Paul Whitty is a sound researcher and composer. He is currently Head of the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University where he works with SARU and curates audiograft with Patrick Farmer. He spends a lot of his time marking out football pitches.
A recent sound work Take it to the Corner developed with producer Grace Crannis was part of Who Are Ya? Exploring Art, Identity and Football at Tate Modern and Jumpers for Goalposts a festival of football culture at Printworks, London. Curatorial projects include Get Some Chalk On You Boots! an exhibition, conference and series of publications investigating the sounding cultures of football.
Exploration of Spatial Narratives: Our daily encounters with spaces resides in the ordinary, often the primacy is given to the visual sense. A space is not only the ceiling, walls, floor, or the configuration of the objects, but it has a wider context. It is not empty, but belongs to a community of people, and is filled with historical, cultural and geographical legacies, stories and memories. I want to rebut the idea that a space is something static and unchangeable, which has important societal and artistic repercussions.
(…) Walking through a space, we engage ourselves in temporal experiences of space through the act of looking, measuring, sensing and listening. Over time, we are able to perceive spatial subtleties, which presents new opportunities. To read a space, or narrativity within architecture is a form of spatial storytelling. By looking at the floors, walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of a building, and observing the markings, transformations and rotting of materials, smelling the muffled odours and hearing the ticking of the old heating system, we experience the idea of architecture as a spatial narrative.
Be a Knife – reflections on the critical moment: The view of reality as a series of interconnected crises, which are part of a larger collective structure, brings me to the critical moment. A split, crack, shiver, sigh, or break which is always sharp and sudden, a sensorial shift which often leads towards a new situation or opportunity. The critical moment can be viewed as an in-between space, where different experiences and perceptions of time occur, with the possibility of also missing or not seizing the opportunity. And I wonder if it is possible to “create” a critical moment? What are the conditions or elements in the Umwelt of the artist which may lead to a critical moment? What are the manifestations of Kairos, or the critical, opportune moment?
Professor of Mixed Media, performance and sound art Esther Venrooij considers her dual roles as artist and composer as occupying two different sensorial planes. She creates work in a variety of media, such as composed music, improvised combinations of electronica, video and site-specific installations. A keyword in her artistic research practice is “experience”. She wants to come to a different understanding of architecture, with the possibility of creating a relationship between the physical environment and the “immaterialities” of space, like sound and movement. Having collaborated live and in the studio with a variety of visual, sound and dance artists, Venrooij’s biography reads like a mixed media map of projects. She has performed and presented her works extensively for audiences in Europe, Asia and United States. In 2015, she completed her PhD studies in Art at KULeuven with an exhibition of a series of sound installations and a dissertation: ‘Audio Topography: The Interaction of Sound, Space and Medium’. In februari 2018 she was granted a ZAP-mandate at KULeuven, in the field “Spatial Experiences: Spatial Experiences: Visual, Auditory, Sensorimotor, Tactile and Conceptual” and is he supervising the doctoral research projects.
I’ve been thinking about birds a lot, and especially miss the chatter of Kittewakes from the cliffs of my hometown in the North East. I started to record the birds directly around me, which led to live streaming for Soundcamp’s Reveil project on international dawn chorus day with my good pal Oliver. We streamed the chorus from Pony Wood, located within the Fairfield Nature Reserve in Lancaster. The recording of our Live stream can be heard here.
We are hoping to continue to record the dawn chorus throughout the weeks in various locations around Lancaster to capture the beautiful communications of birds locally in the silence of the morning.
Kathryn Tovey grew up in the North East of England, now living and working in Lancaster where she graduated from Lancaster University in BA Fine Art. She has also studied and exhibited in Bendigo, Australia and is currently working on interactive performances with arts organisation GRAFT. Her work brings together site specific performance, video documentation and installation in layered works that invite the audience to reflect on human relationships with the natural world. She is often found working outdoors with her cocreator Caleela.
