jackhartley16-17-blog

[jackhartley16-17-blog]

Elephant and Castle Project Space

Here I wrote a small description to accompany this footage so as to explain the piece, I have included it here to illustrate my current thinking about the installation at this point of writing:

A work in progress shown at the LCC studio space in the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre, London.

Using the dream machine, conceived by Bryon Gysin and Ian Sommerville as a meditative and centred focus, I am experimenting with binaural frequencies in composition through intereference, contact microphones and electro-magnetic pickups to accompany the visual flickers of the machine.

This is to create an overall imposed sensation for the viewer, almost in an 'anti-interpretative' manner. By this I mean that the sensations of hearing binaural tones or seeing shapes and colours from light flickers is a psychological phenomenon that occurs at the point of perception and is not affected by contextual interpretation or reading. Whilst the piece carries a wealth of semantic information, the intended sensation has a biological basis upon which the viewer cannot alter.

A key aspect of the installation, or at least what it will be in its final state, is that it is a 'tool' or an 'aid' for meditative practice. By allowing the hallucinatory experience of audio and image to synergise in the perception of the viewer as well as the natural alpha wave production in the brain that is created from binaurals and flickers, a relaxed and mindful state can be achieved.  

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Artists using Cut-Ups in their work.

Lenka Clayton

Lenka Clayton used the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ speech by George W Bush and rearranged all 4100 words into alphabetical order. This is an excerpt of A. I found it really provoking in how it highlights the selection of language and the repetitive almost brainwashing nature of political speech making. It shows how  a simple rearrangement can create a powerful re-contextualisation.

 For my filmic piece, using soundscape footage from films shot in London, I want re-contextualise the material in this manner. My intention is to create a fluid composition using the ambiences, resulting in the sense of being taken on a ‘sound walk’ through the footage. Subtle and accurate editing is key to this, as displayed in Clayton’s work.

Cassette Boy

Cassette boy has found internet fame by adhering the cut-up style composition to footage of popular culture and creating a humorous spin. This is much more indicative of effective mixing technique as opposed to specific rearrangement protocol, however I think the overall effect of his work is very well polished.

Whilst not strictly the original ethos of the cut-ups method, Cassette Boy uses sliced news footage to create a palette of sounds to be used in musical composition. The new phrases he creates using the dialogue is probably the most alike to Burroughs’ poetry examples and I like the way he incorporates political though and cultural paradigms into the work by doing so.

This is something I’d quite like to achieve in my works, though more environmentally concerned and less overtly obvious in its message. I prefer works of a more subtle and suggestive nature. Cassette Boy’s work is very obvious and quickly graspable, this is due to its context of being comedy and thus must be appreciated quickly and in situ.

Negativland

Negativland are a experimental music group from California who use sound collage techniques alongside musical accompaniment. I have considered this as a means of increasing the cinematic quality to the composition. The filmic piece for example could lend itself nicely to musical accompaniment, reimagning a new narrative from spliced segments of others.

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Tableau Cut Ups

Here I am going to display my developmental works in progress featuring experimentations with field recordings, camera footage and cut-up style composition techniques.

Here is my first example of a day/night sequence, where a simple soundscape is only activated in the day phase. I did this with a zoom H5 recorder and a Canon 700D:

I think the effect works quite well, with just basic cut out and spliced techniques, however I need to practice further getting the frames matched as closely as possible. My current approach to solve this is by simply marking the points where the tripod meets the floor in each shot so I can return and replace the camera in the same location at different times. Then, in the editing phase, I use positioning effects to fine tune the placement. I think I have got it quite accurate so far and because of the quick changes between frames, I think any discrepancies blend in with the effect. 

This next film, I used footage of a lightbulb and electro-magnetic recordings I had taken of them to produce another light/dark cut up composition.

I really enjoy this method of creation and I think it brings a new a compositional structure to field recording. It also means that I have to revisit recording locations and this sometimes produce interesting comparative results. I want to further explore more compositional techniques with this method, as displayed in the lightbulb piece, using more musical phrases and richer sonic textures. I will continue to upload my experimentations with this style. 

