Output details

Landscape Quartet (participative environmental sound art)

These interlinked site-specific performances (recorded, edited, and disseminated across different media) form part of a larger AHRC-funded research project (£130K), in which I am Co-Investigator and one of four participating artist/theorists developing methodologies for environmentally ‘participative’ creative practices. The research challenge is a critique of epistemologies that tend towards objectification, through the use of strategies that emphasis proximity and interconnectedness and which combine improvisation, soundscape composition, and practices of ‘photo/phonography’ and performance installation.

This has required developing a portable system for improvised electronic performance. Notably, it incorporates live sampling of environmental sound and vibrational speakers that sound through materials situated within the performance locale.

In connection with process-led and relational epistemologies (e.g. Tim Ingold and the non-representational theories of Nigel Thrift et al), these works interrogate:

1) Ingold’s description of the qualities of sensory experience (light, sound and feeling) as phenomena of ‘the weather-world’. (2011: 134).

2) Landscape and subjectivity defined as inseparable systems of performative encounter.

3) How discrete artefacts resonate with (a) the project’s overriding participative agenda and (b) their individual methodological approaches.

Key insights are:

1) Solutions to the challenges of producing collaborative and improvised site/time-responsive environmental artwork.

2) The significance of contrasting onto-epistemological views within and between science, art and academia.

3) The challenges of moving between phenomenologically focused creative practice and its meaningful re-presentation artistically and via more specifically rational reflection.

Dissemination has occurred through presentations, residencies and performances internationally, including: 2013 Sonorities Festival, Belfast; KALV Festival, Sweden; Dom Dom Festival, Hanoi, Vietnam; University of Paris 8, France; Modern Art Oxford, UK; Universities of Oxford, Newcastle, Huddersfield and Surrey; and through internationally renowned artists and scholars (notably Sally Jane Norman, Max Eastley, Katharine Norman) publishing responses to the work on the project website.