Honestly, I have not been watching much recently besides watching after my one year old daughter ;) My evenings are occupied with catching up with reading and writing. But seriously, I have much reduced watching and listening to mediated, external stuff for the benefit of watching and listening to the immediate surrounding. (Nevertheless, as part of my research includes the Archives of the World Soundscape Project, I have occasionally been listening to some of their work). But primarily I spend long hours on watching and listening to the Vancouver coastline and especially tidal zones which is subject to my current soundscape/soundwalk project. I have been watching changes of the water level and how tidal pools are being constantly formed and dissolved. I have been listening to limpets, barnacles, grass shrimp, harbour seals, blue herons, western gulls, wood ducks among others. I recommend barnacles and herons, especially the piece by the latter in which they clap their beaks.
So in few words: Vancouver tidal zones (feat. the aforementioned species) and Vancouver harbour (feat. bulk carriers, oil tankers, breakbulk carriers and container ships)
Watching:
Starling nesting in a wooden head of an eagle that crowns one of the totem poles at Stanley Park in Vancouver.
Ravens crushing mussels and clams against the surface of a sidewalk at the Sunset Beach in Vancouver.
Working on:
I’ve been keeping up my sonic journal while soundwalking in and around Vancouver.
Following the imposed trend of going online, I have also continued working on Fragmentarium club, a little soundwalking initiative I have been running in Stockholm. One way of elaborating on this rather elusive platform is through an audio cast which is dedicated to the unspectacular, infra-ordinary, fragmentary, and slow. The broadcast happens irregularly and is programmed on-the-go. We just launched a little soundscape composition focused on domestic soundscapes during the pandemic.
Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, and soundwalker interested in attending to (as in paying attention) and recording (as in calling to mind and heart) the diversity of human and other-than-human realms and existences. In his design and art practice, besides working with existing documents, archives and heritage, Smolicki develops new modes of sensing, field-recording, para-archiving, and mediating stories and signals from various sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through soundscape compositions, soundwalks, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, audio-visual installations, and diverse forms of writing.
It’s sadly been very hard to keep motivated or find the mental space/energy to create during all of this (there’s been a sort of weird pressure to have to make lots of work through quarantine – which personally has had more of the opposite effect)… Amongst other things, lockdown has also meant moving back into my old family home to give care + is a place that has unfortunately become all too haunted over the years. I did however manage to record/release ‘Lung Toy’ on a whim after finding a fantastically horrid toy accordion + have been savouring any time out in this lush yet surreal Spring making field recordings (Ohh the birdsong at the moment!). Now, I’m trying to use the opportunity to disentomb the family archive of photos/videos – with hopes of using material/write/sample in an attempt to exorcise some of the many ghosts that live here in lockdown too.
Beth Shearsby is an experimental artist based in Oxford. Exploring sound as a vessel for introspection + release throughout live improvisation + performances. Using synthesisers, tape loops, D.I.Y circuits + other materials to build evolving soundscapes, drones + instances.
She is also an active member turned Session Assistant with Young Women’s Music Project: an educational feminist charity that aims to build a sisterhood of creatives by providing an inclusive, non-judgemental, safe space for musical expression. Through free weekly workshops, events, opportunities + more.
I just finished my thesis, after 2 years of research about the influence of the audible on spatial experience, including methods and approaches. Now, that’s submitted yet I feel like this just the beginning! I turn towards my arrangements and compositions with the information from my research as support. As a Sonic Scenographer, I am always thinking and listening through the space!
With a side module of ‘Sonic Archival Practice’ in my MA, I understand the value and power of the audible archive. Further, with support of documented workshops of Pauline Oliveros, I remember how listening is visceral – which is interesting to then forego intellectual or cerebral reason, to learn to feel through the ears and act of listening, without selectivity or discrimination.
Fiona AR Patten is a sonic scenographer based in the Netherlands. She enjoys to consider the audible as a medium of activism, to create spatial listening arrangements as to evoke a sense of curiosity and empowerment in the listener.
