JAMES WYNESS
  • Home
  • about
  • news
  • projects
    • music >
      • ubanu tarasa
      • fouter and swick
      • music for film
      • discography
    • sound art >
      • words on resilience
    • photography >
      • prints for sale
      • Evidence
      • Rural Hours
      • collage
      • photozines >
        • the fundamentals of architecture
        • crusts
    • moving image >
      • The Landowner
      • Conversations with a Forest
    • Archive
  • Blog
  • Contact

WORDS ON RESILIENCE (radio mix)

12/7/2022

0 Comments

 
I’ve blogged a little already about the Words on Resilience residency. I’m waiting for the final tweaks to the three screen audio-visual installation to be made for the virtual gallery and in the meantime I decided to begin work on ways of presenting the work for radio and sound installation. 

The audio work can be streamed or downloaded from Bandcamp

There are two components, the spoken word and the music. I took some time with the music - recording, re-recording and remixing both new and old ideas from both musique concrète and electronic sources. For the spoken word layer I listened through hours of recordings and selected those passages, both conversational and read, that I thought best represented the writing and the ideas of the writers.

Perhaps the biggest difficulty in a conversational practice with a tangible outcome is that of discovering how to draw the listener into the pace and flow of the actual conversations themselves without merely presenting a document of the events. There’s also the added challenge of lending some kind of consistency to conversations and readings captured both in the field (literally) and in different interiors. The next phase is to experiment with the spatial distribution of the voices in a multi-channel version of the work.
0 Comments

The Landowner (surveying, fretting, stamping, sifting)

26/6/2022

0 Comments

 
With my new moving image project, The Landowner, I'm gathering together the last few years' worth of research and experimentation under one canopy. And not before time. This is the first iteration of a landscape project built around a character, a persona if you like, someone you'll find almost anywhere in the Borders, town and country. Landowning in the Borders is a feisty topic. We have two hereditary dukes who own most of Southern Scotland and a raft of smaller toffs, wealthy farmers and other 'private' individuals who carve up the rest. If you live here you'll meet them eventually. Some are wonderful people, some not so much, as you'll find anywhere in any social setting. Above and beyond the individuals what interest me is the established system (and here it is very much established) along with the traditions, assumptions, behaviours and attitudes that humans adopt vis á vis land use, land ownership and of course landscape itself, the wider field of artistic investigation.

In all of this it's important for me to avoid a literal approach to any of the concepts, themes or topics that I want to investigate around landscape. My first short Landowner film therefore leans heavily on ambiguity, uncertainty, disruption, allusion, connotation and non-linear narrative, alluding to some of the tropes and clichés of the eerie, the unsettled and the genre of folk-horror. It's through these different lenses that I've come to understand the disputed, contested and often inexplicable landscapes surrounding me.

​I've taken great care with the sound design, resulting from my tried and tested experimental methodology. I'm fascinated by the chemistry between image and sound, between film-sound theory and practice. Future iterations will likely make do with less and less material until I get right down to the bone, the core of what it is I'm trying to do.

When I was looking at an outfit for the role at a very posh country gents shop in Kelso, a well-to-do hunting/shooting/fishing chap burst in dressed exactly the way I wanted. There's a specific 'look' to be acquired. To be honest some of the kit is of high quality, comfortable and functional for long days in the field. I did however pass on the £350 wellies.
Watch on Vimeo
0 Comments

Hired

1/3/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
I've started working as digital sound artist in residence at the Heart of Hawick, under the auspices of Live Borders here in the Scottish Borders. The most immediate benefit here is that I won't have to fly and burn up fossil fuels at a time when the planet is turning to shit.

The brief is to work with non-professional local writers and performers, taking inspiration from stories, poetry and reflections. Audio recordings of their work will be collected towards the production of sound pieces linked to the theme of resilience. These audio pieces are to be hosted in a virtual gallery of which I know little right now but will report on soon. I'm told that something is happening at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF) in May of this year. I don't know much about this either but you'll be the first to know. In fact I don't know much about anything yet and I'm already three weeks in. Maybe it's a conceptual residency where you have to guess what happens next. Never mind - the meter's running.

