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.