Tim Parkinson (b.1973) has consistently pursued an independent path, seeking to engage with whatever it means today to be a functioning composer in the world. His music has been described as “reconstructing music from the ground up”, and “sounding like nothing else”, the work invariably returning to fundamental questions around the meaning of sound.
His music is mostly performed around the world by a dedicated community of friends and musicians, but he has also written for various groups and ensembles including Plus Minus, Apartment House, [rout], Incidental Music, Dedalus, Edges, Basel Sinfonietta, London Sinfonietta; and for various instrumentalists including Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Julia Eckhardt, Tanja Masanti, Silvia Tarozzi, Philip Thomas, Stefan Thut, Deborah Walker. Two albums of music have been released on Edition Wandelweiser (2006, 2010), and in 2019 the electro-opera Pleasure Island was released on Slip, and Piano Music 2015-16 performed by Mark Knoop was released on all that dust.
THE FRENCH DROP The Hieronymus Bosch painting known as The Conjurer (c.1475–1505) has held a constant position in our consciousness for several weeks – being emblematic of the dangerous political world we find ourselves in. It represents the ease, and apparent willingness, of people to repeatedly fall for the simple distraction techniques of the travelling charlatan, including the oldest slight-of-hand illusion of them all: Le Tourniquet, or The French Drop.
THIS, AND THE OTHER SPACE Examining the fracturing of memory and the creation of multiple realities, or spaces, as details obscure and the remnants eventually form their own parallel narratives.
Lance Austin Olsen is a Canadian painter and sound improviser. His work focuses on the dialogue between his abstract paintings, and his parallel work in composing tone poems, utilizing amplified objects, found audio tape, and tabletop guitar. The physicality of his large-scale paintings, often incorporating collaged and repurposed pieces of earlier work, is echoed in his sound compositions, where objects within the painting studio are appropriated as sound-making gestural devices.
Forced to move house on very short notice in the midst of the pandemic, I’ve been thinking about place in multiple registers (e.g., place theory in hearing and pitch, place attachment, Bourdieu’s habitus, hospitality and xenia, archaeology). Also thinking about collapse and stress on a personal and more general level (narrative collapse, civilizational collapse, stacks of cardboard boxes collapsing, and me collapsing in exhaustion at the end of the day).
Joseph Clayton Mills is an artist, composer, and performer working at the intersection of language, composition, and archival practice. His text-based paintings, assemblages, and sound installations have been exhibited in the United States and Europe, including at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, the Lincoln Park Conservatory, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker. A former Chicagoan, he remains an active participant in the improvised and experimental music community there, where his collaborators have included Steven Hess and Adam Sonderberg (as Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar (as Partial), Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro, Lou Mallozzi, and Olivia Block, among many others. His recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Another Timbre, FSS, and Entr’acte, and in 2013 in he launched Suppedaneum, a label focused on releasing scores and their realizations. He has received commissions and grants from the Chicago Film Archive, Black Cinema House (Rebuild Foundation), the Illinois Arts Council, the Experimental Sound Studio, and, in 2016, was artist in residence at the Sonic Arts Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
Online PhD classes, meetings (low connection quality), creation of rhythms and demolition of the rhythms, spring-hot-cold-rain-sun.
Working on:
Time-space soundscape collage with the recordings that were taken in a limited daily geography, improvement of the PhD research proposal and its methodology, and sound map project.
Sena Karahan is an architect and PhD student at MSFAU, Urbanism program. She wrote her thesis; Social Reproduction of Space and Soundscapes at Istanbul Bilgi University Cultural Studies Master Program.
Before engaging with academia she worked as an architect at the architecture studio, Selin Maner Architects, and later with her personal interest on the sustainable design, she travelled in South America for fourteen months from Argentina to Colombia.
Her interest in the relation of sound and space was the key figure of design thinking, and that also affected her journey and understanding of cultural space. Along with that, she put her effort on her academic and professional (architectural and acoustic consultancy) works on this base. Sena continues her researches and productions generally on urban soundscape context.