My aim is to create a series of environmental portraits rather than simply create some kind of documentary. I suspect the virtual gallery will determine the shape of some of the work. I'm also interested in recursive methods of exploring the theme, for example by having participants comment on their own readings. This technique brings out deep emotional and psychological layers.

I’m curious about how people manifest resilience in difficult times. We've all had to suffer the consequences of a pandemic over the last two years. I’m also curious about the reasons why people choose to practice forms of art or creativity, whether they wish to express themselves, respond to internally or externally driven challenges, unfold a method of working, reach the culmination of a period of research. Resilience manifests itself across all of these activities. Sound is a somewhat austere medium yet the rewards are unique. Responding to human situations by means of sound alone can allow facets and nuances of human experience to emerge that cannot be rendered in the visual domain. I want to continue to develop my interest in what I’d call the anthropology of radiophonic practice, that is to make sound works that examine and investigate challenging human contexts by means of the human voice, human activities and environmental sound. This extends into the anthropology of work and workplaces and into the complex relationships between an individual and wider society. ​
0 Comments

CYCLOPS

30/1/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Cyclops is a work for radio using voice and the sounds of industrial machinery. The work touches on noise, capitalism and the worker, presented through the lens of Karl Marx's Capital.

In the noisy world of the cities, streets and workplaces I often think of the relentless stress caused by machinery on our sensory apparatus, particularly on our ears and thereby on our mental and physical health. During the industrial revolution, and still in many countries to this day, workers suffer the double oppression of capitalist exploitation and the excesses of machine noise. Perhaps the noise of these 'machines of cyclopean dimensions' stands as a fitting metaphor for capitalism at large. Capitalism as social and political noise.

Both Cyclops and Jericho are flexible enough to work as performance pieces.

Recordings were carried out in the Scottish Borders and Southern Estonia. You can listen on Bandcamp. The audio file is 24bit/48kHz and the download includes a 12 page pdf catalogue.

Mixed and mastered at Faraway Studio, Jedburgh..
0 Comments

CONTAGION

18/1/2022

0 Comments

 

radiophonic work-in-progress

Picture
I recently published Jericho as a digital download and before that I wrote three short articles on recorded sound and sympathetic magic.  I'm currently at the R&D phase of a new project for radio called Contagion. This will combine my interests in electroacoustic composition and photography, taking account of the ideas developed across the three Marcel Mauss articles in the form of spoken word layered with different sounds. 

The pandemic has forced many of us to dig deep in our respective practices. Some good work in different media is emerging from engagements with the domestic and other immediate environments. In Contagion I want to look at and listen to those objects in the domestic and personal environment which carry sympathetic resonance of the kind discussed in my articles on Mauss and magic. Listening will involve activating and energising objects of interest, paying attention to interior and exterior spaces and using recording technologies to reveal sounds beyond the everyday experience. This will be followed by a deep consideration of the musical potential of such sounds though this won't be a musical composition as such. Looking will require taking stock of the hundreds of possessions accumulated over years that we insist on hoarding for sentimental or even irrational reasons, then figuring out how to represent these as photographs, whether as still lifes or as elements in a documentary investigation. An (anarchic?) archive.
​
0 Comments

JERICHO

15/1/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
I’m curious about how we try to understand sound, its mechanics and manifestations, its social and political contexts, in short the anthropology of sound.

Jericho is an audio work for voice and environmental sound which examines scientific and historical understandings of sound. It's published on Bandcamp. The publication includes a twelve page pdf catalogue.

All recordings were taken in and around the Scottish Borders town of Jedburgh, both day and night, in January 2022 using a matched pair of Audio Technica 3032 omnidirectional microphones in a head-spaced barrier array.

​Mixed and mastered at Faraway Studio, Jedburgh.

