The long drive up to Blackheath gave me an opportunity to think about ideas for our project. And one of the thoughts I thunk was to do with blurring the boundaries between reality and art.
As an audience member, I thought it would be interesting to be walking in the native environment surrounding Bundanon, and to see a bug sitting on a rock, and need to do a double take in order to work out if it was real or fake. Or to see a canvas stuck to a tree, and not be sure where one ended and the other began – part of the canvas could imitate the texture and colours of the tree while the other part was imagined – a fantastical creature leaning against the trunk. Or to be walking past a fence and be momentarily confused about whether what you saw was a missing paling, or a photo of what was on the other side.
According to Julian, this approach has a label – ‘interventions’.
Perhaps these 'interventions' could become more and more fantastical as the artwork progressed.
I get nervous explaining my ideas to the group because what sounds great in my head is sometimes a lot less convincing when it comes out in words.
But thankfully this idea spurred some enthusiasm. Some of the ideas that grew out of our discussion included the exploration of place and how it changes over time. Maybe one of our ‘interventions’ could be a TV screen set in a particular environment, and events on the TV screen – changes caused by wind, light, weather – could occur at a different speed from the more static surroundings.
Using interventions might also give us a vehicle in which we could explore the relationship between the natural and built environments. Where does one stop and the other begin? Could we exaggerate the overlap?
Thinking about our small scale interventions also prompted a conversation about the impact of larger-scale intrusions. The Shoalhaven River runs through Bundanon, and when it was dammed it apparently caused several species of fish to become extinct. Maybe our project could incorporate interventions on a range of different scales?
-Rhiannon
3 comments:
I was thinking more about interventions today on the way home from work...
At the NOW now festival this year I experience my first 'Sound Walk', which is where the audience walks through a place (natural or built) and simply listens and absorbs what is around them.
When we talked about the idea of interventions from a sound perspective, we thought about the potential to take the audience on a sound walk through an environment that blurs the distinction between the natural sounds on the environment and sound objects we placed there (some of the examples that were thrown in during out Blackheath weekend included long metallic tubes, windchimes etc)
We also talked about the idea of an MP3 player tour.
For me this idea of fabricating the sound walk itself by giving the audience an imaginary soundscape could be fun. This would be much easier to use the concept of interventions then by blurring the sounds from the headphones and the sounds in the surroundings.
But what about the sounds that once existed in a place? The conversations. Arguments fought. Secrets whispered. Different bird species at different time of year. Wind. Rain. Cicadas. Speedboats in summer.
The memory of place...
This is an aspect of place that didn't actually come up over the course of the weekend. But it's a concept I'm intrigued by and one I'd like to explore further.
So in thinking about the MP3 player tour it could be fun to explore memory.
For example, a montage of imagined conversations by a riverbank (eg. two lovers making love, an argument, a young girl drowning, the brushstrokes of Arthur Boyd's paintbrushes, a philosophical debate between two writers, a bloke in his old tinnie, two kids bumming around...)
Overlapping moments that may or may not have occurred into a single moment for the audience...
And of course people's memories work in different ways. We remember things very differently to the person next to us. So we could even explore have different versions of the same conversations and events...
so apparently I've forgotten how to conjugate verbs and spell...sorry guys! I obviously need to stop rambling and get some sleep!!
The strands of our project seem inevitably to keep returning to these linked notions of memory and place.
Rhiannon's examples start very much looking at the spatial element, the sense of place and what is or is not there, what we perceive and how we perceive it and what sifting we do as we try and make sense of our surrounds.
My interest in the blurring of boundaries between imitation and imagination is that there is this strange notion our imagination somehow has clear boundaries, places where it starts and stops and 'reality' takes over. I wish the imagination was given its own seat at the grown-up's table, allowed to dine alongside this over-hyped reality and its cronies. I don't believe imagination on its own is necessarily all that useful, daydreams that cross otherwise blue skies like animal-shaped clouds, but love to see it thread its way through my world and my understanding of it - the storms brought down after those clouds collide.
I like where Rhi's idea then goes, the TV (or some form of visual cue) illustrating that the supposed static is anything but, that it's a mere moment perched delicately on the precipice of an ever-changing continuum. There is a sense in which the images would be more 'real' than what we see around them, for they contain more honest (absent) detail about the place (day night rain sun cloud shadow) than a moment can reveal to its witness.
This spills quite naturally into Dan's interest in the sounds that once existed, the aural memory of a particular place. One cannot really be separated from the other - sound necessarily occurs somewhere and at some time, and there are very few somewheres without sound. After their utterance, where do these go?
I think we all share Rhi's fear that what's in our heads can't be easily passed to the group through words. That's why we do what we do - make the music we make, the images we create, rather than just talk about them. It was interesting to see Rhi attempt to get around this through 'doing' as much as telling - her projected map of our Bundanon experience and the painted intervention in the garden that I believe still remains where it was left...
I also like the idea of incorporating interventions on a range of different scales, many of which I expect may even be overlooked, but would probably stop just short of any that might leave several species of fish extinct.
-Benjamin
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