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Dream Machine Sound Ideas

I have discovered the Indian ragas are tonal qualities found in music based around key frequencies and they each purportedly have differing emotive qualities that are imbued into the listener. I want to try and create binaural beat versions of these ragas that can be selected through the televisions in the installation. This would theoretically be through putting a different tape or disc into the television which would then produce a differing pre-determined tone through which the EM microphone would pick up. I could assign a different frequency of repetition to each iteration; a series of meditations using the dream machine/binaural installation. 

My initial plans for this are as follows, with the first being entry level meditation and the sixth being the deepest and most transportive. The numbers per second correspond to the light flicker in the dream machine and the binaural beat frequency.

Raga 1 - 13 per sec

Raga 2 - 12 per sec

Raga 3 - 11 per sec

Raga 4 - 10 per sec

Raga 5 - 9 per sec

Raga 6 - 8 per sec

This could be considered to be a series of sonic mantras. Mantras are a keys aspect in meditation. A mantra is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words in Sanskrit believed by practitioners to have psychological and spiritual powers. There is no real pure definition of the word but it involves the invoking or repeating of the phrase or thought to aid in attuning the body, mind and spirit to a particular activity.

In hinduism for example the mantra is inextricably link to sound, be it imagined or temporo-spatially present.

- Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound- GL Beck (1995)

I have also thought to attach contact microphones to the dream machine itself in the final piece to hopefully produce some low-level, repetitive mechanical noises. The use of drones and repetitive noise in meditative practice has been a long established technique for inducing relaxed brain states.

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Dream Machine Development

 The dream machine was apparently conceived by Bryon Gysin half-falling asleep on a bus in Southern France and the light flickering between the branches of the trees going by the window caused a hallucinatory effect, in his diary he wrote,

’an overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. The vision stopped abruptly when we left the trees. Was that a vision?”.

-https://mindhacks.com/2009/09/27/from-stroboscope-to-dream-machine/

I have recorded and started to make a short video of my experiences with this on transport. I have thought that maybe I could show some of this footage on the old televisions I am using to accquire the electro-magnetic binaural tone used in the installation. Depending on whether moving image drastically effects the tuning of the drone picked up through the EM microphone, I think it would aesthetically work really well.

I recorded this using my phones camera but I think the visual effects through the window provide a physical filter to the footage which I think works well and would be further enhanced by being played through the televisions in the final installation. Similarly the ambient sounds picked up by the phones microphone make a nice soundtrack to this little piece of documentation and even relates to my project on cut-ups.

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Dream Machine Prototype

Using these instructions 

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1fj6MDdFL4YfavADUhMixXIrjjJzJrA59kGKrB-Km6XMrtT7_NP4Db-UuEcLR/edit

I have created a prototype dream machine for use in my experiments with the aesthetics for the installation and as accompaniment to my sonic tests.

I started out by gluing two sheets of of thin card together and then those onto a sheet of black vinyl paper.

I then drew out a grid onto the card and hand drew the shapes that create the flicker patterns. 

Using a surgical knife I cut away the shapes leaving tabs on one end to glue the whole structure together into a cylinder

Once all of the shapes had been cut out I lightly scored down the lines of card and glued the tabs creating a cylinder

Here is a video showing it on a 45 RPM turntable with a simple binaural tone I created in Audition and panned appropriately to create the binaural effect. The sound oscillation frequency is 8 per second which is at the lowest bracket for the alpha waves in the brain before you go into theta waves from 7 per second downwards. I have kept it at 8 to coalesce with the light flicker in the video at this stage and I will experiment more with frequency numbers when I trial the installation in the Elephant and Castle space in January.

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Film Cut Ups

For one of this series of works I want to create a film incorporating different soundscape clips from films shot in London. The resulting composition will hopefully show flitting snapshots of streets, factories, roads, markets etc from random times of day or night and at differing points in history. 

