the other end, or the nature of that reception. Put another way, you are in the dark about the character of the guiding intelligence on the other side.

DW: If I were to make a guess, right now, it appears to be totally benign. However, I can’t really interpret or see any kind of altruistic motive or any kind of malicious motive. It’s just information, it’s just data that I’m interpreting, and hopefully interpreting it correctly. I wouldn’t like to think of it as some sort of Tachyonic Anti-Telephone “robo-call,” that might deliver some kind of future propaganda — maybe whereby the blue-suit community are portrayed as a completely altruistic organization. However, such propagandist doubts to a side, it certainly does not appear that way based on the data that I’m receiving.

DL:  Both in public exhibition and on your webpage futureliferegression.com you reference an obscure video on YouTube entitled “The Hutchison Effect” as a major influence in your work. The video features Canadian scientist John Hutchison presenting samples of metals fused together with other materials, such as wood, with his Hutchison Effect Apparatus. It later shows how that the apparatus can levitate and bend metals. I would dare say that the subject of that scientific profile shares your even-keel temperament and some of your demeanour. What drew you to this science in particular? How does Hutchison play out in Dustin Wilson’s Futurology?

DW:  John Hutchison, in both his methods and the liberated way in which he worked, was influential. I understand that he no longer pursues his zero-point energy project largely because people in his neighbourhood grew tired of having objects materialize and dematerialize in their backyard, along with the anti-gravitational effects that would occur through this key-wave quantum jitter activity that he was producing in his garage. But what I see taking place, especially with a lot of the technologies that are observable in my research, particularly the zero-point energy and anti-gravity propelled vehicles, is that we could potentially draw a direct line between the technologies in the very primitive forms that Hutchison uses and those technologies that we are seeing in the future. He is just another Canadian, a “garage” scientist, and I admire his way of working and his resilience in the face of ridicule.

DL: For me what is striking is that Hutchison, like yourself, speaks in a “minor” voice, which is to say that both in terms of the video aesthetic and in terms of Hutchison’s own “outsider” status in the Scientific community, his presentation glides from physical theory to philosophical interpretation in an idiosyncratic way, thereby contravening the classical voice of “authority” with something a little more grass roots, and definitely more passionate. Am I right in suggesting that you, like Hutchison, differ from the blue-suited scientists in that there can be no dialectical synthesis able to provide a complete account to render the situation “once and for all.” Rather, there is always a margin for wonder, at the centre of the attraction is this case for wonder, and that “wonder” is the property that contrasts your system to the closed (hierarchical) system of the blue-suited ones. You work with a chaotic, open system.

DW:  I agree with that statement. Very interesting point. I would like to also point out another really attractive thing about the “The Hutchison Effect,” the YouTube video, and it comes at the very end of the video, where there is a man sitting behind a desk describing what he calls “hyper-force.” This scene very much epitomizes the kind of tropes that we were going for with the “Secrets From The Future” video.

DL:  I’m sorry to hear that John Hutchison no longer practices.

DW:  Yes, this is what I’ve heard. I haven’t tried to contact him to ask him, although I know that he has stopped doing demonstrations of the technology. As I stated earlier, the complaints around objects materializing and dematerializing became the stated reason for his stopping. On a recent documentary that featured Hutchison, his critics were of course saying that Hutchison was “just saying” that he stopped for those reasons, and that his quitting contributes to the arguments for discrediting his work- based on the fact that he won’t try to reproduce it. Yet this may be a binding feature of the “garage scientist:” that within their mind-set or the way that such scientists interpret “scientific method” is the notion that the reproduction of results by multiple people is not necessary, and further that the proof they provide is simply their own proof, which is enough.

DL:  This may be a perverse tangent, but in an odd way this suspension of proof in deference to wonder reminds me of the “QRay,” I don’t know if you’ve heard of it…

DW:  It’s the bracelet?

DL:  Yes. A “wellness” bracelet that claims to have curative powers. It is vaguely offered up with not a dissimilar scientific rationale in that it “works” vis-à-vis resonances. However it seems to me that the QRay example is conversely at large, situated in a home-shopping setting, proceeding in a somewhat predatory fashion. By contrast Hutchison is a character who minds his own business and is therefore quite genuine in his intentions, as is really evidenced by the passion that drives his research.

DW: I would agree with that, certainly.

The Institute for Future Life Regression (office with neutrino signal model), 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable, image courtesy of the artist.

DL: So I suppose there is always a line between having wonder and exploiting wonder.

DW: Yes, and I think that John Hutchison is a good example of one who resists cashing-in as such, especially when we consider the technologies that he has developed for using special crystal formations in order to produce low-yield but free energy batteries — batteries that will never run out. This seems like a technology that is ripe for exploitation. In fact, if what some of my research shows is correct this type of crystal energy converter unit will be put into use in the future, and with tremendous yields. Having said this we certainly don’t see Hutchison profiting from this technology, he lives in a bungalow in Vancouver. Although, it must be added that he has been approached by defence contractors, so we might imagine that these technologies are also being researched by DARPA or being put to use in the mid-west or perhaps within the HAARP installation. Obviously any such research activity is being kept secret.

DL: It’s interesting that both DARPA and the HAARP installation are examples of advanced military endeavours that, as you say, are enshrouded with secrecy and operating with a high degree of control. Hutchison, by contrast, is very much a grass-roots kind of character. Now maybe we can bring this home, we don’t need to talk about Hutchison the whole way, because in a sense it is this grass roots style that puts me in mind of your own work, of Dustin Wilson’s scientific method.

DW: I’m interested in the dissemination of my findings with kind of an open-source mentality. Art galleries present a great venue for this kind of dissemination, and as a space for people to engage. I’m not trying to feed anyone any definitive or authoritarian line, I merely offer an interpretation of the data a with the sincere hope that others will lend their own ideas and interpretations. Of course not all futurologists are content to let the information drive the research, in fact there is an entrepreneurial brand of futurology that is by its very nature quite popular. Two such figures that come to mind are Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku, two very “pop-cultural” futurologists. What they identify through their holistic research is essentially a technology-based futurology. They offer up pictures of the future where the idea of unlimited economic growth still applies. Other types of futurology, such as advanced ecological forecasts, can only offer up models of the future where a world that can possibly sustain human life would require a massive de-scaling of global economies. This, of course, is an unprofitable proposition and really not a very “popular” way of looking at the future. In the course of my research I’ve been talking with people from the Department of Ecology at the University of Guelph, and it is very difficult for them to secure funding because the results from their forecasts invariably describe a future where we need to shrink the human population, the human economy and drastically temper our effect upon the environment.

Dustin Wilson / futureliferegression.com

David LaRiviere received a BFA degree from the University of Alberta in 1989 and later, in 1996, an MA Fine Art degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in London, England. After returning to Canada, LaRiviere taught “Contemporary Art Issues” as a sessional instructor at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton and served as the President of Latitude 53 Society of Artists for two years. In 2000 LaRiviere moved to Peterborough, Ontario, to become the Director of Artspace. Most recently, LaRiviere has relocated to Saskatoon to undertake the Artistic Director position at PAVED Arts.

By John G. Hampton

“Warblers”, installation view, 2012, photo by Devin McAdam, courtesy of the artists.

AKA Gallery’s recent summer exhibition, Warblers, debuts the first collaborative installation by Nokomis-based artists and partners Kara Uzelman and Jeffery Allport. Allport, an accomplished sound artist who extracts uncanny acoustic anomalies from familiar places; and Uzelman, an internationally exhibited visual artist known primarily for her experimental archeology, come together to produce an ethereal aural archeology of information theory through the lens of small-town prairie life.

