Forum 2021 - INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY
who was the first non-human you came to know what is unknowable in your practice where do your compositions come from how do you define listening are all things heard audible scott benison abandoned recently said to me quote you might not hear anything depending on where you are at you might have bigger things than to listen carefully to a sonic event you might be just at the right time to hear all the things and i think that we hear what we hear is not an absolute what i hear when i hear that young woman's voice was a perfect moment in time where my ears were ready to hear that thing my body was ready to accept whatever that thing was that was happening for me it was a sacred moment for me but it was an art moment too all these things happen recently my grandfather said to me yeah stones they're like teachers everyone that i have every stone i have taught me something or is in the process of teaching me something and now it comes down from the elders from the north the old people they're teaching me about that spirit inside of people and how people can see when we communicate with the other world it's not done through our minds it's done through our spirit not the mind the ears are a mind thing when you hear the spirit talk it's not through ears it's through your spirit you hear everything they say loud and clear hi my name is amy brandon and i build augmented reality sound installations [Music] so i'm going to talk a bit about what i've been working on this summer and a bit about my relationship with non-human collaborators as a response to some of the questions from suzanne kite so i was really inspired by some of suzanne's writings about machines specifically the idea that things like silica and gold and some of the elements that are used to create computers could be seen as akin to things like stones and wood and air so that when we work with computers we are using elements of the earth to make art and communicate just as with any natural material in this way computers can also be seen as non-human collaborators one of the things i love about ar is exploring the boundary between the digital and the real worlds so often we look at a screen to communicate with the digital realm but in ar we can use our bodies and our movements to trigger and manipulate sounds last year i created an installation for the guardians festival called boundary which incorporated this idea of using our bodies to test the boundary between the real and the digital worlds uh [Applause] [Music] this summer i am working on two larger scale apps so the first is an installation set in halifax in a large field this app had significant challenges in integrating large-scale ar into the landscape so i rely heavily on my non-human collaborator the computer to make it all happen as well as my human collaborators despos of aqueous and danielle yukubiak who did the visual and sonic art respectively so i kind of wanted to address suzanne's question about non-humans in a slightly different way so when i'm building these apps i really feel like the program and the programming that i'm using is communicating with me in the same way that i'm communicating with it in my case the raw materials the processing power code the devices silica i'm using them to make worlds to inhabit this also feeds into the question about the idea of non-humans and coming to know them the first non-human i met certainly wasn't a computer but they are definitely the non-humans i interact with the most these days as do we all i enjoy my back and forth working relationship with the computer it's very close to learning an instrument in a way you have to approach it at its own level add its own kind of consciousness you have to learn to speak its language or it won't talk to you you have to be kind to it or it won't work with you in some ways working with computers is very much involves communicating in a non-human way coding requires a certain kind of explicitness honesty and brutal literalism that isn't often present in our interactions with humans in some ways it's refreshing and in some ways it's frustrating i suppose it's like any communication with non-humans they have their own way of being and existing another project i'm working on is with polycoro and the cluster festival so i'm setting new works by a number of composers in locations around winnipeg i've been enjoying figuring out new ways to work with sound movement and digital space trying to find again that boundary between the real world and the digital one [Music] yeah foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh ah [Applause] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] as a creative practitioner my process has evolved from large scale field recording projects in different situated encounters with people places and things and has evolved out of innovative projects where collaborative activities informs the making doing thinking feeling of the process one project in particular motion parallax which occurred with my long time collaborator new zealand film and video artist andrew denton in the late 1990s i believe was the beginning of a compositional and creative practice which engages with the stuff of the world in a process of emergence this project emerged out of a six-week journey across the seven thousand kilometers of canada where we recorded audio and visual material out of which emerged a 30-minute experimental documentary and it was during this long field recording trip across canada i became curious of the possibility to use other information from the environment such as weather meteorological and environmental data sets as a co-creative device jump ahead by 25 years and my creative practice has shifted from fixed media processes to a non-linear realization which uses diverse inputs such as environmental data sets streamed off the internet or gallery visitors heart rate like in the work currents [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] in this mode of artistic practice creative open means negotiate a dynamic space