|
Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
I just returned from the Lovebytes festival in Sheffield, UK where I had the opportunity to listen to a performance and lecture by sound artist Francisco Lopez. I have been a fan of Lopez's work for a long time, so it was especially exciting to hear a multi-channel live performance and listen to his views on the work.
He sees his work as very personal, but shaped by the social situation, something he calls the 'socialization of technology.' The current trends in the socialization of sound/music technology began in the late 70s/early 80s when multi-track recording technology became accessible to a large number of people through cassettes. A distribution network called the 'home music network' formed organically in the 80s. This exchange of sound made through the mail had no central control, no aesthetic direction, no central organization and no agenda. New labels developed from this network that bypassed the music industry, and it became possible to work in collaboration with people who you never met in person. At this time, the ratio between people listening to sound and people making recordings changes radically. The exchange was weighted toward the 'gift' economy as opposed to commercial economy.
After cassette recording on analog tape was made obsolete by digital recording, there was a slowdown in the home music network, but as soon as digital recording technology became accessible through home CD recorders, a second wave of socialized music exploded with releases on CDs. Now, there is a new wave using files on internet.
These waves of the socialization of sound have changed the way sound and music is understood culturally. The process of music creation and distribution has become open and intervention into the process has become part of the aesthetic form. Instrumental 'virtuosity' has become separated from the process of generating and creating sound. The amount of time necessary to 'learn' how to create sound from the computer versus learning how to play an instrument is such that anyone can have the ability to create sound--this has never happened before
so many people using the same tools at the same time. Lopez sees this as a time of 'naked' creativity, naked spirit, naked skills, a major shift in the history of sound that makes the question of whether it is noise, music, sound, etc, irrelevant.
In Lopez's opinion the most interesting work with sound now is coming from people with no musical training. He believes that focusing on technology takes away from the sound experience itself and believes that Cage's work focusing on process takes away from the sound experience. Listening to his work is like listening to an inner and outer soundscape. At times the sound feels as if it is coming from inside the body and at times outside.
He uses the real world as source of sound material and sound structures. He researches compositions by listening to the 'world' versus listening to music. The world, he states, has a wider spectrum of dynamics, frequencies and textures than music and finds pop music especially restricting in terms of pacing and timing.
Lopez is interested in working at the limits of perception. He sees sound as space,
an 'inner world' of possibilities.
When he performed a few nights ago, he positioned himself in the center pof several rings of chairs for the audience. The audience faced away from him and toward a ring of speakers around the room. In his view this is a much more effective way to communicate sound work, exploiting the fact that the listener no longer needs to look at the performer, and that in fact looking at a performer with a laptop when one cannot see how the movements relate to the resulting sound detracts from the performance. Through configuring the space in this way, he is trying to work against what he calls the 'schizophrenic' separation between performer and sound mixer.
One aspect of Lopez's work that particularly interested me was his work at the limits of perception. He is a biologist as well as a sound artist, and some of his recordings are extremely quiet. I asked him about how he found this work and what kind of reaction he has had to this work. He said that in performance it is almost impossible to work with this very quiet sound. He has found that audiences find it extremely stressing, but that he has had success creating recordings of quiet works, or creating 10 minutes silence in middle of work. he is interested in how listeners might experience sonic illusions and in how extremely quiet listening requires extreme focus. In terms of technique, he has achieved this best in recordings by starting out at a normal volume and then slowly dropping to near silence. In this way he also finds that he expresses the full range of dynamics experienced in nature
|