The exhibition presents the aura of a prairie field, sparsely populated, but occasionally flecked with debris hobbled together by some absent inhabitant. The construction speaks to an economy of availability, using objects found in fields, and discarded technologies repurposed for esoteric wanderings. In the far corner sits a vacant campsite made from the loose assembly of some stools with a bench, a lawn chair and a bucket. In the middle of the room a jug of beer has been left brewing.^[1] Closer still, sits an anthropomorphic structure constructed from rolling pins, hockey sticks, salad forks and other detritus, haphazardly assembled like a utility pole made by the inhabitants of Wicker Man’s Summerisle, or Burning Man’s Black Rock City.

The first encounter with the exhibition, however, is an aural one. When walking into the gallery, the room buzzes with the beautifully ambient abstractness of an electro-organic clearing in a field. Like an acoustically immersive animatronic museum diorama, the exhibit washes you in mechanically mediated sounds from nature. The croaking of frogs bubbles and crackles out of a tinny cassette player mounted to the wall. Subtle white noise drawn from an old tractor radio rattles out of a cymbal turned into a speaker. And the hum of domestic AC electrical current is amplified on the skin of a snare drum. This ticking, squealing and murmuring speaks equally to the language of electronic interference and that of a natural landscape. Similarly, the titular “Warblers” could refer either to the modulated reeling of a cassette spool, or the similarly sounding songs of the Canadian Warbler (a bird that is common to the southern prairies that the artists inhabit).

The electronic/organic ambiguity of this acoustic environment is oddly comforting. The abstractness of the sounds of nature and technology conjure the nostalgic presence of an indistinct landscape. There is an honesty in the use of humming, whirring and rattling to represent the sounds of nature rather than a community of identifiable creatures. This honesty is not exclusively on account of the omnipresence of the hum of technology in our daily lives, but also speaks to the foreignness of the forgotten language of nature. Being, myself, able to identify only a few common insects by sound alone, the rolling of static on cymbal-speaker sounds as authentically natural as the field recording of frogs in a marsh. The language of the natural which used to be so crucial to human survival has, in most cases, faded into obsolescence like a disused signal.

In his recent book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick sets up a narrative where information evolves as a constant presence that moves through different physical shells and ethereal languages like a hermit crab. He traces this informational migration from the “talking drums” of West Africa (which mimicked spoken language to communicate over great distances), to contemporary experiments in quantum entanglement (which attempt to sympathetically link subatomic particles separated by vast distances, to behave as if they were one). Uzelman and Allport map a similar trajectory as does Gleick, but where The Information focused on human-made information, Warblers explores the information carried through the air that surrounds us, through its compression and expansion and the electromagnetic radiation that permeates it (both visible and invisible).

The sculptures in Warblers represent various methods for pulling information out of the air. The Wickerman/utility pole mentioned earlier is given more context by a small slide viewer hidden behind it that depicts a semaphore telegraph. Invented and named by Claude Chappe in the Eighteen hundreds “les télégraphes,” which translates into “far writers,” have a similar shape to this make-shift utility pole, augmented with a series of pulleys, gears and mechanical arms. These devices transmitted a visual code of ninety eight characters corresponding to messages in a closely guarded codex. Like an early pictographic game of “telephone” these messages would be transmitted from one telegraph to the next down a chain connected only by sight.^[2] While traveling Europe, Uzelman saw many of these relics peppered across the landscape, where they lie in disuse, marking a communications network that has ceased to be tapped into, and as such has lost its language.

While the signals of the semaphore telegraph travelled over the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum (sight), in North America, the more familiar form of technologically transmitted information over the air is the radio. The radio appears in multiple forms in Warblers, yet never decodes nor transmits an identifiable human-made signal. For example, their ‘expanded radio’ intercepts human generated signals that are interfered with by natural electromagnetic noise. The power source on this radio is sent through a chain of recent artifacts dug from a field: a pot, a hammer, a copper coil wrapped around a beer bottle, and an abstract form made from tinfoil. These objects are arranged like an archeological display, but they lack any accompanying narrative that would ascribe them a particular history. The narrative contained in the artifacts is left for the viewer to unravel, like an alien species receiving our radio signals indiscriminately alongside those of our planet (which would sound similar to the sounds coming from the expanded radio).

The signals transmitted by our planet, which appear as interference in the expanded radio, can be more directly intercepted through a device called a very low frequency (VLF) radio—the schematics for which are etched into the gallery wall opposite the semaphore telegraph. A VLF radio picks up the electromagnetic radiation emitted by our planet. It can be tuned to pick up an aural translation of phenomena such as lightning or aurora borealis, and indeed nearly every object and event emits its own signature signal. Electromagnetic radiation is the information of ether; it is the language of all that we see and much of what we don’t. These signals render the world, “a conductor of acoustical resonance,”^[3] and the VLF radio is its receiver.

During the birth of the field of Information Theory at the fin de siecle, it was proposed that the ‘bit’ (as a measurement of information) is one of the primary particles from which our world is constructed, “more fundamental than matter itself.”^[4] Technologies for the transmission of information continually fade into obsolescence, and their languages become incomprehensible as a result, but the information within them remains active. Devices and languages eventually lose their immediate practical usage and become languages of specialization, fashion, cultural histories, or novelties for fetishists of obsolescence. Warblers, however, does not rehash a ‘new aesthetic’ that fetishizes retro-future digital vision, but instead refracts the electromagnetic spectrum like a crystal refracts light, splitting it into recognizable frequencies across a band of extraphysical omnipresent hums of information. Uzelman and Allport’s installation renders visible that which is not, extracting the current from archeological excavations, pulling it out of the air, out of cymbals, out of unreliable batteries and transistors, finding the lost information or the mistranslated, the obsolete and the encrypted. Warblers expands the apparent serenity and stillness of the prairie field, showing not only its physical life, but also the unseen informational life that buzzes within and around it. Uzleman and Allport harvest information and artifacts from the ether and the earth on a collaborative archeological dig with the viewer, who also must piece together a fractured cultural narrative, finding the familiar and the foreign in the terrestrial sounds and objects put on display.

John G. Hampton is an artist and curator from Regina, SK. He is a member of the artist collective Turner Prize* and is the curator at large for Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum. He currently live in Toronto where he is pursuing his Masters in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. 

Exhibition curated by Denise Markonish, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MASS, USA

Amalie Atkins, Three Minute Miracle: Tracking the Wolf, 2008, video, 13 mins., courtesy of the artist.

On a warm weekend in May hundreds of artists, curators and critics descended onto the city of North Adams, Massachusetts to take in an exhibition that caused a flurry of excitement within the Canadian art community.

“Oh, Canada” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) showcases over 60 artists selected from across this country. With the exhibition, curator Denise Markonish aimed to create a dialogue about contemporary art made in Canada.

Upon entering the installation, I was greeted by a large feature wall painted bright Canadian red, holding the didactic. Next to the wall stands an oversized taxidermy-like bear created using felt roses by artist Janice Wright Cheney. The pairing of these elements made me apprehensive the exhibition would be decidedly recognizable as Canadiana.

As I moved through the exhibition, it became more evident that Markonish had curated an incredibly diverse survey of contemporary Canadian art. It has been said that “Oh, Canada” is the largest contemporary exhibit to look “North” that has occurred outside of Canada. Despite the fact that this exhibition has been mounted in the massive 14,000 square feet comprising MASS MoCA’s first floor galleries, as well as additional outdoor spaces, “Oh, Canada” is a tight, dense installation.

Artist Amalie Atkins was decidedly drawn into the spotlight as a primary representative for “Oh, Canada” when Markonish selected her work for much of the exhibitions visual branding. It seems the exhibition has catapulted Atkins’ career into a new trajectory: included alongside her work are many of Canada’s heavy hitting artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Shary Boyle, Eric Cameron, Douglas Coupland, and Michael Snow, to name a few.

Atkins’ inclusion in “Oh, Canada” illustrates the fine balance Markonish was able to strike between established and mid-career artists. Albeit some may argue that she missed numerous key players, others may say it is a fresh take (or counter-narrative) on who “could” rather than “should” represent the current climate in Canadian contemporary art.

Atkins’ piece selected for “Oh, Canada” is titled Tracking the Wolfe: Three Minute Miracle (2008). This piece is incorporates two components, a video, that may be viewed upon entering the second component, which is an installation of a white circular felted tent. Reminiscent of a circus tent crossed with a child’s snow fort, Atkins suggests that the tent also has less literal references to a yurt and a grain bin. Outside the tent sits a row of five pairs of hand-stitched, white felt boots, ordered from smallest to largest. The boots are designed to be worn by viewers and protect their feet from the snow-like salt crystals covering the floor inside the tent. Atkins’ inspiration for the boots is drawn from the traditional Russian footwear called Valenki – literally meaning “made by felt.”

The salt crystals lining the floor of the tent are imbued with layers of meanings, one being the natural healing properties of salt. Atkins associates the healing element as a construct to address  “loss” and “grief.” More literally, the salt creates a crunching sound that emulates the sound of walking on snow on a cold winter’s day in the prairies.

Surrounded by white felt, the tent seemed to transport the viewers from the 30 degree environment of North Adams to the snow flurried prairie landscape of a winter in Saskatchewan.

“I’ve always wanted to make some kind of viewing environment for the film that would extend the experience of watching [it],” Atkins said. “To bring you into the film in a way that feels like you almost become part of that world, or at least one layer closer to being part of it.”

Three Minute Miracle: Tracking the Wolf, 2008, felt tent, mixed media, video, 13 mins., courtesy of the artist, photo by Timothy Harrison Raab.

During my first encounter with Tracking the Wolfe at MASS MoCA, there was a young girl sitting at the felted boots trying on each pair until she found her size. It appeared as though Atkins drew upon a Goldilocks and the Three Bears-like inspiration to create this form of participatory engagement with the gallery viewers.

Atkins’ ability to turn a serious contemporary art encounter, such as “Oh, Canada,” into a playful and even child-like memory, while simultaneously remaining relevant, poignant and engaging, marks the success of Tracking the Wolfe amongst the many other powerful works that surround her piece.

On the last day of the “Oh, Canada” opening weekend, Atkins performed the soundtrack to Tracking the Wolfe live. Accompanied by her sister Tanjalene Kuhl on piano and a choir comprised of MASS MoCA employees, together they created a live musical version of I’ve Got A Full Set of Teeth, the theme song to her film. Atkins sat on a red felted bicycle, her pedaling generated the projection of the video Three Minute Miracle, which appeared on a screen facing her audience. The audience consisted of artists, curators and art critics, and Atkins seemed at home.

“If I had gone into that performance, with that audience, cold it would have been extremely intimidating. But because it was at the end of the weekend, and the collective experience, it felt like performing for family,”Atkins said.

As an audience member, the warmth, support and patriotism projected back at Atkins was most certainly evident and could be felt throughout the room during the performance.

Atkins encountered a minor glitch at the start of the performance, when the projector was catching the loop of the film. Victoria Stanton, who originally commissioned this performance, encouraged Atkins to embrace such unexpected performative errors.

“We talked a lot about failure and how the performance has a lot to do with failure,” Atkins said.

The glitch in North Adams was affirming to Atkins who feels as though she doesn’t need to build in that imperfection, as it already exists in the work.

“I don’t need to make that happen, probably at some point it will just happen,” she stated.

Atkins’ willingness to push her practice into an uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing place is central to the complexity and experimental resonance that marks the success of her piece.

Midway through the performance, Atkins got off the bicycle as a man with a felted wolf head (a character out of the film) appeared with fragile trays of tiny glass jars, each containing a gold ceramic tooth, symbolic of the teeth featured in the film. Atkins and Kuhl handed out the little jars to the audience. It was rather magical and humbling seeing the giddy smiles of the audience members as they received the tiny souvenir from the endearing performance.

This performance contextualized the collective and collaborative way in which Atkins created the film Three Minute Miracle. Everyone has a role or feels as though they participated in the making of her projects, whether they are an animal in the film, singing in the live choir, or rattling a tiny gold tooth in a jar, she creates a seemingly magical moment out of the everyday.

The weekend events at MASS MoCA will most certainly hold a lasting memory for the artists who were included and for those of us who had the opportunity to be there and experience the 110,000 square feet of gallery space. Not to mention the expansive grounds that house the incredible historic converted factory, that was occupied by the Sprague Electric Company until 1985, and established as MASS MoCA in 1986.

After the smoke had cleared, Atkins returned to her home-based studio in Saskatoon.

When asked if this exhibition has changed her career she replied:

“In some ways it hasn’t changed anything in terms of my art practice and daily life … it was the starting point for other things to happen. I’ve been working really hard for ten years, just making my work in Saskatoon, some great things have happened, and I can pinpoint everything and how one thing has led to another.”[1]

In this moment it’s clear that Amalie Atkins is having a good year.

Chris Watson recording in the field. Photo: Donald Strydom, courtesy of Touch Music.

Four listening instances in reverse chronological order:

I.

2011. I’m at the kitchen table in Nara, Japan for my weekly headphone session

with Framework:Afield, a radio show and podcast “consecrated to field recording and it’s use in composition.” It’s been a vital weekly ritual for a few years now. Instead of the usual raw or processed documents of the world-at large, this week’s episode features a long-form piece by the singularly-named Omalto, using sound environments found in the popular online game “Second Life.” Chirping birds, crickets, waterfalls, the brittle rustle of leaves and other bits of canned nature fade into digital footsteps, keystrokes and a fuzzy pile-on of players’ voices—one can imagine the artist’s avatar walking through the virtual environment equipped with headphones and a shotgun mic. There’s a refreshing lack of overt criticality to the work: in lieu of expected heavy-handed statements about identity, technology and conviviality vis-a-vis web hyper-connectivity, the layers of sound act as a subtle form of inquiry.

II.

Playing the nocturnal stealth game Manhunt on PS2 a few years ago in Vancouver, taking a break in the shadows and letting my character stand idle, I marveled at the sound design: the familiar dull hum of a city in the middle of the night chording with the breeze after a sudden rainfall, a soundscape privy to most night owls. Amazed that a video game could represent it so well.

III.

Headphone session in Vancouver, a 2002 live CD by the Seattle Phonographers Union, who use field recordings as raw material for large-ensemble improvisation. Crowd sounds, playgrounds and train crossings took on an abstractly-musical shape. By bringing diverse sources into and out of the mix, visualized spaces overlapped and shifted in mental left-to-right screen wipes and questions about site-specificity, narrative and indexicality eventually dissolved into a rich, pleasurable wash.

IV.

Cold night in Winnipeg in 1997, listening to The Vancouver Soundscape. A landmark work in the then-budding multidisciplinary field of Acoustic Ecology, it was a record dedicated to documenting the sonic environment of a fast-growing city developing its legs back in the early 1970s. The sound of a harbour-front was interrupted by intermittent horn blasts. Slowly, the sound of train whistles began to reply. The mind’s eye became confused: which one is it? Dock or railroad? The two sources answered each other like dueling banjos, or crows communicating from telephone wires: Is it both? Listening to “The Music of Horns and Whistles” was a revelatory experience. By manipulating two simple sound sources, a short-circuit happened: the mind’s insistence on recalling or assigning visuals to associative sounds became unnecessary.

