Author: Harry Charlton

Joel Stern is an Australian researcher, curator and artist. His interest in sound came to him when he was a teenager listening to community based local radio stations, especially graveyard shifts, listening to long form minimal, avant-guard experimental music. He joined a media and technology course in Melbourne, where he collaborated with students, articulating ideas across the boundaries of different mediums. He felt at that time, something new was happening in the world of art, focusing on new technologies and techniques. He studied sound arts at London college of printing and began to see sound as an important genre of art. Stern feels this time was extremely formative for him, partly due to the improvised and experimental music scenes in London.

Stern took on the artistic direction of liquid architecture in 2013. It’s the key sonic arts organisation in Australia, it formed in the late 90s out of the interdisciplinary practice in the royal Melbourne institute of technology. At the time it was a national touring festival of sonic art. It had a Eurocentric, modernist experimental approach to sonic art with concert and exhibition as the key formats. 

When he took on the role he dissolved the festival format, he wanted to work on projects at any scale at any time, he wanted to be more ‘formally experimental’. By 2014/15, under his direction liquid architecture had become a year round venture consisting of all kinds of formats.

What would a Feminist methodology sound like? This is how Joel describes his curatorial methodology for sound, he puts emphasis on the politics and ethics of listening. Stern sees curating and curatorial research as a from of knowledge production, trying to map out a particular terrain. Joel’s aim was to cultivate a feminist culture within the organisation, to create a radically inclusive environment and set a template for liquid architecture for years to come. Stern thinks not in terms of singular events or projects but in terms of investigation into methodologies for sound production in a political space. 

Eavesdropping and machine listening was a research project for Joels PHD. It was fundamentally a collaboration with James Parker who had been thinking about sound through the prism of a critical legal perspective. For example, the ways in which law tries to regulate and control sound, and the way that societies and structures operate with it such as the weaponisation of sound. The word eavesdropping is relevant because of its history, it describes a crime or public wrong. Stern and Parker wanted to think about what the history of eavesdropping can tell us about the practice today. They hoped that researching the history of eavesdropping would illuminate how todays social political landscape is affected by it.

The Manus recording project is about a detention centre on Manus Island off the coast of Papua New Guinea that is controlled by the Australian government. This work was a collaboration between Michael Green, Andre Dao and Jon Tjhia. Michael was contacted by a prisoner detained in this centre through a phone he had smuggled in. Due to the intermittent internet connection, the prisoner would prerecord messages, these messages became the content of a podcast called the messenger. It’s a sonic representation of the prison population. Joel approached these artists and asked if they would create a piece for the eavesdropping project, this piece came to be called ‘How are you today?’ They smuggled 6 audio recorders into the detention centre with phones loaded with credit. This was to give the prisoners a means to record a ten minute recording and send it to Joel and his colleagues, they did this daily. They then created an exhibition where these recordings would be played. There is also an online bank of these recordings, they total 14 hours of speech. Some of the recordings ask us to listen to the men, and some ask us to listen with the men to their surrounding sounds. I find it interesting that they didn’t try to create a narrative, its more a documentary take, an unfiltered window into the experience of people who normally would not have a voice, not be listened to or with. The piece is a vessel for the audience to eavesdrop on something we are not meant to hear.

The main pieces of advice I took from Joel Stern’s lecture is think about how you can make audible, what was previously inaudible. When you make a piece about something, consider why you use sound, does it reveal something extra or communicate an account or idea in a way that couldn’t be done through another medium?

Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian sound artist that works primarily with technology, making artwork through experiments, pushing electronics to new uses. 

Hewitt takes inspiration from Dr Ursula Franklin, who suggested that technology should be seen as a comprehensive human led practice, similar to culture or democracy. Hewitt believes that Technology is connected through history to structures, networks of people and nature. We need to not only value the end product of technology, but the preceding steps and advancements that led to that point. This ‘end product’ view of technology, Hewitt says, leaves us unfamiliar with the material aspects of the infrastructure that upholds it. 

Hewitt places a lot of value on working with obsolete technology, this is partly influenced by the concept of post-growth. We live on a planet of finite resources, therefore populations and economies cannot grow infinitely. Post-growth is a term that acknowledges the eventuality that there will one day be a tipping point where economic growth will no longer be beneficial to humanity, after this point we will have to look for other indicators and techniques to increase human wellbeing. Hewitt is looking into ways to use technology that responds to this idea of post growth. Darsha thinks of obsolete technology as a naturally occurring resource, appearing in rubbish bins and sidewalks. This resource is a tool, to be experimented with, material to manipulate and reformat into art. 

An example of using obsolete technology for sound arts: 

Electrostatic Bell Choir- 

In 2013 Canada switched from analogue to digital cable. Due to a failure to inform the public that the switch could be achieved with a converter (there was no need to buy a new TV), a lot of people bought new televisions, thus there was an abundance of televisions on the streets. Hewitt used this new resource to create an art piece. Curious to see if she could use the static from the screen to move something, Hewitt started experimenting. She found that she could hang electrostatic bells from telephones in front of the screens, and they would respond to the screen’s electrostatic discharge, causing them to ring.  

