La Durée (2024)

Film and Soundscape (Full Version 12 Minutes ) Hairdryers, Effects Pedals, Vox Microphone, Contact Microphone Funded by Sound Diaries 2023, SARU, Sonic Arts Research Unit Oxford

Titled La Durée  meaning ‘The Duration’ in reference to Henri Bergson’s definition of the duration of a consciousness that is essential in separating time and space. Acknowledging that time has two faces, the first being ‘objective time’ and the second being ‘La Durée’ which is lived time, the time of our inner subjective experience, a time that is felt, lived and acted - a temporal interior dimension.

Space Sounding - To Listen

In an attempt to de-centre humanness, I begin by listening intently to the containment of the chaotic movement of air particles, random fluctuations in the pressure field, partnered with an almost equal intensity of distribution over the audible spectrum — no ups or downs. Listening to the hairdryer at work, to its casing, how it acts as a chamber of amplification for the motor within, listening to its mechanics, the motor spinning, small vortexes of air escaping as quickly as they formed. Listening to this simple machine, in an era when more complex machines are perpetually and relentlessly listening to us.  Accepting utility and service at the cost of its roar. Multiple hairdryers of different ages, producing slight sonic variations coming together in a low hum. Conjured are images of trees mirrored by their roots, the hairdryer held to the ear, chamber into chamber, a displacement from a central position, of the individual human subject and into a plural sense of being.  The hairdryer as the ouïr granted entity via recognition by autonomous mechanism, once detected, deciphered by the active perception of listening. To be free of its source bond, deeper and deeper into listening. “What can be heard” asks Schaeffer: judge and describe the signalled sonic entity, with the aim of understanding its significance by way of abstraction. Compare and deduce until an imagined alternate sound source arises and then complete the cycle once more. I am taken to the grid work of  Agnes Martin, paintings defying object-hood, now passing doors into other states of being, This reality is not based in the material or a binary language, objects are merely a vehicle to access ineffable feeling. Small pencil lines and evidence of the artist’s hand become glistening swathes as you retreat, the same phenomenon occurring sonically when listening to these layered machines.

Agnes Martin Falling Blue (1963)

Agnes Martin The Sea (2003)

Sounding Space – To Perform

In order to access alternate landing sites and permeate boundaries, I now turn to view the sound object as an acoustic action, it’s physicality the very intention of listening itself, granting the means to approach and enter ephemeral non-place. I begin to record the sound of multiple hairdryers, held out into space, through walls, proximity to the body, the movement of the body augmenting the output. Exuding, multiplying, disrupting and undulating, in the fabrication of a new spatial realm.

Three surround in their orange and chrome orbs, atop microphones, poised as performers, as art objects, as machines. Opening up dialogue between physical space and a realm of escape, that is facilitated by ones experience of space and the triggers it provides, the elusive objectivity of sound, and the elusive sound of objects, sounds both human and other. Complex constructions influenced by various stimuli, workings of memory and its profound influence on our understanding of the past, the present, and ourselves, through the welcome monotony of sensory cocoon.