See Hear

These experiences unveiled a secret, barely-audible world. Just as one can look but not see, one can hear but how often does one listen? It’s an old saw, I know, smelling of “Be Here Now” baby-boomer spirituality and borrowed Zen lifted out of the John Cage playbook—but one that still bears repeating. In terms of the broad banners of “field recording” and “phonography,” the act of simply listening is a welcome exercise these days, available on a weekly basis via my podcast folder. Afterwards, listening-as-practice gets carried into the mundane, outside world until the next instalment.

Field recording/Phonography goes hand-in-hand with what American composer Pauline Oliveros calls “deep listening”: an intuitive and selective practice that trains the ear to become more receptive and finely-attuned to acoustic phenomena; the things that already exist but go unnoticed. Similar to contemporary improvisation’s reliance on the tiniest, most lowercase of sounds and extended stretches of silence (“Everything quieter than everything else”, to invert the slogan on a Motorhead t-shirt), phonography makes listening an active skill, the audible world an extension of the Buddhist notion that, bear with me here, (capital-or-small-“E”) enlightenment already exists, but is buried under layers of patterned conditioning and other obstructions. Phonography and field recordingbased work can re-orient the listener outside of habitual perception, and once that shift takes place, a life experienced inattentively seems withered and dull. This kind of attention can be augmented by simple devices. Similar to photography, there is the world, and then there is the world as it presents itself when framed through the viewfinder. The mundane act of walking to the corner store can change when mediated through earphones and real-time monitoring on a recording device. As noted by a member of the New England Phonographers Union: the act of using the microphone as a divining rod can open one up to discover small grains of sound, overlooked ambiguities. The group recently recorded and performed an ensemble piece at a sewage treatment plant on an island outside of Boston Harbor, demonstrating how a chorus of industrial fans or pipes coursing with waste sludge can become inspiring, even musical once the visual referent is removed. The ears can’t see.

Recorded History

The use of field recording as a discipline and compositional tool has a rich and varied lineage. A lineage that goes back to the early 20th century in Musique Concrete where in the composition Étude aux Chemins de Fer Pierre Schaeffer confounded by using recordings of steam locomotives as music. To trace field recording as a creative practice, one must also trace other disciplines along with the evolution of its tools. With the forward march of technology, portable recording devices were used for ethnographic and academic pursuits, notably by folklorists John and Alan Lomax documenting and preserving oral traditions from field hollers to regional folk songs of the United States for the Library of Congress. Jump forward a few decades as definitions of “music” splintered through amplification, electro-acoustic composition, sound collage experiments incorporating electronic signals and processed recordings by lab coats at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and the use of audiotape as a plastic medium by psychedelic bands and for broadcast (check the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Glenn Gould’s work in the CBC archives online sometime). Add to the mix: the development of sound effects and foley work in radio and cinema, the proto-new-age “Environments” series of LPs (full album sides of ocean waves or a thunderstorm), the birth of Ambient (or Brian Eno’s version) and New Age music spiralling out from earlier progressive and “kosmische” music. The use of recorded sound evolved in diverse, often intersecting directions, braiding commercial, broadcast, novelty and loftier art considerations leading to contemporary work aided by the advent of the computer workstation.

Saturation

As sound recording equipment became more compact and less cumbersome, the shoulderslung reel-to-reel tape recorder and shotgun mic of yore has given way to smaller, more affordable gear. Now spoiled for choice in sound recording smartphone apps, one can do their flaneur/dérive thing and upload it directly to SoundCloud. Along with affordable “prosumer” compact stereo recorders like the Zoom hitting the market, there is now more work produced by anyone with an interest, be it passing and/or passionate, and consequently, more time demands on the listener. Like the advent of digital photography democratizing the medium, the audio field has become saturated with sounds posted online by amateur (yours truly) and veteran sound artists alike.

As noted by Simon Reynolds in Retromania, the side-effect of the Internet and its unfettered one-click availability of, well, pretty much everything, is that one requires an iron resolve to be selective when it comes to gratifying their archival/collector’s impulses, lest exhaustion ruin one’s sensibilities. He calls it “franticity”: the buzz of discovery, combined with the lemming-like pull towards an ocean of swarming data one can barely process. Anyone who’s spent time on UbuWeb or lost a day off digging through endless obscuro music sharity blogs understands this binge anxiety.

Thankfully, there are venues which offer curated respite. Alongside podcasts offered by NatureSounds.jp and longtime stalwart Touch Records, Framework Radioairing on London’s Resonance FM and available freely for download, is one of the key showcases of current phonographic practice. From raw documentation to longform composition, this is where the best of the medium opens up. On air, buried within the playlists of countless avant-noise-ambient community and college radio programs, venues like WFMU’s Airborne Event, Soundscape on Co-op Radio in Vancouver and Winnipeg’s Send + Receive festival’s radio program on CKUW act as venues for sound art, current and old, including phonography. Meanwhile, SoundTransit (www.turbulence.org/soundtransit) offers brief recordings from all over the world in mix format while recording boffins talk shop Web 1.0-style on the decade-old Yahoo Phonography group.

Recently, field recording has exploded. Labels like 12k and Room40 offer soundscapes-as-colour through melodic, ambient and drone artists like Sawako, Taylor Deupree, Chihei Hatakeyama, and Lawrence English, many of whom incorporate environmental recordings as another texture or instrument. Established artists like former Cabaret Voltaire member Chris Watson, who moonlights as recordist for Sir David Attenborough’s high-production value nature docs on BBC, offers dense, immersive natural soundscapes with high-end gear, or takes us to the brittle, frozen silence of Antarctica. Geir Jensen, aka Biosphere, incorporates source recordings from his travels and offers straight-faced documentation of mountaineering in Tibet. Additionally, Aki Onda works with an archive of diaristic cassette tapes and multiple Walkmans, and Toshiya Tsunoda records naturally-occurring phenomena through tubes and bottles, or contact mics to capture the creaks of a dock, or zeroes in on the vibrations made by air itself.

Another active and prolific player in contemporary sound art is Francisco Lopez, who creates long-form, harrowing multi-channel sound arcs for pitch-black room and blindfolded audience using a variety of source materials. Whether exploring the canned machismo of metal, satirizing 5.1 movie sound effects THX-engineered for maximum punch, or using his own field recordings of machinery or rainforests, these pieces tend to begin as delicate and build in volume into an intense, extended crescendo—in the live setting, an hour-long panic attack that entombs the audience—before dropping back to deafening, and welcome silence. Lopez is beyond prolific- with 250-plus releases to date and is also an erudite, knowledgeable essayist on the form, writing on bio-acoustics and is an outspoken critic of the avant-garde’s strictures, the cult of John Cage, and Acoustic Ecology.

Noise Annoys/Mercy, Mercy Me

At Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, parallel cultural and political shifts of the 1960s helped produce Acoustic Ecology, an interdisciplinary field that focused on sound mapping with a naturalistic bent, formed via R. Murray Schaefer’s World Soundscape Project. Schaefer developed a helpful list of considerations for listening to nothing happening (“foreground, background, contour, rhythm, silence, density, space and volume”), adding to the experience of how environmental sound can be perceived, while introducing new terminology like Clairaudience, Morphology, Schizophonia, Sound Romance and my favourite, Jet Pause (“Voluntary and habitual suspension of speech or other activity during the overpass of low flying aircraft near busy airports”). With a team of artists and recordists including Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp (still active today as artists, lecturers and hosts of group Soundwalks), their landmark work was the aforementioned Vancouver Soundscape.