I started practicing using a cut-up style composition ethos where I would select a random film from this imdb list of films shot in London and I then spotted the film for sections of pure ambient sounds with limited or no dialogue. From there I tried to be as impressionistic in the editing as possible using only the slice tool in Premier Pro to chop the clips into audio/visual chunks. My first draft is below:

I added more footage and worked with the sequencing in this second draft:

My ideal resulting effect from the final piece will be to create the illusion of a fluid imagined, sound walk through the footage. I think this harkens to the work of Christian Marclay, particularly his work The Clock. In this work, Marclay has collated a vast library of footage featuring the time, be it shots of clocks or watches or spoken references and created a 24-hour video art representation of the days time. It is designed to be played in gallery from a synchronised time so as to be fairly accurate to the actual time the viewer experiences the piece. I have become fascinated recently with how video artists can reimagine and recontextualise visual footage or sound material that was originally disseminated through mass media for differing reasons. I want to try and replicate this in my work with cut-up compositions.

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Leith Hill Project - Composition Ideas

 Much like Fransisco Lopez’s work I looked at earlier in the year, I want to try and create as much of my compositional choices simply through contextual meaning and microphone selection and placement. I think by trying to get some interesting drones and mechanical sounds from the machinery being installed currently at the Brockham site near to Leith Hill, I could try and use multiple microphones such as contacts,  electro-magnetics as well as hyper-cardioids to record some evolving sounds. A really good example of this, is the following recording taken from the bascule chamber of London Bridge.

<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/85775760&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false"></iframe>

This composition sounds cinematic in its structure and sonic timbres. Another interesting point is that he attained this recording remotely. This was a second attempt as the first time the guard accompanying him made too much noise, whereas by leaving the microphone alone any imparted noise by being simply present in the environment is lost. This is something I want to try in Leith Hill as I feel wildlife especially will react to the observer effect, and even then will probably take a good few minutes to acclimatise to the presence of the microphone and recorder. 

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Leith Hill Project - 1st Trip Preparations

Potential Recording Sites

There are number of locations I think would be of interest either from a viewpoint of observing the nature and landscape of the area or as relevance to the drilling itself:

The Broughton prospecting point.

Pine forest (contact mics in trees) 

Rhododendron Wood

Top of Leith Hill Tower

Any electro-magnetic sounds I can acquire from existing equipment or building from the oil development or simply urbanised infrastructure that would increase with further planning acceptance for Europa.

Holmwood Common

The Protest Camps

I hope in gathering these materials and anything further I come across that a structure to my composition or installation will become apparent. I do not really want to go into this project with my own prerogatives as much as possible, instead I want the landscape and its people to speak for themselves as I feel there will be a more than one voice or perspective to be presented from any unifying work. 

On top of these I will also be assisting to record sound for some documentary footage that I believe Ellen Watson intends to create.

Kit List

Audio

Sennheiser 418 Stereo Shotgun Microphone

Rode NTG 2 super-cardioid electret condenser microphone

Rycote Blimp and fluffy with pistol grip and boom pole

Zoom H4n handheld recorder

Telephone pick up electro-magnetic microphone

Home-made magnetic microphone using a hum-bucker guitar pickup

Homemade Piezo-electric contact microphones of varying sizes.

2 packs of AA batteries

Visual

Canon 5D with spare battery.

FM8 film camera with 2 rolls of 30 shot film

Mannfrotto tripod

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Jonty Semper

Kentoaphion

http://www.kenotaphion.org/

Kenotaphion is a double compact disc album of the newsreel and broadcast archive recordings of the 2 minute silences from Remembrance Sunday services dating back to 1926. Kenotaphion was produced as a result of researching, locating and anthologising all the existing archive recordings of the two minute silences from the Armistice Day or Remembrance Sunday ceremonies at the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London. There is, in fact, very little silence in the recordings as they are location recordings from the Cenotaph and include the chiming of Big Ben striking eleven o'clock as well as the ambient sound from the immediate vicinity. Some of the earlier newsreel recordings also contain voice over commentary. The title of the album, Kenotaphion, is taken from the Greek words from which the word cenotaph is derived and literally means 'empty tomb'.

This piece gave me the initial inspiration to use soundscape and ambient material in compostion akin to a collage. 

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The Infinite Mix exhibition - 14th November 2016.

This exhibition was very well publicised and I was intrigued to see this satellite site acquired by the Hayward also. These are the three pieces I found most interesting or relevant to my own practice:

The main draw from this piece for me was how it was communicated in the room. Screens of varying sizes were adorned on all four walls with the same footage of John Giorno performing his poem but in different clothing and states of being. The multi-screen presentation aiding in transporting the self-reflective nature of the poems content. He is speaking about the dualities, contradictions and illusions of his life’s experiences and thus we are presented with differing yet simultaneous diffusions of the poem in the space.

The reflection of the work’s motive in the apparatus and materials of the work itself is a notion I took away from this exhibition.

This again was a multi-screen installation featuring temporal edits and sonic manipulations of footage take in an African American community.

 The soundtrack really drove this piece and Joseph has utilised a cut up methodology in working with Kendrick Lamar’s album. Once again I think this effect produces a well finished final piece but is still deferential to the original audio. I think the reason cut-up audio is so effective is because of that; the originality of the source material can still be heard yet the new context is what predominates and this creates a slightly unsettling context.

The final piece I am looking is probably the most memorable for visitors to The Infinite Mix due to its use 3D visuals and repetitive audio soundtrack. I found it to be a really surreal experience, and like the liner notes state; a meditative one. The flickering in the 3D visuals may well be connected to alpha brain-wave replication in the brain because I felt the drones and mantra like nature of the repetitive music lulling me into a trance like state.

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Jerwood Open Forest exhibition.

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Return to Tate Modern.

 I made a quick visit to the Tate to see the couple of audio/visual pieces in the Tanks space I had missed on my last trip.

 Upon arrival however there was a new installation in the main Turbine Hall space.

Phillipe Parreno’s Anywhen utilises, ‘’acoustics, sound lighting, flying objects and film, each connected to the other and playing their part in a far bigger score’’ (Tate website). Participants sit with the Turbine Hall encased in acoustic treatments and speakers with a large screen at one end, the sounds of rain and acousmatic music fill the space. Then, with the shifting visuals, the screen raises and the soundscape of a storm fills the Tate. I took a short video:

 The piece is described as a automaton, in that it is ever-changing throughout the day and is constantly evolving its inherent form and relationships between an audio, visual or tactile piece. According to the Tate, ‘’The artist combines aspects of chance and control: the sequences of events are triggered by software which is informed by micro-organisms. These react to and activate elements of the commission through a bioreactor visible at the far end of the Turbine Hall.’’ I liked this piece in particular because it seemed to incorporate chance but relate to this to the presence of the audience. 

The Telegraph offered some harsh criticisms http://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/philippe-parreno-anywhen-hyundai-commission-2016-tate-modern-rev/. The Mark Hudson writes that the weakness of the piece lies in finding a coherence in the multitude of sensory information that will make it memorable, not that the experience in of it self is lacking. He also mentions that the audio visual works projected during the performance seems slightly contrived compared to the rest of the piece. I would be incline to agree with elements of what Mark Hudson is saying but overall I found the piece really engaging. I think its somewhat similar to how a video game tries to replicate randomness in crowd behaviour for example, you can spot the hand of the maker in the intricate patterns but the overall illusion is nonetheless one of a natural, and responsive environment and I think Parreno has achieved this in making the gallery space appear cohesive and responsive to the artwork. 

After viewing this work in the main exhibition space, i moved onto the bottom floor of the Tanks that I had missed on my previous visit.

