POST

Ultimately my plans and ideas changed a lot in some aspects and in others not at all over this semester. I knew I wanted to explore the affective qualities of the space I had. The event of the beating of bat wings eventually ended up almost dictating to me the kinds of textures and spaces I wanted to explore. Thankfully it was an event that tied in materially with the necessity of recording in stereo only

I made a work in classical musique-concrete technique using only fairly primitive techniques of EQ, panning, mixing, speed and frequency shifting. I presented this in the mid semester classes. Here is a long version of the piece.

https://soundcloud.com/keith-w-clancy/beat

I never worked out an efficient way to graph the structures of the sound and work with that. I intend to over the summer break and use it as a formal model for a series of works derived from this project. 

As it was this one sound became the basic overall form of the piece too. This is the isolated file of the bat flying past. This kind of integrational possibility that found sonic material can have is going to become a strong goal for my work now I think.

FINAL PRESENTATION

https://soundcloud.com/keith-w-clancy/there

This is a mix-down of a trial run of the work I performed as my assessment piece for Spatial and Sonic Environments. I had a lot of trouble with Audiomulch crashing repeatedly on account of the complexity of simultaneous processing I was demanding of it. Despite this I was determined not to simply play a recording of the piece as it's not really a "piece" at all. It is an environment for sound without specific duration or even form: it is more an imaginary space than a "thing". An advantage of having the work performative in nature is that it prevents too much reification of the work as "a work". It is more a place where things happen than the results of a happening. 

As a major concern this year has been with transport, passages, in-between states and ways in which the relation of "here" and "there" can be taken as something like a primary "choreography" of experience I really wanted to "perform the space" that I had set up, even though this "space" was a virtual one.

The reason I decided to use Audiomulch was because of its "metasurface" which places "snapshots" of the state of a process in an X/Y axis (I use the corners of the rectangle by default but other arragements are also possible). This virtual space is a kind of map of the sonic possibilities of a particular arrangement of processes. I used it in the live performance to control things like the rate at which the granulators sample and replay short fragments of the field recordings being fed into them. I also used it to control and interact with the filtering and delay times of the processing applied to the sounds of currawongs and bats. In addition it engineered cross fades between the various sonic levels of the environment I had set up.

As a rectangular virtual space the metasurface acted as well as a kind of metaphor for the real space I was attempting to evoke and transform in the work. A lot of the original field recordings I made featured the sounds of walking to and from the small digital recorder I used, as well as the sounds of my footsteps on gravel and dirt. Quite pleasingly the sounds that indicate my presence in the recorded sound-field, when accelerated, had the same sonic quality (whispering, rustling) as the sounds of bat wings in one of the files being fed into the live processing: one (human) form of movement rhymed audibly with another (non-human) form of movement and both were present in the soundworld of the work.

This isn't identical to the performed work, given the degree of complexity of the processing it appears almost impossible to repeat the same movements twice.

And that is the point of doing the thing live I guess.

The metasurface is the coloured rectangle and the white lines are interpolating between four different settings of the process. The four settings are audible alone in the four corners only so any other place in the metasurface results in a setting influenced by all four settings but to different degrees depending on the position of the cursor. The cursor is controlled by a finger on the trackpad of the laptop (or a mouse if used) and apears highly sensitive to the slightest alterations of position. The metasurface is a kind of map and is further mapped onto the trackpad of the laptop: I conceived of the metasurface as a kind of map of the "real" space as well in that it was a domain in which one could wander.

(T)HERE

Thinking about the thinking that went into the original site analysis: "(t)here" was a way of articulating space without thinking of things in space or things in their place. "(t)here" is also the title of a painting that I have kept with me since leaving New Zealand, over there, for here, Melbourne. As it is capable of toggling between "here" and "there" the signifier used here articulates and opens up an in-between space, and evokes in addition an implied movement between the two. In implying movement it also evokes things like resonance, transformation, transport, flight even.

There is a relation of my original site analysis, a fairly conscious one then, to my "monochrome" painting practice especially as "(t)here" was the title of my last solo exhibition in New Zealand. Over the past decade painting got to the point where the stripes I presented in my first solo exhibition in New Zealand grew, overtaking and filling the entire "picture plane" of the canvas, with sides articulating the necessarily temporal history of the layered production of an often iridescent and colour-shifting "monochrome" surface. 

Those works were done explicitly as necessarily failed attempts to repeat the same painting. 