One particular criticism of the field via Lopez and Thomas B.W. Bailey is that it

seems largely holistic, adhering to a certain morality; unsurprising since it originated on the Left Coast during the ‘60s/‘70s, carrying an environmentalist’s view of the world into the sonic realm, almost Waldenesque in assigning higher value to “natural” rather than mechanical sounds. Nowadays, many contemporary sound artists seem intent on moving beyond the equation of “machines/cars/planes/traffic = noise/pollution = bad”, insisting on creating different criteria to measure whether certain sounds should be indexed as “noise” (the now equally-saturated genre of Noise, from Whitehouse to Merzbow to Lasse Marhaug, along with its own codified aesthetic framework and micro-genre squabbles merits another article altogether). Like the volume of the rock gesture, noise can be harnessed into form.

In a time where smog-alerts accompany the daily weather report, neither side seems wholly right or wrong; urban life has become harsher, and who wants to inhale gridlock? And so, most urbanites tend to automatically tune the city out. When you focus on it, similar to noticing the lack of constellations on view thanks to urban light pollution, it’s difficult to not hear: it’s an orchestral thrum, or, in spots, physically invasive. When amplified, even moreso: anyone who’s gone on a recording hunt/soundwalk knows that one of the main enemies of field recording is the sound of a passing car. Still, rather than being an unwanted nuisance (a tree full of birds chirping merrily outside your window at dawn can equally serve as an irritant) it’s a matter of how one deals with unwanted environmental stimulus. Perhaps one of the reasons why everyone walks with their head down fiddling with their mobile device while plugged into little white earbuds now is out of a sense of self-defense. The city-dweller’s body hasn’t evolved and adapted to the bombardment of ongoing stimulus, so our toys act as prophylactics. In spaces where taking public transit or walking down a street where every third person seems to have their hustle on (hello there, Commercial Drive/Granville), tuning out becomes necessary when you’re just trying to get from point A to B.

TL/DR:

Looking at Schaefer and critics like Lopez, both have their points: any perceived rift is a matter of different aesthetic and even moral sensibilities, with an appreciation for idyllic quietude on the one side and the texture of cacophony on the other, both with their own potential. Noise, like most other sound phenomena around us- happens whether we want it to or not: phonography in particular provides a useful assessment of our relationship to our environment, asking for critical involvement in all of the considerations mentioned above. By isolating particular sound objects and events, or by allowing the background to become foreground, one chooses to hear their world analytically, or with pure pleasure in mind. The aim is engagement.

V.

My recent shift in locale from East Vancouver to the quieter and less-hectic ancient capital of Nara, Japan made me hyper-aware of the scale of sound and noise:

When navigating a new city/country, the senses re-engage with the body as it moves through unfamiliar spaces; a different operating system overrides when you can’t read the signage and don’t instinctively know North from South. Everyday sounds stand out: ambulance sirens here are different, each train line has it’s particular trill. Instead of Harleys, biker kids roll in swarms of motor-scooters that sound like weed-whackers. Cicadas, ravens, Tenrikyo followers clapping their hyoshigi blocks as a calling card, the sweet potato vendor coming down the alley singing through a loudspeaker. I’ve made a habit of documenting my new audio environment while it still sounds fresh.

On day trips into Osaka, I imagine the bustle of shopping arcades like Dotonbori and Ebisubashi to be an acoustic ecologist’s nightmare. For me, the sensory overload is a pleasurable buzz: the strobe-pulse of faces, neon and LCD screens, the competing soundtracks of crammed-together shops (J-pop vs K-pop vs metal vs dubstep vs techno, all simultaneous), barkers, conversation and ringtones, while everybody manages to keep to themselves. It’s a kind of “Gastronomy of the ear”, to paraphrase Honore de Balzac. Until it becomes annoying, I’ll keep coming back to it.

Check:

Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather and Sinister Resonance - David Toop

Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past - Simon Reynolds

Schizophonia, and Environmental Sound Matter - Francisco Lopez

MicroBionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century - Thomas

B.W. Bailey

A Sound Education and The Tuning of the World (The Soundscape) - R. Murray Schaefer

Noise: The Political Economy of Music - Jacques Attali

See also: Walter Murch.

Thanks to crys cole for her invaluable input.

Christopher Olsen (@standardgrey), a recent graduate of Emily Carr University,  is a Canadian writer and artist based in Nara, Japan. A frequent contributor to Border Crossings, his critical work has also appeared in Colour, Vancouver Review, C Magazine and The Capilano Review. Recent sound work can be heard on Framework:Afield and Instagrambient: 25 Sonic Postcards, and he has lectured on sound matters at Center A and the Or Gallery in Vancouver. His obsessive musical hoarding tendencies are aired out at www.solarflares.tumblr.com.

How listeners experience reverberation depends on whether the environment is primarily a social, navigational, aesthetic or musical space.

Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter[i]

Annie Martin, Untitled, 2011. Installation views, from the exhibition “Horizon”, courtesy of PAVED Arts.

Sound moves through the body as a physical vibration and a tangible felt experience that brings us back to our corporeality and reminds of our connectivity to our world. We need this. Technically sound production can be completed with relative ease. Perhaps this helps to explain the proliferation of sound in contemporary artistic production. But a deeper impulse than means and currency may be at play, namely a call for a renewal of embodiment and wholeness.

Sound art is rooted in the visual arts. It emerges as an art form as one chapter in the history of modernist art starting in the 1960s with the shift of emphasis from the art object to spatiality and relational engagement, performance-based practices, spatial experience and locational practices that were part of the formal and philosophical investigations of John Cage, Happenings, Fluxus and Minimalism. These movements and artists focused on questions of how work shapes its immediate environment, kinesthetic rather than visual affects, the democratization of audience’s mode of engagement, interdisciplinary crossovers, renegotiation of art and life, heightened sensory awareness and phenomenological experience.

Looking further back into the rearview mirror, developments in music extended the vocabulary and perception of that canon. French composer Edgard Varése (1883-1965) was responsible for broadening the definition of music to include all organized sound. John Cage (1912-1992) expanded the definition to include silence. Cage is credited with liberating sound from conventions and music by drawing attention to the larger context in which music occurs. He shattered the musical object with everyday sound, the consequences of which was a merger of musical and found sound, “ making music a cultural paradigm beholden to sound and its situatedness.”[ii]

In “Sound Art?” written in 2000, musician and sound artist Max Neuhaus (1939-2009) rejected the category “sound art” as having little to do with either sound or art.[iii] He criticized visual art institutions in the early 1980s and early ‘90s for including “anything which has or makes sound” in exhibitions resulting in “most often what is selected is simply music or diverse collection of musics with a new name.” He questioned whether “sound art” constituted a new art form and called for the refinement of distinctions. For him, sound art needed to go beyond the limits of music and develop new art forms as an aesthetic inquiry. When (and if) this happened, new words would need to be invented. Ironically Neuhaus has been labeled as a sound artist, a label he tried to shake off through his life, without success.[iv]

As an alternative, Neuhaus coined the term ‘sound installation’ to describe sound works that were neither music nor events.

In terms of classification, I’d move the [sound] installation into the purview of the visual arts even though they have no visual component, because the visual arts, in the plastic sense, have dealt with space. Sculptors define and transform space. I create, transform, and change space by adding sound.[v]

Neuhaus held that our perception of place depends on what we hear, as much as what we see. His work utilized a given social and aural context as a foundation to build a new perception of place with sound. In the 1960s he organized promenades that came to be know as “lecture demonstrations” promoted through word-of-mouth with itineraries and schedules that he determined; he stamped the word ‘LISTEN’ on people’s hands then led tours through industrial and immigrant neighbourhoods with no commentary; the walks concluded in solo concerts in his studio. Times Square (1977-92 and 2002-present) is a sound installation located on a pedestrian island in New York City. The sound is a humming sound of varying frequencies that emerge from beneath the gratin of a subway ventilator shaft on a traffic island. The sound is subtle and its mode of address informal – the site is unmarked. Rather than creating a confrontation or a monument, Times Square is a minor interruption in the everyday noisy urban environment. The work increases private awareness within a public site as a democratic gesture: It is both there and not there for those who happen to focus on it.

