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Metis (multichannel live electronics durational performance-installation)

Mêtis takes inspiration from Tim Ingold’s configuration of sound not as an object of perception, but rather as a medium for perception; where attentive listening does not locate the listener through a kind of emplacement but rather “the sweep of sound continually endeavours to tear the listener away, causing them to surrender to its movement.” (Ingold 2011: 139). It questions the idea of sound as an “infusion of the medium in which we find our being and through which we move” (2011: 138), and seeks to inhabit the related concept of mêtis as defined by classicist Peter Kingsley in his work on the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles: “Mêtis is the particular quality of intense alertness that can be effortlessly aware of everything at once… Mêtis feels, listens, watches … It misses nothing… Mêtis is the encircler; the completer of the circle; the awareness that allows us at any moment, in spite of the raging torrent of appearances, to connect the beginning to the end.” (Kingsley 2003).

Each performance interprets the experientially sonorous qualities of its particular location and surrounding area. Whilst preserving a sense of the familiar and recognizable, through techniques of collage, layering, repetition, slight sonic modification, and immersivity, it investigates the nature, qualities, and interconnections between permanence and change, ubiquity and uniqueness, and their significance. Over a period of three to four days field recordings are made in the vicinity of the performance location using an intensive process of listening-guided soundwalks from which edits are then prepared for performance. The event, a site-specific installation and improvised durational performance (3-6 hours), combines aspects from soundscape composition, live electronic performance, and installation arts practice

Insights from this ongoing project have been shared at international colloquia and conferences alongside performance-based presentations, and contributed to an AHRC funded practice-based research project.