In a way the individual monochrome needs to be thought of as a moment in a history of the monochrome in a way that is rare in art, given that the individual monochrome strategically in some cases seeks to be as identical as possible to all others with its chromatic quality: to the extent that one makes a white painting (or a black one for that matter) there is no escaping the fact that the new is also a repetition of the original monochromes. Thereby individual monochromes are as different as possible from one another at the same time and (especially when photographed) look more similar to one another than to any other art: where better place to situate a practice dedicated to nuance in a "genre" of painting that is only nuance? 

I would love to curate an exhibition one day of monochromes (by different artists) of a very limited colour range, a series of exhibitions in fact. I imagine that all the nuances that come with painting practices would be visible in a new light simply because colour would be, at the limit, neutralised as a significant difference. Yet even the attempt to install in the one space a number of "all white" or "all black" or "all X" paintings would reveal the individual nuances of colour, mark and surface even more sharply. After all how different are Robert Ryman's constantly white paintings from one another when you can see them in the one space? Or those inscrutable and incredibly responsive late 5 foot square black crosses of Ad Reinhardt? Seeing a group of the "black on black" paintings by Rothko from 1964 under natural light in Washington DC several years ago was a kind of visual education about how much light could come from at first barely perceptible shadings of dark.

Back in 2009 I wrote the text that follows in preparation for my last show in New Zealand. The concept of "there", the "there is" or the "Da" of "Dasein" in Heidegger has been in my thoughts since the late 1980's when I was introduced to his work studying philosophy. I am adding it here because I still agree with the understanding of place that it implies and also because for me the constant presence of a drone of some sort in most of my sound work is for me very much related to the project of monochrome painting as well: not simply because Yves Klein made monotone music as well as monochrome paintings, not simply because John Cage was clearly inspired to finally realise 4'33" after seeing Robert Rauschenberg's pristine white monochromes but because for me, like the monochrome, the drone uses repetition and scale, duration as material. 

I'm citing this here in effect so that it's clearer the way in which I conceive of sound which is from this broadly phenomenological standpoint. Painting for me was often just an investigation into seeing, embodied and provisional as it could appear to be when one is effectively dealing with illusions if not illlusionism. My sound work clearly is a similar kind of non-scientific but definitely experimental and empirical practice that could be seen as a similar investigation of scale, colour and nuance.

I still stand by these basic observations (which is really all they are). I live with some of these works still and I think they do inform what I make in the sonic field still.

(T)HERE

Why "(t)here"?

What is named, or rather not named, but indicated, pointed to in this impossible "(t)here"? Which is to say, why "here" and/or "there", at the same time and alternatively? Would it mean to be "here" and "there" at the same time or is that, as we say, neither here nor there?

We say that something is "neither here nor there" to mean that something does not matter . . . as if to matter, to be material, significant, important to us, something must be either here, with us, or there.


So why "(t)here"? This title imposed itself upon me (I resisted it for a long time), but came to be the most appropriate way of describing the space opened up by the works themselves in the way they relate first of all to their placement on walls, in corners or on floors.

It has become almost impossible for me to photograph my works in the accepted, normative way, the way paintings are reproduced in books, without frame, reduced to the mere reproducible image, without scale, without environment, without reflection. The surfaces of my works make photography almost impossible. You always see yourself taking the photograph, they reflect other works, the sky, the walls, other viewers.

We do not float before a painting, we do not magically materialise before a painting, least of all mine: we approach it, mostly on foot, we walk towards it to see it. Our experience of most painting therefore involves some sort of placement on a floor, walking or standing upright, facing a wall on which a painting is placed.  Looking at a painting we stand "here" before it, where "here" names a certain patch of the floor that we occupy in order to see the painting there on the wall before us.

I took the photograph at the right underneath my neighbour's house in Auckland where enough light came through the window shown to keep alive a small, proportionally related patch of ferns. To me it still says, somehow, everything about my painted work and how I conceptualise it. It is in some ways the effect I am after: I would prefer that a painting be thought of as a window or doorway onto what is outside than as a mirror.