Neuhaus distinguished between music and sound installation as a difference in the relationship with space or time. Music is distinctly time-based; it has definite beginning and end times. Sound art is spatially located; sound works are without beginning or end points. While sound art does include temporal elements, its ends are manifest in spatial terms. Sound art projects can be sited in (public) space rather than in the conventional frame of musical presentations.

Two recent sound projects at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon continue the dialogue of relationship of sound and space, and of aurality and visuality. Annie Martin’s Untitled and Thomas Bégin’s Larsen Surf-Mixing Plan Model are sound installations. Both projects employ live sound in the gallery setting.

Martin’s Untitled was a site-specific multi-channel installation using a live feed of sound with four microphones positioned on corners of the building’s roof outside the gallery. The signal was relayed to four channels that were split and distributed to multiple small low fidelity speakers positioned around the four walls inside the gallery. Gallery visitors were immersed in an environment of low-level ambient sound that mapped the outside world as a Cagean gesture of everyday sound as music.

The work was a subtle poetic intervention into space with a strong visual component. Listening was the dominant mode of engagement, although visitors needed to make the effort. Speakers were attached directly onto the gallery walls at about waist height suggesting a horizon line. The audio cables functioned like a drawing element—the cables danced over and under speakers accenting the linear alignment of the speakers as a visual indulgence.

Martin describes her intention and production:

… my works place focus on the moment of embodied perception, extending that moment into an opportunity for deeper reflection. Events such as marks, sounds and actions are distanced from their context in an act of abstraction that does not sever their relationship to the everyday world from which they arise, yet frees these events from a referential framework. In this way representation, figuration and narrative and political interpretation emerge as the creation of the viewer-perceiver, and the very nature of these structures and forms is also made available to contemplation.[vi]

Not all the technological components were visible. I learned about the existence and location of the roof-top microphones and a mixing board at an artist’s talk. Knowing technical aspects of the work enhanced my experience and understanding of the work. Without knowledge of the technological relays, the sound was detached from a specific locale. Knowledge of the technological process positioned and defined the work as a spatialized sound map of the outside world in which the occasional truck, vehicle horns and sirens passed through the gallery (and my mind). I was able to decipher spatial and incidental relations between actions and sound of outside and inside with their spatial transposition.

Martin’s work is experimental and speculative, driven by exploration, research into novel situations and discovery through the act of making. Her ideas develop from her lived experience including fleeting daily encounters that defy language or have no measurable value. Most recently, she has been exploring the ethical dimension of perceptual sensitivity and pleasure, particularly the aural, visual, touch and haptic, and the formation of a sense of self and locality through perception. She is also aware of the problematics of gender but ultimately thinks that the feeling self is always a gendered self, and perhaps a racial and economic self.[vii]

Thomas Bégin transformed the gallery into a sound box and host for Larsen Surf-Mixing Plan Model, an instrument that was based on the principle of an oscillating electro-mechanical system.

The model worked with the renewal principle of the feedback phenomenon, using the system’s own architecture to develop and maintain sonic schemes.

Bégin constructed an extended instrument using three electrical guitars, colored string, elastic bands, plastic clips, amplifiers, a C-stand and wall-mounted speakers. He directed vibrations emanating from the speaker cone directly on the guitar strings, creating a “mechanical feedback system” that operated on the physical premise of an electronic oscillator. A complex of wires ran between different speakers and guitar strings constituting a ìnetî (host for a network) that interfered with, or enhanced the signal. The network of vibrating and pulsing wires produced a continuously shifting waveform using a positive feedback system—Larsen Feedback–named after its Danish inventor. In this system positive feedback occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input—a microphone or guitar pickup—and an audio output. The effects of a small disturbance are increased in magnitude. The modified sounds took on the life of a moving pattern.[viii]

Participants generated sound through direct interaction with the instrument. As a participant and listener, I thoroughly enjoyed the exploration required by the project. I needed to experiment with making sound to discover the system through an empirical process. The system was not easily evident; there were no directives or set of instructions within the installation. And I liked this. As a consequence I gave up my rational analytical mind that called for causality and simply indulged in the work. I stopped playing. After a period of time the instrument became silent and dormant, ready for the next participant. Or so I assumed. Several minutes later as I was leaving the gallery, the work erupted into sound. The renewal principle of the feedback phenomenon had used the system’s own architecture to maintain sonic schemes. I was delighted.

Bégin’s project reflects DIY experimentation with production, straddles music and sound installation as an artistic form and gives access to “everyman.” The work challenged my expectations. For me several questions arose in relation to the dialogue of sound/music, humans/technology and agency/systems. To what extend do participants play the instrument? Or do they simply trigger a system that plays itself? If the latter is true, participants transfer authorship to a technological system. Alternately perhaps a feedback system uses technology as its agent. Depending on the answer (if there is a single answer), what does this imply for us humans?

The projects of Martin and Bégin engage with space and sound with different means. Martin’s work emphasizes listening as a sensorial and felt experience that explores embodied perception using outdoor sound as source material. Her work references Cage’s use of everyday sound as source material for sound as well as Neuhaus’ use of sound without beginning or end. Bégin invites participation to generate sound through direct action; then the complex feedback system takes over as a sound generator. His work is durational but it is not music according to Neuhaus’ definition of the musical idiom. It lacks the temporal structure of beginnings and ends.

In contesting the term “sound art”, Neuhaus called for precision about terminology for forms of art, aesthetics and life. His focus was the individual within the social realm. Sound installation is situated at the intersection of architecture, spatiality, environmental situation, the body and the mind. The listener (or player) is positioned inside a complex space of aurality and visuality defined by the general relation of the found and the constructed. The exchange of acoustical experience is reciprocal.

Sound installation aims for a space of sound rather than a time of music by attending to perception. Sound tells us about spaces, indoor and outdoor. We know sound through vibrations through our bodies, not just our ears. A live sound feed from an exterior space to an interior space reduces the walls that separate these spaces. An interactive instrument invites participation to make sound. The engagement is about more than independent agency. An unpredictable feedback loop suggests that we do not control our environment. We are individuals with a social context.

Our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as what we see. [ix]

Ellen Moffat is a media installation artist whose work explores site, sound and space using fragmented multi-channel sound, text and image. She is currently exploring methods and strategies for sound generation as interactive co-creation. She is based in Saskatoon.

A Q&A between Amy Fung and Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson.

By: Amy Fung

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Cohabiting, photograph from Uncertainty in the City, 2011. Image courtesy of the artists.

Fung: Your collaborative team appears aware of problematic representation and dominant/centralized discourses raging in the field of animal studies surrounding moral authority, how do you think art methodologies, especially photography/video works, can steer the discourse into alternative ways of relating with animals/nature/Other?

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson: In the field of animal studies and particularly in art that espouses itself or is espoused by animal studies groups or individuals there is a regular and (in our view) unhelpful reiteration, sometimes spoken and sometimes just implicit of the question ‘How should we represent animals…?’

The representation of animals and myriad intended functions of such representation specifically, are also critiqued in our work, not only in respect of the disservice they do to our receptivity to and understanding of specifics and particulars, but also because our very messy, inconsistent and often contradictory relations to animals tend to provide such a graphic illustration of how we blind and delude ourselves daily with our dependence on symbols, avatars, simulacra and representations – a reflex tendency that we’re suggesting should be resisted strongly.