Chinese artist Wen-Ying Tsai’s work Umbrella was the first I came to:

I was quite impressed with piece and its novel way of capturing the gallery view in a feedback loop with itself. The viewer and sculpture become an audio visual installation of itself upon interaction. The reverberant chamber was a really interesting acoustic space and I think the Tate were right to install a silent piece that allows the viewer to interact with the acoustic space. The visual element of this piece provides almost a ‘safe haven’ for the viewer to play and experiment in a sonically different space. I think predominately Wen-Ying works visual and technological mediums but, wether intentionally or not and perhaps clever curation on behalf of the Tate, this piece is sonically particularly interesting.

Upon further research I have discover that his work often uses this method of creating a mechanical or electrical sculpture that when viewed or interacted with can produce very interesting sonic effects. In particular, his Harmonic Sculptures series I found really interesting. He builds the sculptures adhereing to the laws of harmonic relationships and fundamentals. By using the right materials he sets them to vibrate constantly and attaches sound and light sensors. The resulting effect is much li

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Artists use of the Dream Machine and binaural beats.

 After looking into the background and prerogatives surrounding Burrough’s and Gysin’s inception of the dream machine, I wanted to further my research to discover work that artists have created in inspiration.

Cerith Wyn Evans

http://mikesmithstudio.com/projects/dream-machine/

Cerith is one of a number of artists to have created a dream machine in accordance with Gysin’s design. I really like this almost ‘open-source’ nature to the work and it relates to ideas of mass-production. By using the record player as its transmission device, Gysin is appropriating the turntable to producing a self-generated art in the user, as opposed to the turntable’s original purpose of disseminating art in a producer/receiver loop. The dream machine was designed when almost every home and a turntable and thus it was a form of mass producible ‘self-art’. I think this is really interesting especially today when we have a multitude of digital technologies that aid us in the DIY ethos.

Shezad Dawood

http://parasol-unit.org/shezad-dawood-the-new-dream-machine-project

Dawood created The New Dream Machine Project I a giant version of the dream machine and this was to be accompanied by a trilogy of films featuring musicians that create a response to the installation.

I think the audio aspect to this work is lacking slightly in being true accompaniment to the work though the premise itself I feel is very good.

http://blog.hookeaudio.com/hooke-blog1/2015/10/20/the-artists-that-created-with-binaural-audio

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Binaural frequencies and hallucinatory or meditative experience.

 For my piece involving a dream machine they key aspect that I am drawing into the work is the interaction with sound during the experience. I am hoping to influence the experience with binauriaulty. This in fact is a bit of a misnomer as binaurality can only really be achieved through headphones, thus what I will be creating is isochronic tones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochronic_tones

The resulting effect is the same however, in that making the repetition of the sound anywhere 5 to 13 cycles per second, this can instigate theta and alpha brain waves which occur at the same speed. 

http://www.the-guided-meditation-site.com/psychoacoustics.html

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Activist and Public Focused Work

 With the piece I am developing with the LEith Hill Action Group I thought it would be useful to conduct some research into this mannifetation of artistic activity. 

http://www.linkedm11.net/index2.html

http://www.ultrared.org/mission.html

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Dream Machine Research

‘’The Dreamachine (or Dream Machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs's "systems adviser" Ian Sommerville created the Dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain’’ (wikipedia)

William Grey Walter was a neurophysiologist and robotician who was a pioneering figure with work regarding the electroencephalogram or EEG. This is a device that emits flickering or, ‘intermittent photic driving’ unto the patient to produce alpha-wave activity in the brain to test for epilepsy. Through his work in this field he was the first discover alpha and theta wave activity in the first place and invented several machines for use in diagnosis. Most notably for Gysin and Somerville and ultimately myself however, he was the first to note and record that intermittent photic driving causes visual hallucination.

http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article020101.html

The notion of flickr induced hallucinations goes back even further through history however. There are records that record that Nostradamus conducted his predictions by standing in front of the sun with a spliced in front of his face. By moving his hand up and down he produced a flicker effect which reportedly caused his seer-like visions. 

http://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/235945