When Gertrude Stein memorably said of Oakland (if I recall correctly) that there was no "there" there she articulated in a negative form exactly what I am after in my installation of works. I want to evoke a strong sense of the "there" - I want to make a place, a place in the sense of some area, not necessarily well defined or bordered but not just empty space, space charged with some sort of intensity, some sort of qualitative difference from the void, however minimal. For me the work, the painting there on the wall or in the corner or on the floor is above and before all else some way of making a place appear. Every work of art, even those that appear to "say" little else, always says "here" or "there", in their brute presentation of something, themselves at first. Even an empty gallery, like the "voids" of Yves Klein, at the very least, presents "something" even if that something is almost nothing. An exhibition, that is a kind of spectacle directed entirely towards the presentation of something to someone, is always at the very least a way of saying "there" as in "there you go", "here look at this", "voila!". So first of all "(t)here" is the name for the works themselves as a whole but in addition when you are there in the space, there with the works, there in that shared world the works and their viewers make, each of them effectively also says "here", as in "look here". "Look here" always implies a "from there". Now because the sensations presented by my works change when viewed from here, or from there, because they present themselves to the viewer in the midst of a passage between here and there, each of them sets up an elementary differential between the place where the viewer is and where the work is. I have often told people that I paint nothing, I certainly do not make pictures of things or places but at all times things and places are reflected in my works: this reflection cannot be avoided so in effect my works change depending on where and how they are installed.

In addition the reflective surfaces of most of my work ensures that at all times the viewer can see the space in which they find themselves reflected in the surface of the work. The viewer can see at all times what the work itself could "see" if it could see - including the viewer him or herself, other works, the outside, the passage of the sun through the day. "Here" and "there" are the names of the most general definitions possible of space. It seems that "here" is always, already "here" where I am, in the here and now. Imagine yourself saying "here" to yourself while pointing to where "here" might be. Would you not point to your feet? or to your heart? If you imagine then pointing from "here" to "there" where is "there"? What is indicated as "there" is always at least at arm's length away, it's always over there or out there. I imagine your hand moving out from your heart to an arm's length away, in an expansive curvilinear gesture like the sign language for love.

What horizon is being marked out (t)here?

Is the "there" the same "there" as in "there is . . ."?

A painting is always somehow "there" in the sense of "over there" even if we, here and now, momentarily share the space it inhabits with it, we can move close to it, approach it from a distance but it always remains there where we are then. My work situates itself in a mobile and changing threefold relation between situated work, specific space and mobile viewer. This is the real "subject matter" of my work and it is one reason why I think of myself as an installation artist who uses painting rather than simply a painter. My works are not just pictures of nothing, they aim to make the viewer aware of the radius of their vision, its necessary anamorphosis and perspective, in short these works aim for a kind of proprioception of the conditions of viewing themselves.

VIRTUAL SPACES

After making what were in some ways conventional "musique concrete" works from the recordings I had made in Mayer Park I decided to use the more complex processing and re-synthesis capacities of Audiomulch. This also allowed me to "sample" the previous sound works I had presented already and to re-present them in a different context, a transformative and generative one.

If you look at the "PMixer" contraption it is getting audio from many sources:

1: the "raw" field recording that featured the bat flying past preceded and followed by walking sounds and surrounded by the distant calls of currawongs and other birds

2: a short edited snippet of the bat flying past on a loop

3: a texture made from up to 90 different transformed recordings of the bat sounds (transformed via changes in pitch, speed, position in space, equalisation, frequency shifting and comb filtering) layered and mixed and fed into a granulator that samples extremely small fragments of the sound at regular but varying intervals, transposes, reverses, shapes and loops them and feed this into a resonant reverb patch that emphasises pitch content

4: the "drone" work I presented as part of the site analysis that had a prominent lawnmower drone throughout feeding into a resonant filterbank that extracts pitch content from complex sounds

5: small loops of the currawongs singing from a field recording feeding into four delay lines whose timings are controlled by the metasurface and feeding further into a resonant filterbank that extracts and emphasises pitched content (this creates the background of slowly changing ringing "chords" in the piece)

6: a pair of sine waves, each drifting very slowly around 37Hz which creates variable beatings which speed up and slow down depending upon the difference between the two frequencies at any one time (these were automated as they needed to be absolutely precise and they are formed in such a way that they appear to speed up towards the climax of the piece

There is also a pair of "pulse combs" which further modulate some of the sounds by comb filtering a sound in a periodic manner and again the speed of this transformation was controlled live by the metasurface .

In general nearly all sonic materials are presented simultaneously "raw" and processed or fed into another process as well. Ultimately I wanted to be able to move between a more or less "real" sound and sounds that would be transformed more radically but still possess the character and "grain" of the original sound.

BODY AND WORLD

The rarely discussed book by Samuel Todes called Body and World has become a kind of touchstone for my thinking about space and perception over the year. It has been a big influence on my way of thinking, along with Don Ihde's Listening and Voice and the Phenomenology of Perception and other texts by Merleau Ponty. I have also founda lot of interesting material and lines of inquiry in Steven Malpas' books on place especially Heidegger's Topology.  