Our use of photography and video should be seen in the context of significant and established traditions. The role of lens-based media in representing and/or capturing images of nature (Animal Planet, Discovery etc) has had a profound influence on our relationship to animals and the natural world. Setting aside important issues such as an understanding of physical embodiment through proximity and the appliance of senses such as touch and smell, it has not only flattened the animal body into a two-dimensional semblance but accordingly, stripped it of its real nature and character into edited and fictional versions reflective of our own desires. Boundaries between the life and death of animals have also been seriously blurred in the same way, as these media have increasingly fused the relationship between what is real and what is not. In order to vicariously involve us in some of the emotions previously available only through real life excursions, natural history programmes have begun the practice of double takes. First the world of the animal is revealed but this is followed by behind-the-scenes footage revealing how the film was prepared and shot – of the cameraman behind the camera lens and his/her emotional reflections on the events – in short, a specifically human-oriented account.

Fung: At the end of your presentation, you suggest a goal of parity between humans and non-human animals. How do you think parity could be achieved between species operating in inherently different value systems?

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson: The answer to this is bound up in the idea of meeting without prejudice – meeting without presumptions, even trying to forget what we already think we know with a view to learning again by empirical means. In the case of non-human animal others (and also with post-colonial hindsight, non Western human others and those who are marginalized) it is a strategy for reinventing ourselves within an alternative framework of values. Empathy, or at least the willingness to acknowledge commonalities is central to this concept of parity. The work is idealistic in the way it wants to establish the basis of something better, less exploitative, more connective.

It is founded on the idea that we have messed up in relation to ‘others’ and to the environment we all share in order to serve short-term human (Western style, capitalist) self-interest. As artists our job is to constructively destabilize, to create a sense of unbalance in order to address what we see as an existing but deceptively stable looking imbalance in our relation to what we vainly perhaps appear to have become the custodians of – that is the world we live in.

Fung: Do you think we can tell “animal stories” or “earth/landscape stories” without mapping our human agendas into them?

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson: No, we believe it’s beyond us because we are who we are. Although we might try imaginatively to escape our condition, any such imagining whilst possibly worthwhile, will still always be human. In one recent project of ours, “Uncertainty in the City” (2010), a key component of the work which was centered around the variable perceptions of the term ‘pest’ was a series of interviews we conducted with people regarding their experience of particular animal encounters in and around the home. I think it was in full acknowledgement of the fact that these were human stories that we made these accounts central to the project. We are routinely blinded by our individual world-view and we are often surprised to find out that ours does not necessarily correspond with our neighbour’s world-view. Perceptions of what is tolerable, repugnant or attractive when it comes to animal others for instance, are diverse to say the least and when one examines those discrepancies or better still, puts them in juxtaposition with one another, the idea of cultural coherency is soon revealed as fragile, if not altogether mythic.

Our anthropocentric agendas have got us into some serious trouble and there are those who would argue that the problems we’ve heaped on the world are irredeemable. Even if that was the case wouldn’t it be, or isn’t it more interesting to test ideas that do not correspond with the logic that has taken us to the abyss’s edge, by imagining another way. There’s a presumption perhaps even present in your question, that to map human interests into our imaging of animals or the environment is necessarily problematic, but I’m not sure it’s the case. It’s the human exceptionalism with which we’ve historically stumbled into that habit that has created the mess – the exploitation on the basis that the world and its denizens are here solely to serve human needs and moreover, serve corporate greed. In any adjusted approach we can’t deny who we are, but by taking on board our essential interspecific position perhaps, if we must regard ourselves exceptional, we could be more constructively and responsibly so. There are hosts of environmental and ecological groups, activist and otherwise and we do not pretend to be directly amongst them – but as artists we can exercise subversion, playfulness and idiocy even, in the service of nudging or pushing an audience into thinking differently…

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Pest Silhouettes, from Uncertainty in the City, installation view, 2010. Image courtesy of the artists.

Fung: The issue of responsibility ties back to my initial question then of whether we can unmap humanist agendas, as both sides of the spectrum from capitalist corporations to environmental and activist groups have manipulated the representation of animals and nature to serve their own needs. The issue I’m perhaps burrowing down to is whether there is an ethical strategy into aesthetics or if “ethical aesthetics” is just an oxymoron?

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson: You’re right, that in both cases the animal is exploited or depleted in order to serve human agendas. Clearly one end of the spectrum is likely to be working at least to some extent with more sensitivity towards the environment and therefore one might presume, the species that inhabit it. But the summary deployment of such representations is still too common and unthinking. The introduction or management of ethical agendas and content in this work is paramount, it’s what we’re weighing up all the time; but to evangelize is deadly, so we just have to keep on asking the questions. It is also important to note that the work we make concerns human behaviour, historically and now. Our interaction with other species (almost any other species it seems) provides insights into specific facets of human behaviour and as such allows us to unpick that which otherwise might go unnoticed or unchallenged.

For more information:

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
www.snaebjornsdottirwilson.com

 Amy Fung is a roaming cultural commentator, arts writer, and events/exhibition organizer. She is currently based in Vancouver. More info may be found on AmyFung.ca.

Christof Migone, Hit Parade (Winnipeg), 2011, performance, courtesy of the artist.

That sound art should have a politics is something which is not immediately obvious. Nor is it a claim that is often made by its practitioners. Of course, it would be too sweeping and implausible a claim to assert that all instances of sound art in all its forms, genres and practices can be grouped under the rubric of a particular set of political strategies; at the same time, it is equally too sweeping and implausible a claim to suggest that there is no political content to the artform whatsoever.[i] Art forms do not render themselves analogous to political strategies at a global level, to be sure, but certain modes of sound art do make claims that are of a political nature, and these should be considered carefully to determine their validity.

The most recent Winnipeg festival of sound send+receive festival v.13 was based around the idea of “Noise and Disruption.” As Artistic Director crys cole wrote:

Noise could be defined as any unwanted sound… a disruption or interference. Within experimental music, unwanted, accidental or problematic sounds are sought after, claimed and manipulated. Rather than fight against the Noise that surrounds us, we capture it, create it and work with it, embracing its confronting nature and using this to challenge the way we listen and the way we experience sound. Whether we choose to order them in a way that helps us relate to the noise differently, or whether we spin them into a disorienting barrage that creates an intoxicating and startling effect on the listener, Noise is a powerful and essential area of exploration. Without Noise, errors and disruptions we would stagnate…[ii]

Noise—whether “Noise”/“The Noise” or merely common-garden “noise”—is credited with several qualities here: it is “unwanted,” it disrupts or interferes, without it we stagnate, etc. These qualities are often asserted to differentiate “noise” from not-noise (defined in terms of inverted values given to musicality, melody and other alleged indications of complacency). The question here is: at what point these qualities become questions of essence​ That is, does Noise have a nature, confronting or otherwise?

Many of the questions asked in the preceding paragraphs are also asked in the anthology of essays Noise & Capitalism.[iii] This 2009 anthology, edited by Basque sound artist Mattin and digital culture e-magazine Mute editor Andrew Iles, contains essays by such people as the seasoned free improv percussionist Eddie Prévost, philosophers Ray Brassier and Nina Powers, new music magazine The Wire contributor Ben Watson among many others, all of whom are involved either as performers or as enthusiasts for Noise music. The anthology formed the basis of a discussion group held during the send + receive v. 13 festival and, arguably, formed the conceptual backdrop for the 2011 festival in general. The linkage of noise and capital is subtle here; it is not a question, as sound and digital artist Joseph Nechvatal, in his 2011 book Immersion Into Noise, claims, that “an art of noise can also be postulated as a realm of anti-social cultural purpose directed toward the revolutionary transformation of an irrational social reality that insists on calling itself rational.”[iv] The implication, as old as the first wave of modernism itself, that disruptive forms and content necessarily have an emancipatory and, by extension, anti-capitalist trajectory is avoided, as is the concomitant opposition between avant-garde noise and predatious capital; the title of the anthology is, after all, Noise AND Capitalism. Is noise necessarily anti-social? Is it any more so than capitalism, the greatest solvent of social relations itself?[v] That noise may, in fact, be not just complicit with capitalism but required by it is not a question that any of the authors in the Noise and Capitalism volume are quite prepared to countenance. I would argue that the reasons why the possible complicity of noise and capitalism can be graphed along two axes: the axis of production/distribution and the axis of non-mediation.

