Abstract
East Mere Hide, Wicken Fen (2012) arises from work carried out as part of an AHRC-funded project, Landscape Quartet, which explores practical strategies for ecological sound art and their significance. Listening and walking, usually over a number of days, have become integral to my practice methodology as the initial stage for any performance. In essence facilitating a multisensory fusion of being and doing that binds feelings of place and self across a variety of registers (including not only sound, but also, for example memory, physicality, encounters with non-human animals and vegetation, imagination, smell-sound-sight, pre-cognitive and pre-conscious intuitions, and so on), and initiates a process of attunement from which artistic responses surface: responses that can be understood as being ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘for’ the environment. As a complement to this listening/walking method I have developed a performance set-up that allows for improvised location-specific electronic performance. Technically, this comprises of vibrational speakers that play through any suitably resonant material within the environment, live sampling and gestural sound modification achieved through an iPad/Kaoss Pad combination. Any resulting improvised performance is intended as a direct and holistic response to my experience of and engagement with place, both leading to the point of performance as well as the actual performance. Audio and video documentation of the performance then form the basis for an additional and complementary process of working with these same experiences and encounters, pursuing the same theme of participative environmental arts practice but across other modes of presentation. ‘To regain the currents of life, and of sensory awareness, we need to join in the movements that give rise to things rather than casting our attention back upon their objective and objectified forms. We need, in a word, to undo the operation of inversions, abandoning the fixities of genes, images, recordings and landscapes for the generative movements, respectively, of life, light, sound and weather.’ (Ingold 2011: 97) Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge.