Sam Rolfes
High Reality
Month: April 2023
Creativity and Research
What is creativity?
creative – “to bring into being”
intertextuality Julia Kristeva. ideas are being recycled and influenced by artists predecessors
What constitutes an original work?
everything is a citation.
How might artistic work be research?
Tacit Knowledge (Polanyi 1966) We can know more than we can tell.
Julian Henriques Sonic Bodies
Sonic Knowledge – Knowledge is related to sound
Lawrence Abu Hamdan – Saydnaya (the missing 19dB) 2017. – Worked with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture to produce an acoustic investigation into the Syrian regime prison, where over 13,000 people have been executed since 2011.
George Brecht – Drip Music (1959) – Performance with water dripping into a container.
Fluxus
Group Work –
Sacred Frequencies XOSAR
Audrey Chen
Glacial by Audrey Chen is a live recording of “unprocessed cello, voice and analog electronics”. The recording starts off with a repeating cello riff that raises and lowers in intensity, it lowers in intensity and is this accompanied by the sound of almost a single note on a bass guitar and as this comes in the cello notes start to change and the playing gets more and more intense. Beautiful vocals almost Bjork like then accompany the playing. I really enjoyed the end of the piece where it got more noisy and was surprised at how she got her instruments to sound that fuzzy without effects.
I was surprised by the modulation that she was able to do with her vocals without using processing, at parts of the recording it sounded as if she was using distortion and looping processing. This was inspiring for my final piece as it made me think of how I could use vocals and warp voices without processing.
Derek Baron
Listening to “Curtain” by Derek Baron released on the 7th of August 2020, I was inspired and influenced by the rawness and almost vulgarity of the recordings which sounded as if they were cut up and stitched together in a beautiful way. I liked the gaps in-between the ever evolving instrumental. I was inspired by this and I think it would be god to take inspiration from this for my creative sound piece that I have to create for this unit. I was thinking I could cut up tape and play around with timing for the final piece as this is something I haven’t got round to doing and would be a good experimentation to see what I could come up with.
I also listened to the piece “Recollects”, the piece starts of with two old people who are suspected to be seen on the cover mid conversation talking about Vitamin C and the grocery store. The piece starts of very intimate and is almost was if you’re in their living room and intruding within their conversation, it feels as if you shouldn’t be listening. They then start talking about travelling and a man that we are not familiar with. The conversation then cuts out and sounds as if someone was on a boat (like the cover), you can hear the water and I suspect Baron and his father talking, I presume it is a father and son fishing bonding session.
I really liked the intimacy of this piece and the way Baron was able to create a feeling of intrusion from the listener, this was done by the way the conversation starts midway and cuts out midway. I also really liked the minimal editing style and that he probably cut up raw recordings and didn’t do much post production with them. I could use inspiration from this as normally I am an over-editor and tend to ruin work with editing it too much so that you can’t make out the original recordings.
Anthropology of Sound
Anthropology is the study of human development and culture.
Ethnography – the systematic study of individual cultures. a branch of anthropology.
Minimally ethnography
Sensory ethnography
“Disciplinary developments in the field of anthropology has molded Western ethnographic work that sought to describe meaning and symbols within specific cultural trance practices. Anthropology has also profoundly influenced the other fields — religious studies and ethnomusicology — considered in this review.”
Autoethnography
Surrealism VR Research
Sothebys – Masters of Surrealism: This is a non-interactive experience that showcases surrealist art. You are taken through art pieces by Salvador Dali, Paul Delvaux, Andre Masson and Rene Magritte. The experience was made by Sothebys a fine arts company and used to advertise the art pieces that they have for sale. The experience was good but lacks the interactivity that we want to include in ours.