0 Comments

Marcel Mauss, Sympathetic Magic and Recording Sound

4/1/2022

0 Comments

 

Part 3. Contagion

Now we get into the core of my argument. I already quoted from Mauss’s definition of magic as follows - ‘..if the whole community does not believe in the efficacy of a group of actions, they cannot be magical’ (p23).This doesn’t mean that anything we believe in is magical but it does invite further examination if we consider degrees of proximity or distance, correspondences and transformations between real life and representations such as sound recordings and photographs.

Before that discussion we might digress to consider the debatable notion of artist-as-magician in the context of art, and the presentation of works of sonic art, acknowledging the importance of the rite. Mauss (p10) speaks of ritual’s basic idea as that of ‘the sacred’. We consistently find rituals of listening to recorded sound, in the conventions and conditions of framing the listening as part and parcel of the artistic mode. We find a measure of sanctity - look, listen but don’t come too close and don’t touch. The conditions of the rites of magic demand that the time and place is strictly prescribed, as we find in the art world.

Mauss holds that magic can be seen as ‘a world of ideas which imbues ritual movements and gestures with a special kind of effectiveness, quite different from their mechanical effectiveness (p25). ‘Act and actor are shrouded in mystery (p29). For more understanding of the artist-as-magician I invite the reader to examine chapter 3 of Mauss’s volume and make the often humorous connections - what artists wear, often as group, the belief held by some that artists are a class apart, the forming of secret or exclusive clubs and cliques (often with manifestos).

Returning to the main argument Mauss argues that words, gestures and thoughts are forces in themselves. ‘He (the magician) is to be found in many places at once’ (p42). This is where we discover the powers of the microphone, recording device, playback system and associated paraphernalia, in their ability for example to replicate the artist’s voice, utterance, actions or abstractions thereof. 

With socially approved ritual come deontic powers attributed to the artist. As with the magician, we hand over various powers to the artist under the terms of an unspoken contract. This is exploited in various ways using different degrees of force and power. Mauss (p60) speaks of the requirement of ‘special mental states’ - ‘you must have faith, the whole thing must be traced with the utmost seriousness’.

We might also consider the materials of the magician and the artist - useless leftover objects from places of the dead or where spiritual resonance exists in the mind of the artist - ‘anything which is usually thrown away or considered useless’. For more on this I urge you to explore sonic pursuits related to Arte Povera. 

My main point converges on sympathetic magic and the three principal laws (contiguity, similarity and opposition). ‘Things in contact are and remain the same - like produces like - opposites work on opposites’ (p79). It’s here that I believe we must examine closely the nature of this ‘contact’ between real-life event and the representation that sound recording affords. This would help us unpick the somewhat mysterious and counter-intuitive notion that ‘the fortuitous connection between thoughts is equivalent to the causal connection between things’ (p79). Contiguity identifies the part with the whole. A street recording can represent that whole place at all times. Temporal and spatial separation are overcome.

Everything that has come into contact with a ‘being’, or by extension a place, is relevant (to the magician). These conjure up the very person or place. From this magical continuity arises the idea of contagion in which all manner of attributes are transmitted along a sympathetic chain. It takes  but a small step to see similarities with the recording chain. ‘Contagion is limited to those properties which the magician detaches and abstracts from the whole’. In other words through selective transformation and editing the material is reworked. ‘Sentiments are also transferred’ (p84). I don’t have data on this but I have heard many people talk of the spirit or the emotional impact of a recording, sentimentalising the place represented, transferring the assumed sentiment inherent in the environment of the original experience (felt if at all of course by the recordist/artist) to the new detached and dislocated playback space of the recording. It is evidently important for anyone interested in these matters to examine the nature or degrees of similarity between reality and representation, then perhaps in the domain of value we might ask to what extent, if at all, a recording is a poor substitute like a cheap doll, depending on the specifics of mechanics and engineering?