After creating this piece, Hewitt found that in the 1700’s electrostatic bells had already been used in a similar way to demonstrate the potential of static electricity. Hewitt believes this is a first hand example of how ‘electronics are not only matter, unfolding through minerals, chemicals, bodies, soil, water, environments and temporalities. They also provide traces of the economic, cultural and political contexts in which they circulate.’ This practice of taking apart old technologies to understand and reformat the parts is called media archaeology. 

Hi fidelity wasteland 1: 100 year old quicksilver cloud-

Central to this piece is a 100 year old piece of technology called a Thyratron typically used in industrial AC switching mechanisms. This thyratron contained a vacuum tube radiating a cloud of ionised mercury. This piece of technology interested Darsha as it was built before the concept of planned obsolescence, it was a functioning piece of technology’s history, and due to the transparent construction the infrastructure is visible. Darsha recorded the high pitched tones the thyratron emanated, and with help from a musician composed an audio/visual piece that gives an experiential glimpse into history.

Darsha Hewitt became interested in the idea of spontaneous DIY sound performance, and created a poster detailing how to create a sound performance with two telephones called the ‘loop hole generator’. I like this as it makes sound performance completely accessible to anyone as most people have phones, I also like that it has a collaborative/communal aspect to it. The piece creates one time, unique and dissonant sound pieces where small patterns would sometimes emerge, the user could also input sound into the phones and listen to how the sound travels and changes through the feedback loop. Darsha noticed that the feedback sounded like a whimpering baby, this gave her the idea to mechanise this movement and create another slightly different sound piece. She attached strings and motors to lots of old baby monitors, she described them as looking quite small pathetic and noticed a sort of  anthropomorphisation happening. Darsha creates a mechanical system and lets it create its own patterns and sequences, and leaves it up to the listener to discern musicality from it. I’m interested in this idea not composing a piece of sound art, but composing the framework and context for a piece to grow and thrive within. This is very similar to Jessica Ekomane’s use of Max MSP to create parameters for a piece.

Researching Darsha Hewitt’s work and philosophy has given me an appreciation for the political-economic aspects of materials used in art, the value of obsolete technology as something to explore and reformat, and lastly the practice of creating the parameters for a performance or sound piece and letting it unfold organically.

Jessica Ekomane creates situations where sounds acts as a transformative element for space and audience through the interplay of psychoacoustics, perception of rhythm structures and the interchange of noise and melody. She explores the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics, and investigates listening expectations and their societal roots. 

Jessica believes that there is a ritualistic aspect to listening to or making music, and that there’s an opportunity for community within it. Jessica has an interest in rhythm because of its bodily quality, its universally felt, its democratic. She believes that audio can be a way to transmit a complex idea through bodily knowledge, audio is a way of sharing and understanding knowledge. 

Multivocal is an album consisting of two compositions. For the first composition, Solid of Revolution, Jessica created 13 different metronomes in Max MSP, they are all pulsating at 1 millisecond difference, each with a different note. This means that they start in uniform as one, but slowly, they start to faze into something different, the landscape is constantly changing. Ekomane states, ‘The piece is in a way always the same and always different’, this causes the audience’s perception of the piece to be less about waiting for the next event, and more about the process. Its about holding and releasing consciousness, if someone were to fall asleep or leave the room and come back, the piece would be the same but totally different. You don’t perceive the changes in the piece while you’re consciously listening to it, but if you leave the room for five minutes and come back then it will be completely different. Solid of revolution is played in quadraphonic and each note is played from one speaker. This makes the audience’s perception more spatial, it creates a melody in space. Its provoking trends through repetition that play with your bodily experience in the moment.

Jessica Is interested in the classic division of mind and body, she investigates this through trying to evoke thinking and feeling in her audience at the same time. 

I think holding and releasing consciousness is what you do when you create any sound piece, but this piece isolates and elucidates this aspect of sound arts for the audience. This piece has influenced me to be mindful of how I hold and release consciousness in my work. Hopefully through understanding this piece I can play with the idea of structuring works in layers, some that demand the audiences immediate conscious perception, and some that can drift in and out of the audience’s conscious perception. I think framing sound art in this way will help me understand my effect on my audience and how I communicate my ideas.

Comedown is a piece exhibited in the Berghain. Jessica took elements of club music that are usually used to induce euphoria and collective intensity, and reformatted this musical language to create the opposite effect, a piece that builds but never drops, a piece that wants to start but never quite builds the momentum. This, for Jessica, is reminiscent of the social landscape of 2020. This ironic take on club music is driven through use of samples that re-enforce themes of money making, predators, war and hustling. This almost sarcastic use of samples ‘reflects some aspects of the social and economic system we are in’. It is about a system that is breaking down. 

Citizen Band is a piece by Jessica made using a CB radio, a short distance communication radio, now mainly used by truck drivers. CB radio is completely public, anyone can tune in, and the conversations found can be very personal. Jessica tuned into American truckers having conversations and recorded them. She thought it would be interesting to dislocate this CB frequency to FM, national radio, where these conversations don’t really belong. Jessica values ‘placing one context into another’, and believes that ‘this can reveal certain hidden structures’. 

https://www.jessicaekomane.com/Citizen-Band

I like the idea of finding beauty/interest in a private or unassuming place. It reminds me of the candid humanist photography of Henri Cartier Bresson. The element of his work that I love is the unbiased, uninterrupted glimpses into human life. I feel as though Jessica Ekomane has achieved the same effect through audio.