Although I had often thought about the concept of the "there" (the "Da" of "Dasein" in Heidegger is a name for it as well) the quite unique perspective of Todes was an immediate trigger for me to re-utilise the concept of the "t/here" in this work.

He emphasises for instance (and this was in 1963) the centrality of the body to perception, the perspectival nature of perception and the role that the experience of embodiment has in the constitution of "abstract" categories like space and time. In short, we think of time going "forward" simply because we are forward-facing beings, our immediate conceptual apparatus (what for Kant were transcendental categories of the understanding and required for even brute "empirical" perception) is a kind of metaphorical translation of our embodiment. The book is a publication of his thesis which argued for the conceptualisation of the body as the material subject of the world: we have a "world" because of our embodiment so all of our perceptions, thoughts, affects or ideas about the world are expansions or contractions of our primary relation which is to the space that our body in itself already constitutes just outside our skin as it were.

"Awareness of our own movement implies a pervasive and systematic change of all circumstantial positions in respect to our own. As we move from Here to There we change Here to Back There and we change There to Here." (Todes 1963, p. 108). 

In other words we carry space with us, a kind of mobile prism that reshuffles all events and places around us as we move through the world. Even when we are stationary those fields move and shift (perhaps a little less violently) with our attention and our perception: I wanted my soundwork to capture something of this.

If we hear a moving sound source that movement is reflected in our perception as a kind of virtual movement we make "with" the sounds. 

When, one morning just after 5am a bat flew across the recorder as I was trying to record the "empty" space I had chosen, it immediately set off a chain of associations which gradually grew into the work I am presenting in this course. The stationary stereo recording device was crossed by the path of the bat as it flew across the field. 

The field was marked in a particular way by this event: in a sense, because the event becomes a kind of prominent mark it immediately sets the field into relief, the event makes the time before and after, in retrospect, a different kind of "emptiness" than what would have been the case had the bat-event not occurred. If the "field" is considered as the space in which events occur, each occurrence of an event makes the field appear as a field in a new way. 

I think here, metaphorically, in particular of those little blotches of impasto in the landscapes of Fred Williams, which serve to flatten the field they are placed upon, simply by registering their presence as events.

I am thinking of a sense in which the field of Mayer Park is a kind of metaphor (and an example) of how our bodies are placed already in a perceptual field that moves with us and how events within that field have a similar relation to the field as our bodies have to the world in which we move. In short, the rustling beating of the wings of the bat is a kind of metaphor for how we perceive events in the world (no matter how dark or empty that world might appear): in listening to the bat flying past, from right to left, increasing in amplitude and energy as it approaches and departs my perception follows the bat, is drawn up into that sound. 

My sound work that I am making with the bat sound is an attempt to present this ecstatic identification with flight. This is one reason why I decided to present a sound work that involved the simplest possible basic idea: a field of drifting liquid "chords" made from the distant song of currawongs and beating sine waves in the bass presented as a "ground" against which the granulated rustling of the sounds of the bat's wings could be heard as a "figure". 

In addition the way that the bat wings inscribed in the air a kind of crescendo-decrescendo "hairpin" movement also prescribed the form of the work as a whole: the setting up of an "empty" space within which a mobile, energetic "foreground" event could take place and then dissipate.

As a kind of equational metaphor it could be as follows: the bat-event (the mobile granulated rustling of wings) is to the quiet of night-time (the sine waves, chords and currawongs) as my body is to the world. 

The work I want to derive from this is a way of transporting the listener to the site and also into my imagined re-creation of an entirely fugitive and transient event. 

It is an attempt to find a way of mapping "inner" and "outer", "virtual" and "real" spaces onto one another.

VARIATIONS ON A GROUND(ing)

Would we hear differently, would we listen differently if we ("humans") were not beings that walked upright? It's quite plain to me that we see differently because we face forwards and move for the most part forwards through space. 

I'm not sure I'm so sure about sound and verticality: our ears are on the sides of our head making our hearing a combination of two quite different sonic qualities even if we hear a single source. 

Our ears don't face forward to the extent our eyes do perhaps for this reason sound is immersive. We feel as if we are surrounded by sound but we are constantly aware of directing and focusing our visual attention somewhere in particular: in fact it is difficult to look at nothing in particular although in some ways that is the state I am after in a lot of visual art. 

I noted in my site analysis that we are bathed in sound and I would like to take off from this as a fundamental aesthetic goal as well: I am after an immersive quality in all my work so far. 