Like produces like - we relive the spaces, places people and events in a recording and are guided to aspects ostensibly of the artist’s choosing. The recording stimulates the memories and subjective impacts of real events, dominating in its new role as representative, as an ambassador of the real. 

Magic is believed and not perceived
0 Comments

Marcel Mauss, Sympathetic Magic and Recording Sound

2/1/2022

1 Comment

 

Part 2. Belief

As I wrote earlier, I'm developing the proposition that the processes of audio recording (and film and photography to different extents) along with the social context around these processes share fundamental features with magic, sympathetic magic and more specifically the chain of contagion as discussed my Marcel Mauss.

Before I dive into the work of Mauss I find it helpful, in terms of putting flesh on the bones, to pay heed to the ideas of Allen S. Weiss in Phantasmic Radio who speaks of radiophony's history and current forms in terms of transmission, disarticulation, metamorphosis and mutation rather than communication and closure.  For historical perspective I would also bear in mind Edison's radiophonic moment of 6 December 1887 when voice and sound became disembodied, heralding the dance and play of sympathetic magic that I'm attempting to understand and explain.

'If the whole community does not believe in the efficacy of a group of actions. they cannot be magical' (p23). Try telling someone who's weeping that 'it's only a film' or that a recording of a musical performance is simply air being moved by loudspeakers or that a photograph of a deceased loved one is ink on paper. We believe and it's this belief that invites the comparison with sympathetic magic. This has nothing to do with the artist being a magician, though some artists would love to be considered as such by setting themselves apart and shrouding their activities in mystery. Artistic skill and techniques - these are matters of cause and effect.
1 Comment

Marcel Mauss, Sympathetic Magic and Recording Sound

1/1/2022

0 Comments

 

Introduction

I am about to embark on a period of sound recording, primarily in the outdoors. Final destination as yet unknown.  Before I do so I want to to explain my ideas on what I believe takes place when we make recordings and play them back in a manner that might be considered as ‘faithful’ to the original. This isn’t a discussion about technology as such, microphones and speakers for example, though the use and development of recording technology obviously have a place in the wider discourse. Nor is it the unfolding of a subjective or personal aesthetic, a clever cosmogony or even an ontology, designed to set me apart from everyone else, though fundamentally there are elements of subjectivity in my very choice of ideas to adopt and develop. This is very much a discussion that converges on specific topics of anthropological interest and on social matters more generally. I've always believed that the social sciences offer more satisfactory explanations of artistic processes than purely technical, aesthetic or other philosophical descriptions and understandings. What I'll be explaining is what I actually believe takes place when we record and play back sound (and I might add when we make certain kinds of movies and photographs) and how these are socially received.

We now have an established and blossoming field of academic sound studies which sits, uncomfortably at times, alongside a vast range of personal and small collective belief systems on the agents, actions, contexts and results of the processes involved in audio recording. Thankfully not all of this is technical and a lot of it is helpful and well thought out. Academic research has strengths and weaknesses driven as it is by the need to publish which carries with it the need to recycle the thoughts and writings of canonic individuals groups and institutions. Much of it overlaps with what others are saying which results in progress by very tiny increments to the overall mass, at times of great value it must be said. Some of the research is contrived and perhaps even insincere in that the writers don’t really adhere to what they’re writing or have worked practically to establish the truth of what they claim. I find it difficult to take seriously ideas that refuse any grounding in the world of production and the body, making and listening for example.

