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.