Talks
A talk about the installation ‘Water Pail’, a work about family, Hong Kong, water famine, oil drums, and intersectionality. From the conference ‘Memory, Raw Materiality and Transformation’ 2021, Western Sydney University. Link
A co-composition with mangroves and with members of The Music Box Project. This project inquiries into the relationship between cinematic art and how we experience ecology, engaged through concepts of the dispositif, opsigns, sonsigns, heterotopic coupling, and other deep embodiment practices. Link
Sound and the More-Than-Human World
Cloud Pulses
Incoherencies define our experience. Systems that are undefined, with fluctuating edges, Just as meteorologists attempt to make sense of storm systems (Lin 2022), insects too must navigate the chaotic “sensory noise” of their environments (Halfwerk and Slabbekoorn 2015). Is it possible to examine an anthropology of incoherency? (Pinho 2023) Can we learn from the interspecies responses to ‘sensory incoherence’ (Halfwerk and Slabbekoorn 2015; Kunc et al. 2014). For instance, humans are naturally incoherent to a bee or a flower. We are not making “sense” in the ultraviolet spectrum (Koski and Ashman 2014).
Weather events like the Madden-Julian Oscillation are sonically mapped, reflecting the tropical disturbance of clouds, rainfall, winds, and pressure (Lin 2022). Native grains (like wattleseed and kangaroo grass) are used to simulate storms. Native perennial grasses increase soil carbon and animal and plant diversity. They require less resources and have micronutrient benefits (Pascoe 2018).
The ecological artwork of sonifying incoherence use aeoliphones, custom-made seed chimes, in a micro-climate deluge, bouncing on surfaces. Incoherence is an integral part of living and non-living systems (Halfwerk and Slabbekoorn 2015). ‘Cloud Pulses’ is about systems outside anthropogenic ways of knowing, interspecies processing of incoherence, the importance of First Nations practices, and decolonial perspectives (Pascoe 2018).
References
Halfwerk W and Slabbekoorn H (2015) ‘Pollution going multimodal: the complex impact of the human-altered sensory environment on animal perception and performance’. Biology letters, 11(4).
Koski MH and Ashman TL (2014) ‘Dissecting pollinator responses to a ubiquitous ultraviolet floral pattern in the wild’. Funct Ecol, 28: 868-877.
Kunc HP, Lyons GN, Sigwart JD, McLaughlin KE and Houghton JD (2014) ‘Anthropogenic noise affects behavior across sensory modalities’. The American naturalist, 184(4), E93–E100.
Lin H (2022) ‘The Madden-Julian Oscillation’. Atmosphere-Ocean, 60(3–4), pp. 338–359.
Pascoe B (2018) Dark Emu. Scribe Publications.
Pinho T (2023) ‘Tim Ingold and Object-Oriented Anthropology’. International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, 7(1).
Copy make is a demonstration video about the physicality of sound and proposes new methodologies of working relationships between composer and performers in an open and visually centred collaborative approach. You can read further about this project here in a peer-reviewed paper in Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 30, 2020. The video-essay below explores an area I felt was lacking in contemporary art music, that being, the lack of engagement with ‘somatic video notation’ or ‘video gestural notation’. Link
Such works invite performers and audiences to open up their senses and engage the body. They are novel methodologies where video media is codified and actualised by a performer, a process that is sometimes hidden from the audience. It encourages those involved to look, to listen and to enter a state of reflection and kinesthetic empathy, all of which become methods for influencing the outcome of a performance.
References
A. Gritten, E. King and G. Welch, New Perspectives on Music and Gesture (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2016) p. 6.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2007) p. 71.
Daniel Portelli, Music gesture and the correspondence of lines: Collaborative video mediation and methodology. (Leonardo Music Journal and MIT Press, 2020) Vol. 30.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/764933/summary
Nikos Stavlas, Reconstructing Beethoven: Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (Ph.D. thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2012) p. 90.
Michèle Steinwald, “Methodologies: Bill Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt by Dana Caspersen,” Walker Art Center Magazine (9 March 2007): www.walkerart.org/magazine/methodologies-bill-forsythe-and-the-ballett-frankfurt-by-dana-caspersen (accessed 5 March 2020).