I would not be the first person to point out that our ears do not close like our eyes can: hearing - which is always hearing in and from a particular situated, perspectival, embodied and finite position that no other perceiver can exactly share, absolutely unique at that moment where we are in the world - is in some senses more intimately connected to openness. 

Our hearing already has something like the future "in its sights" or, better put without an unnecessary visual metaphor, our hearing "listens out" for what is coming, our hearing is anticipatory in ways that our sight is not always or even often: in hearing we are outside ourselves and that is perhaps why a sudden loud noise is a more effective scare than a flash of light. 

It's the thunder that really spooks you, not the lightning even though the latter is obviously more dangerous.  
Looking at monochrome paintings, slowly changing coloured lights (in a James Turrell installation for example like the one outside the NGA), or just the way natural light changes (again the source of the effects Turrell achieves in his work) are the closest visual experiences I can think of where we become aware of a slow process of transformation which is what happens in most sonic environments. I try to think of what I tend to hear as the constant drone of the sounds (other than the grinding poprocks sounds the decaying bones of my neck make whenever I move my head) around me as forming a ground, or rather, the space itself, which is the thing that is in common (or is fairly regular or at least does not suddenly change) in my normal experience, that space is the ground of my experience in it. 

Space is thus always a resonant body in some way or to some degree. I think this is one reason I was excited to try some different synthesis techniques that would play with the ways that hundreds of parallel narrowpass resonant filters could be used to extract pitch data from sounds with non-tempered pitches such as the sound of currawongs: as if the virtual space of the filters was echoing with the precise frequencies most prominent in their songs. In the original raw recording there are at least two currawongs bouncing back echoes of the same three note motif: the delay in the real place was taken up as a formal principle for most of the remainder of the piece where multiple delay lines and filters capture small fragments of the field recordings and transpose them, delay them, multiply them, feed back into the system etc. This is also one reason why both the currawongs and the bat flying past are presented first of all in "raw" form and then after a delay, the variations upon that sound start to dominate the rest of the texture. 

In so many ways this whole project is now about that event: how it took place against a "ground" if you like of currawong calls, passing cars, the sounds of other distant birds, footsteps on gravel and the mechanical drone of the lawnmower at the golf club next to the park; how it is in some ways the only unrepeated event in the field recordings I made. In some ways the piece I presented in class midway through the semester was a kind of virtuoso solo for an "instrument" made from up to 90 separate layers of transformed versions of that one beating of wings past the microphone all being overlapped and mixed and crossfaded and panned. One big reason why I tend to play with reverb settings and modules a great deal in my work is because of the ways one can make a completely artificial space transform itself over the course of a piece, closing down, becoming distant or close etc. In the "sketch" version each of the tracks were recorded with slightly different settings for reverb in terms of size, decay, brightness or complexity and so on. I wanted to create the sense of multiple superposed worlds at the climax. 

This carries over into my earlier work where I do the same with a totally synthetic sound source and it's something I want to explore further. I think space and spatialisation in multichannel sound projection is the way I need to go in the future.

There is definitely a sense that the slowly changing unbroken sound is something that ends up representing a kind of ground, to the extent that large or significant changes, say one of pitch, have an enlarged importance, coming to act as the presentation of a different ground, as if the listener had moved, or the previous ground was opened up to reveal a new ground underneath or revealed that the previous ground was in fact a veil over the newly opened ground.

A lot of my soundwork this semester was about figure and ground, about how sometimes to transform one into the other

This is perhaps why when I painted the intention was always to make a place from out of a field with small incidents: the drone is a similar kind of presentation of a ground without figure, the drone is literally a series of variations on a ground, a series of puns on the idea of the ground bass. The presence of the drone, or a slowed down progression of different drones but always timed so the individual pitch lost its audible or memorable relations to the one that preceded it or followed it: this pays tribute to an attempt to use the way our hearing is anticipatory as a material for composition. For this reason, I tend to time events lately by when I start to lose the ability to remember what or when the last event was.

We hear in our sleep but cannot see. Hearing, hearing one's own voice for instance, has often been taken as the very sense of "interiority", the intimacy that is implied by the concept of "consciousness" or "mind" has therefore an acoustic dimension. Derrida calls this "phonocentrism" but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing anymore.

If we think of consciousness, especially a rational one, as being something like talking to oneself without opening the mouth, then that would also be because we can hear ourselves speak when we do speak. Our voices sound very different heard from "within" with its echoes, resonances, resoundings grounded in the embodied and situated selves that we are. Hearing our own voice reflected back to us in space becomes a source of "spiritual" experience in various sacred spaces (not excluding the concert hall).