a relational and situational experience that has developed over time into a practice i have come to refer to as ecological performativity this is an artistic inquiry that shifts from the anthropocentric conceptualization of creativity to a relational and performative ontology the outcome is a reorientation of my creative thinking making procedures where the interaction between people places and things constitutes a dynamic mode of artistic practice and are considered and explored as co-created devices thus the context and formative creative process and the resulting artifacts are understood as responsive embodiment of larger structures of phenomena this work sense of place is a sound bank a field notebook and an ongoing exercise in listening this video shows the layout of an interactive and evolving map which acts as a notebook the first three points on the map are documentation of moments at listening with and to more than humans the audio is a mixture of field recordings from those moments as well as midi libraries found in logic pro i input these field recordings and sound files into a synthesizer that i've built which monitors the bioelectric capacitance of the plants that i connect it to [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] when i was thinking about suzanne kite's question about where my compositions come from it resonated with another of her questions what is unknowable in your practice and when she mentioned her grandfather it brought to me a memory of a conversation that i had with my grandmother in which she told me that intuition is a muscle that listening is how you exercise and strengthen it i think that listening is an act of preparedness an opening and a willingness to meet the unknown and to accept the unexpected [Music] [Music] [Music] good three [Music] system [Music] [Music] two through the videos embedded in sense of place the soundscapes are compositions created through peaks and the plant's capacitance however i have curated the sounds that each plant plays determine through sitting with and observing each plant's capacitance readings what the threshold should be reaching this threshold allows the plant to trigger the audio file or sound library so these compositions are a sort of collaboration these soundscapes are an echo of a moment filtered through my synthesizer recording device and through reflections on the sonic elements around the plants through rescaling my relationship to a field of brown-eyed susans or borage i'm trying to relate on a one-to-one scale with these plants and to understand them in a new way i'm interested in building instruments and developing sympliatic soundscapes with them [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] to innovate is to imagine and to move towards new ways of being and becoming with the final form of these compositions cannot be predicted they are the things that happen between the learning to listen and learning to intuit they are meditations on rescaling acceptance and trying to better understand what is the technique of a tree what does a tree know how does the tree practice renewal how does it renew how does it innovate what can we learn from trees what do we already know that we learned from trees how could we forget how much we need these trees and how much they give us and how they are dear dear friends how is it that we are so removed from these things we know wow so my [Music] hey hmm [Music] so um [Music] how did trees make me feel uh protected because i like the idea of being uh in enclosed spaces sorry there's an ant i mean i like open spaces because i don't like the feeling of being trapped but if i am in a a fixed location i like the idea of being what's the word like canopied by something soothing that's what trees are altered sheltered yeah yeah yeah and i yeah sheltered but i don't mind the elements you know so sheltered from what i don't know i think sheltered from emotional things yes two if you're struggling in the sea like well does does a tree also have a consciousness right that you're trying to often often one is trying to ascribe what a human conscious is to a tree right but that's not gonna happen and you probably will probably get more out of the experience of trying to make your consciousness like trees right and have it go the other way yeah and which is why in my work when i ask how does a cottonwood feel pleasure i have to think like a cotton right yeah and what does what gives pleasure sun sunlight i imagine the rain during summer you know like things like that right and so then if you're like in the field doing like i don't know like just sort of artist absorption work right yeah it is like okay well i guess i'll sit here and feel the sun or you know i will go out okay in the summer rain right you know and enjoy that like a cottonwood wood right and and then of course of course like the thing has a consciousness right because that is how it that is experience for it right yeah i found i think i found climbing trees very focusing my parents were divorcing right about then and so like it it just because you ha you have to pay attention right what you're doing and so i found that very very soothing there's some big holes up here i wonder if there's nests so beautiful [Music] so so that tree over there is basically pulling moisture up from [Music] the river moving underground and bringing it up to the surface it's creating this green canopy that shelters all the other plants and animals and humans from from the sun and also from rain and from wind and from snow so it creates this beautiful space and it also is making carbohydrates and sugars from sunlight and providing them back into the whole system into this whole world full of life and it's taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it in its cells and it's producing or making oxygen and breathing out oxygen into the space so that we all animals around birds insects all of us can breathe this air when a being does all of these things then how do you how do you think it how do you express gratitude for all of this you
2021-11-17 22:14