1) Modes of Production/Distribution

Noise musicians, whether they be free improv musicians emerging from the groundbreaking AMM[vi] or post-Throbbing Gristle industrialists,[vii] have, perhaps, made a virtue out of a necessity by insisting on alternate distribution networks for their recorded material. Independent distribution, it is argued, allows artists control over the contexts in which their work may be produced. This reproduces the logic of “Main St. v. Wall St.”, with large music labels crushing the life out of the small, brave independent labels. Less mordantly, one might note that the corrosive effects of macro-capitalism (“Wall Street”) has on the cultural field itself; Eddie Prévost, in his Noise and Capitalism essay “Free Improvisation in Music and Capitalism: Resisting Authority and the Cults of Scientism and Capitalism,” suggests that the technocratic apparatus of capital necessarily co-opts liberatory cultural formations such as free improvisation and valorizes “scientistic” modes such as the Darmstadt serialism of Boulez and Stockhausen or the putatively empty formalism of John Cage and his acolytes.[viii] Mattin, in his concluding essay/manifesto “Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property”, signals an important contradiction here: Prévost runs Matchless Records, which is a fine record label offering authorized recordings of AMM performances. In conversation with Mattin, Prévost notes that this was necessary to prevent larger record labels from profiting off of the artists’ work at the expense of the artists themselves.[ix] Mattin’s focus in this particular avenue of inquiry is the liberation of copyright, so he does not ask the question: what differentiates little capitalisms from large ones? Is it simply that size leads ineluctably to iniquity, or is there something about the capitalist structure of relations that is culturally corrosive?

If “Small is Beautiful” turns out to be politically untenable, another implied proposition is the gift economy in the sense derived from Georges Bataille’s sense of the gift as being conceptually prior to the economic as such, in which nothing circulates freely.[x] Because pre-economic, the implicit argument is that gift economies avoid the potential for recuperation. One such example might be the manner in which Noise & Capitalism is itself distributed. As the publisher’s website notes:

The distribution of this book is going to be done by trading.

If you are an artist, musician, writer or engage in any creative activity, we would very much appreciate that you send a sample of your work as a form of exchange for the book. Otherwise you can write a critical response to the book and send it to Arteleku.

If you are a distributor or a label or a publisher and you want to get copies of the book for distribution, you can send single copies of different books, zines or records in exchange [sic] and Arteleku will send you copies of the book in return.[xi]

In this case, “Even Smaller is Beautiful.” I will admit that there is something deeply attractive about this picture of small interest-related communities interacting with each other on a level playing-field in the exchange of creative forces. Indeed, Mattin suggests that there is a homology between the non-economic transactions proposed above and the affective forces gathered during improvisatory performance: “the radical and exploratory character of improvisation should be directed no only to the making of conditions but in changing the conditions in which the music is produced.”[xii] To further extend the trajectory of this argument: the sense of leaderless creativity of a group subject as culturally instanced in improvisatory collectives, however evanescent, is actualized in the political sphere by the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.

If the equation of a handful of people clutching musical instruments with mass political uprisings seems overly fanciful, it is worth bearing in mind that this sort of the claim about the revolutionary potential of avant-garde music generally and deregulated sound (be it Noise or free improvisation) more specifically is implicit in virtually all of the essays in Noise & Capitalism. But, as I noted earlier, these were precisely the claims of a pure oppositionality between capitalism and noise that have been previously exposed as fallacious; Prévost, a venerable free improviser and theoretician, notes that, at the very least, capitalism forms the background of the scene in which collective improvisation occurs.[xiii] Capitalism mediates the conditions in which sound is produced or consumed. We now arrive at the second axis.

2) Non-Mediation

Anthony Iles, in his introduction to this volume, states it quite succinctly:

Rather than overcoming mediation, free improvisation and noise are in tension with it – something to which these many attempts to theorize music and its relations to politics attest. The stance of anti-mediation binds the practitioners of these musical interests to a modernist aesthetics in which successive institutional and formal frameworks for making and presenting art are transgressed and transcended. Yet there is also an important split – in the modernist academy this could be interpreted as refining a critique internal to the work, while improvisation and noise arguably turn outwards to the field of social relations.[xiv]

There is a caricature of modernism at work here which we can leave aside for the time being.[xv] Before we understand why Noise is anti-mediation (or “in tension with it”), we must first understand what is meant by mediation in this instance. Do the authors who address this question directly mean that mediation is a boundary membrane between sound and perception, which distorts and alters our experience in a manner favourable to capital’s attention economy? (Such is the argument of Howard Slater’s essay “Prisoners of the Earth Come Out! Notes Towards ‘War at the Membrane.’”) This is a particular understanding of mediation as such, which neglects that Noise itself, despite its connotations of primacy and im-mediacy, is nevertheless “media” in the same way that any signifying system is.

This, course, begs the question: are Noise and the sounds produced in the course of free improvisation signifying systems or, as is argued, are they, strictly speaking, a-signifying, which is to say, meaningless? While I want to retain some trace of the pejorative sense of the last word (which can be useful when confronted with the more puerile examples of Noise music), it it also important to maintain a certain relative sense of the term. Ray Brassier, in his polemical essay “Genre is Obsolete,” discusses two sound artists (To Live and Shave in LA and Runzelstirn) and asserts that they “not only mean something different than other experimental musics; they mean differently.”[xvi] The relativity alluded to here is one of competing signifying systems; a work of Noise or free improvisation has separate semiotic protocols than, say, a work of dodecaphonic composition.

However the claims to non-mediation are, I think, more radical than simply asserting a specific criteria for judgement when dealing with Noise and free improvisation. The claim that of non-mediation implies an anti-dialectical stance, insofar as mediation is one of the categories of essence as well and the engine of dialectical thought in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “[w]hat is unmediated is often held to be superior, the mediated being thought of as dependent”[xvii] Immediacy is allied to experience, and one can see this conceptual logic functioning in Mattin’s consideration of the antimonies of recorded free improvised performances:

It is important to understand that you can never capture a moment, and therefore must never attempt to make a universal truth that represents the moment. It’s only through understanding this disappearance [of the instant in improvised music] that one can bring to lie different qualities that might feel similar but nonetheless raise new perspectives.[xviii]

I must confess that I find the first statement in this passage entirely untenable and demur at the imperatives it presents, e.g. “you can never…”, “must never…”. But questions of tone aside, I would suggest that this appeal to an evanescent moment of experience neglects a fairly important aspect of mediation itself – that im-mediacy is an effect of mediation, not its reversal or overturning: “[i]mmediacy itself is essentially mediated.”[xix] While this desire for immediacy is not universally shared by the essayists in Noise and Capitalism, it does represent a desire to circumvent the culturally corrosive aspects of capitalism sketched above. That this desire is ultimately an impossible desire speaks volumes about the limitations of Noise as a political aesthetic.

Tom Kohut holds an M.A. In English from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) and has written on visual arts, new media and film locally and nationally. He currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba and maintains the website The New Ennui (thenewennui@blogspot.com).