And when we hear a singer are we not also hearing an imaginary or virtual version of a possible voice for ourselves speaking to us as we sing along in our heads?

SITE ANALYSIS

I decided to present my site analysis as a soundwork and visualised text with some images from a Google Earth image of the site. 

I did not speak the text but right-arrowed through it "in silence" and I had copied some slides several times to allow the gradual presentation of black text against white in an almost animated way. 

This was set against a soundwork dominated by a droning lawnmower, distant birds, hammering nails into wood and the sounds of footsteps on gravel and dirt.

Almost as "punctuation" I used pixels from the "pinetree" icon the software uses to indicate "you are here" on the image to provide colours for what were effectively projected monochromes. 

In this case "Mayer Park" is the name of one of the sporting fields as that is where the icon is positioned. The effect of the bright green icon against the drier, more muted olive green of the grass in the image made me wonder whether or not someone somewhere had made the decision to place the icon there or if it was effectively random within the conventional confines of the park. 

The soundwork is hosted on my Soundcloud page here: https://soundcloud.com/keith-w-clancy/site-analysis-soundwork.

The text is as follows:

We are bathed in sound and there is no such thing as “silence”. When we listen to it it is a kind of music.

In order to think about this I have chosen not a beautiful natural place but a totally prosaic park at the end of my street. It has a particular profusion of birdlife and is ringed on two sides by busy streets.

But it is really just a large flat playing field.

It is next to a golf course and hence there are lots of machine sounds juxtaposed with birdsong and cars. There is a house being worked on in the little dead end street which dissolves, after a barrier, into a path that again leads nowhere.

I have often seen the sun rise over and into the park walking home from working overnight.

I have often listened to the birdlife of the park those Sunday mornings.

You are hearing now a constructed field of recordings made over several days and at different times but with recordings made at midday dominant.

The name of the park is Mayer Park.

The name of this presentation, this “Hörspiel”, is “(t)here”

Here. There. Is there any more primary spatial relation?

It can evoke a movement between states or a more stable relationship of perceiver to the perceived.

We are here. You are there. I am here. I am almost there.

We are in the “same” place but not really. One definition of what a body might be is that a body (a thing or object) cannot occupy the same place at the same time as another.

Where are your thoughts now? 

Every experience, even the simplest, most thoughtless ones,

says first of all “you are (t)here”.

Holding out your hand to reach for something, the simplest action imaginable, you immediately make what is at your fingertips “there” in relation to the “here” where you are at that moment.

This is particularly evident when you have a microphone in your hands and are using it to focus on tiny sounds in the environment: through amplification you can bring the “there” “here” and transport what is “here”, how and what you hear, “over there”.

One source of the beauty of field recordings is that they present to us a place, in which we are situated virtually, imaginarily. This sound-walk I have put together from multiple walks and multiple copies of those walks is meant to suggest how repetition and timing affect how we perceive the world: listened to, anything can become music.

These recordings attempt to “show” what we cannot see: the constant bodily immersion we have in sound and vibration both from nature and from technology.

The idea that I am pursuing with this is about our relation to our environment, namely, that we can easily imagine absolute solitude but we cannot imagine the absence of a world and that this world is where we live, where we are.

We can imagine its degradation or ruin but not its total absence without also being absent ourselves.

If the world is already “there” before us, both spatially and temporally, the world precedes and exceeds us.

Becoming conscious of this excessive precedence is something like wonder and for me (personally) art is a way of becoming conscious of this and working with it on the basis of that consciousness.

And when I mean “consciousness” I really mean just “perception” or “affect” or “thought” or “ethics” and certainly not the common quasi-mystical sense “consciousness” can acquire.

What I am gesturing towards is something like this:

a thinking of the environment and ideas of place, space, nature, landscape as preceding anything like consciousness, that sense you have of being here or there,

a thinking of all those names we use to describe what is not ourselves

and thinking this as having a primary source in the relation of our bodies to the earth and the sky, in our verticality and as sky-breathing beings that stand and walk and make marks on the earth that supports us.

And perhaps most importantly an attempt to find ways of articulating this conception of a very basic human experience in sound and vision.

In a sense I am proposing the park as a kind of objective metaphor of experience itself, looking at it and especially listening into it from the point of view of focusing on the relation we find there between body and space, between earth and sky, in as many different experiential forms as possible.