Video still from GENERATIVE CONSTRAINT AND THE SITE OF LANGUAGE. LOCATING AN OBJECT THROUGH EMBODIED MUSICALITY IN THE ABSENCE OF VISION (available below).
The work listed under “Perceptual Ecology – City Work” was made as part of my Doctoral Research Project “Embodied Blindfolded Navigation as Perceptual Ecology – The Re-markable Space of Poetic Form” (2019-2023). That project employs non-visuality, in this instance through blindfolding, as a generative constraint, loosening the link between, on the one hand, the time, space and materials of reading and writing, and on the other, the visual and conceptual categories of language.
Made during the Covid–19 lockdowns the City Work films are built around an experience of central London that is rarely, if ever, available now. That is, sounds that would otherwise be absorbed into a larger environmental cacophony remained audible enough to confer the direction of other moving objects, the distance between objects, and the location, size, and shape of obstacles. In the films catalogued below, that environment sound is tuned to the moving body as it charts a course in the absence of vision.
As with the explorations in Forest Work 1 & 2, the work was undertaken alongside a sighted interlocutor. We would dialogue using language that emerged from the activity, impressing on the activity the weak (Vattimo) logic of its own development. Rather than language becoming meaningless through this process, the meaning of language is gradually rebuilt through navigating blindfolded in relation to the specificity of the city site and the temporality of the encounter.
GENERATIVE CONSTRAINT AND THE SITE OF LANGUAGE: LOCATING AN OBJECT THROUGH EMBODIED MUSICALITY IN THE ABSENCE OF VISION. A NAVIGATIONAL AID AS A FILM AS A PRESENTATION was shared as part of the online symposium Vibrant Practices at the University of Leeds on the 16th and 17th April 2021:
https://forkingpaths.leeds.ac.uk/symposium
My abstract from that event is available here:
GENERATIVE CONSTRAINT AND THE SITE OF LANGUAGE. LOCATING AN OBJECT THROUGH EMBODIED MUSICALITY IN THE ABSENCE OF VISION.
This presentation is a fine art, practice-led enquiry. It aims to evidence how environmental sound, dialogic speech and citational practices can be utilised to create a musical, rhythmic, iterative, and prosodic score that doubles as a navigational aid for embodied wayfinding in the absence of vision.
It will interrogate the relationship between composition and sounding through an engagement with embodied cognition, asking how Cagean compositional processes (whose method is largely absent from their sounding), and Reichean compositional processes (whose method usually results in their sounding), affects the status of the resultant audition for the purposes of navigation.
The presentation takes as its material the ephemera from two blindfolded explorations of an urban space conducted under strict generative constraint. The material in question consists of audio, photographic and filmic documentation.
Accounting for the placement of this enquiry at the intersection of non-visual embodied navigation and rhythmic, process-based temporality, any imagery used in this presentation will be bound by two conditions: that it in no way reveals additional information that might benefit a sighted navigator; that it too is subject to the procession of sonic and linguistic iteration by which the work is constructed.
This work is intended for use with headphones.
GENERATIVE CONSTRAINT AND THE SITE OF LANGUAGE. LOCATING AN OBJECT THROUGH EMBODIED MUSICALITY IN THE ABSENCE OF VISION.
TRIPS INTO TOWN, RECORDED ON 11th NOVEMBER 2019 AND THE 29TH OCTOBER 2020.