 When asked by the Outposted Project to respond to the OS map for Brighton and Hove, there was only one place this invitation would take me: my favourite dew pond on the ridge of the South Downs near Ditchling Beacon. I carried some microphones and a camera the five miles from my home to a relative sheltered spot between some gorse bushes in what was one of the windiest days of the year. Originally, I thought I would just record the sound and make an ambient portrait of the hawthorn and the pool of water with its reflection, but things took a different shape: deciding first to write a text and then finding that the process of writing and listening back took me very far away from the runners and dog walkers on the Downs. You can read the text and watch the short film here.  Uncharacteristic of me to respond to something unfolding in the historical present like the COVID pandemic and the responses to it but I found myself: using my phone to record the fluttering of security tape in a supermarket car park repurposed as a distant queuing area; hanging microphones out of the first floor window for the first and last NHS Claps in my suburban street; holding an induction coil against a Playstation 4 to document the shifts in electro-magnetic flux as I booted up a game to play (gaming being a surprise activity I found myself turning to in Lockdown). Three of these were on Kate Carr's Interiorities show on RTM radio (episodes 1, 3 and 8), one was on the Parallel State podcast and one on Gabriele de Seta's Noise Reduction, a "multi-sited field study". I also submitted a potential contribution to Drew Daniel's crowd-sourced "Quarantine Supercut" but this wasn't used (!).
"Dew Pond #1" was a talk and listening session that was part of "Acoustic Ecologies: Hildegard Westerkamp and Environmental Listening" at the Attenborough Centre of Sussex University on January 31st, 2020. The sheets of paper I am holding in the first image and the participants have in subsequent photographs were letter-pressed by Alex Cooper and used to respond to the listening environment of the dew pond, marked with chalk to create soundmaps, scores, listening diaries. Photographs: Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin Dusk brings a shift of the senses, a change to how the world is known. A similar recalibration can happen when we choose to settle down somewhere and map what our perceptions find there. Pictures of Alex Cooper's letter-pressed Dew Pond sheets and examples of what participants did with them. Photos: Daniela d’Arielli The Manifesto of Rural Futurism was an exhibition at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Melbourne that ran from 26.07.19 - 11.10.19. Curated by Daniela d’Arielli, Beatrice Ferrara, Leandro Pisano and Philip Samartzis, the show was "an invitation to experience rural locations and abandoned places as spaces in which to question our approach to history and landscape, our sense of living in a specific place and the relationship that we have with it. The sound of environments, spaces and landscapes reveal the challenges and territorial transformations that inform the ideology, infrastructure and biological ecosystems to which we form a part. In this sense, listening practices are deployed as a way to critically traverse the 'border territories' of rural territories, challenging persisting notions about “inescapable marginality”, 'residuality' and 'peripherality''.
"The Manifesto of Rural Futurism comprises sound and visual recordings undertaken by artists undertaking fieldwork in Southern Italy including: Daniela d’Arielli, Enrico Ascoli, Angus Carlyle, Luca Buoninfante, Jo Burzynska, Enrico Coniglio, Alejandro Cornejo Montibeller, Nicola Di Croce, Fernando Godoy, Miguel Isaza, Raffaele Mariconte, Marco Messina, Mollin + Voegelin, Alyssa Moxley, Philip Samartzis, Vacuamoenia, David Vélez and Sarah Waring". Read more about the show.  Above is the cover for a cassette tape which I had held onto since January 28th, 1996. The cassette contained a track in lieu of a paper for the Haçienda Must Be Rebuilt conference held at Manchester's nightclub, The Haçienda (RIP). The track, "Swarmachines" was attributed to "switch/***collapse/CCRU" and featured my voice, alongside those of Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher and Nick Land. Urbanomic digitised and posted the audio track, the text for which had appeared in Abstract Culture, later in nomadsland (and I believe it was translated into Serbo-Croat, though can find no evidence of this). It was republished in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, being mentioned in the 2017 Guardian review of accelerationism. The CCRU connections seems to be stirring at the moment with me being asked questions about this period by Simon Hammond for his excellent article in the New Left Review about Mark Fisher.
After the original A Crossing Bell at the Estuary Festival in 2016 and a later iteration at the "What Has To Be Done" exhibition for the Beijing Today Art Museum in 2017, another adaptation of the project was developed as a contribution to one aspect of Tomoko Hojo's "Unfinished Descriptions" exhibition at the Hundred Years Gallery. Tomoko invited scores to respond to the undocumented material catalogued under "O14" for Yoko Ono's 1966 show at Indica. I thought a gentle version of "A Crossing Bell" could work here, shown in first two images with some shots of Tomoko's own work for context. "Orang Alijeh / Mountain Ghost" is part of a developing project relating to the eruption of Krakatoa. Part of the "Velocity" installation, curated by Alex Cooper and Tim Hutchinson at "Everything Happens So Much" at London College of Communication, my contribution comprised an essay, Morse code flags and posters designed in response to the essay by Alex and Tim. More information.
“Decoys” is a two track vinyl album that began as a collaboration with Mark Peter Wright. Having spent time researching different foley techniques used in the history of film sound, we adapted a repertoire of our own, shifting from the usual kind of pastoral / wilderness scene where foley is recruited to add punctual detail and acoustic atmosphere to conceive a wastescape instead. As we were recording and then as we were arranging the recorded material, we constructed an oblique score, which was then interpreted by musicians Claudia Molitor, Tullis Rennie and Alison Blunt. At that point they had not heard our version, nor did they know our toxic ecology thematic. Their response to the score forms the second part of the album. The album will be released - with the score - on Multimodal in the Autumn, the first release from this new label. |
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