The non-academic discourse, including reviews and opinion pieces in independent sound journals and online platforms, is a separate study. What I like about some of this is that we occasionally find examples of ongoing long-term and large-scale research, field work and production that leads to or is driven by a theory or a methodology which the artist sticks to it or modifies as required by conditions, producing interesting work along the way. I like that a lot even if I don’t agree with the theories or appreciate the results. It’s what drives the collective practice 

In the early to mid-2000s I found myself doing a lot of work with sound recordings, investigating problems of representation, documentary and ethnographic forms and as a result questioning many of the accepted theories, hypotheses and beliefs on what was becoming a quasi-musical genre, that of field recording. Because of the added levels of complexity brought about by techniques of abstraction, the discussion around how electroacoustic music fits into the picture should be for another day. I began theorising what I was doing along the lines of a chain of several different modes of activity, behaviour and attention, differentiating between the one who simply listens as they walk with no particular goal to the one who listens attentively or with intention and even adopting specific strategies, to the recordist who listens selectively through headphones with quite clear intentions, to the artist or engineer who listens to the work-in-progress and finally to the listeners, the audience, of the final work. Though worthy of consideration and elaboration this is all very obvious. But within this I discovered another important thread, brought to light by the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss and clarified by further reading and understanding of the problem of representation, especially in the realm of photography. This was my first practical understanding of what Mauss calls the chain of contagion, in the context of sympathetic magic.

I’ll call this my hypothesis or theory and by this I mean something I believe to be true (so far), something useful in understanding the mechanics of what I do, what I can do in the future and perhaps even why I do it. This understanding of how the recording process operates, from listening in the field to listening through loudspeakers, has served me well. It’s based on a close reading of A General Theory of Magic by Marcel Mauss and is quite simple. Before you log off let me stress that this isn’t a trivial or light-hearted humorous theory. It’s as scientific as can be, a working hypothesis that replaces all the others I’ve worked with and which waits to be superseded by a better one. I’m not interested in talking about pulling rabbits out of hats or calling upon demonic or celestial forces, rites in other words, and neither was Marcel Mauss (though I can and will discuss later some correspondences between artists and magicians). If you read the prologue you’ll find that Mauss is not interested in the plan or composition of the magical rite but in the nature of magic’s working methods, the beliefs, feelings and agents involved. As he says, ‘In magic we have officers, actions and representations..’ (p23) 

This then is a theory based on the social conditions around field recording and how these resemble point-by point those of sympathetic magic in particular. The process of sympathetic magic is best explained by J.G Frazer, as quoted by Mauss. There are two laws of sympathetic magic, the law of similarity and law of contiguity. '‘Like produces like: objects which have been in contact, but since ceased to be so, continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed'. One might add as a corollary ‘The part is to the whole as the image is to the representation.’' p15. What does this mean? I take it to mean that the contact, the massive complexity of that contact, between the recording device(s) and the real world, once broken, distanced from the source, appropriated and reproduced, continues to produce its effects (more or less), even into the realm of emotion and sentiments. Someone records a few minutes of wind in the trees and plays it back. I believe I'm listening to the forest itself. I can't help myself - its there, clear as day, even if I'm tucked up in bed with the headphones on. There is something profoundly contagious at work.

For sure it could be argued that all I’ve done is to go through Mauss’s text and make correspondences between the various aspects of magic that he discusses and aspects of the recording process. However the points of similarity are too strong for me to ignore and it’s in the following blog posts that I’ll explain why.

Finally none of this relegates or denigrates in any way those idiosyncratic statements or working hypotheses of other individual artists who will have put in every bit as much (if not more) effort into figuring out what they do and why as I have. Indeed it’s the accumulation of knowledge produced by dedicated research, field work and production that drives my ongoing enthusiasm for audio art.
0 Comments

    James Wyness

    news, projects, research

    Archives

    October 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    March 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021

    Categories

    All
    Climate Change
    Collage
    Composition
    Film
    Installation
    Landscape
    Music
    Photography
    Research
    Socially Engaged Practice
    Sound
    Sound Art
    Still Life
    Welcome

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • about
  • news
  • projects
    • music >
      • ubanu tarasa
      • fouter and swick
      • music for film
      • discography
    • sound art >
      • words on resilience
    • photography >
      • prints for sale
      • Evidence
      • Rural Hours
      • collage
      • photozines >
        • the fundamentals of architecture
        • crusts
    • moving image >
      • The Landowner
      • Conversations with a Forest
    • Archive
  • Blog
  • Contact