Echolocation
Elizabeth Abrams and Iwona Teika — (digital artists, essayists, bats)
We began this article as a series of conversations about the concerns in our collaborative work and the stretch of space, or landscape of thinking, between our research and our 'practical-outcomes' — our practices. We have been sharing images and descriptions that interest us; 13th Century Japanese poetry anthologies used as card games, Wikipedia, photography catalogues, relational-aesthetics, costume hire shops, Star Trek and Michael Jackson's death. Things that make us think about potentialities and paradigms.
We always specifically consider the unique way in which we communicate — through ultrasonic squeaking, tapping and clicking that reverberates through space telling us where we are and what's around us — and how this can be used as metaphors for our mainly digital practices. As we talk to each other we simultaneously orientate ourselves, defining the location of our bodies while defining our thinking through conversation. We ask each other about our work and how our ideas evolved, what materials and processes we have used. We justify and argue these ideas, sending near identical noises back and forth in an echochamber.
A new piece of work we are collaborating on is based on Edgar Allan Poe's essay 'The Philosophy of Composition', in which he details his writing processes for The Raven. Following Poe's methodology we have created a digital version of the room featured in the poem. We encoded the program with each aspect of the poem in the order he mentions them, and with the relative importance Poe places on them. We designed a digital system of sequencing that links various conceptual, sonic and visceral aspects of the text; beginning with the sound 'ore', moving on to the tone of the poem, then to the physical/visual features in the room and the order they move in.
We are continually probing the distinction between our research and our practice, insisting that they occupy the same space at once, making no distinction between the connection and the content. If our transmission, our voice, does not link with an object, then we are unconnected to it and it is absent, silent. Our research transmits signals that are returned, projecting the shape of the discovered material. It is the shape or the coordinates of the discovered material and it is the discovered material. It is a new sound and yet it also an echo, as it has omitted the shape of all the other objects and potential material around it.
This is not broadcasting, or passively receiving, but a constant conversation. Questions and answers and contesting questions and answers in peer-to-peer dialogic networks. We transmit one voice and read the differences in the return of that same voice as information; the length of time it took to return, from which direction it returned from first, the frequency and speed of the echo. The size and location of the object or surface that rebounded the transmission is all encoded in the echo. The object is the information matter and the information processor, as are our bodies.
It is the same with practice and research, with data and meta-data. The click, the whistle and the screech ask the question and the same question returns in the shape of the answer; it is flying at twice my current speed several inches below me, my voice is calling to it and becoming a map to it — without touching, without placing atom on atom, it writes a relational connection.
My question reveals the answer's dimensions, actions and character, all in relativity to my own voice. And so in reading the information on the sound transposed between my body and the object, I am learning something about the ratios of my own body in relation to the object I have found. I am constantly finding myself in the search for others. We have learned to understand this as a significant process in our work; new research and new collaborations redefine our practice as we previously understood it, giving it new categories and new versions.
Sometimes we have at hand disparate ideas and material, things that are known but invisible to each other. The combination of research and practice illuminates or creates the unknown connections between them. You have to make the work to find out what the work is. We collapse theory and practice, reflection and action together to build a landscape of a work. Maybe this is why we are so compulsively attracted to Poe's essay on the details of his composition. What decisions he made first and how this led to the next decision, all made in advance of writing. How he reasoned his desire to write something melancholy, and his highly objective preference for the vowel sound 'ore' for the refrain. All of this before the raven or the bereft man even entered the room.
In our digital recreation of The Raven we wanted to build an arch between the work in question and the reflective essay. By re-ordering the elements according to Poe's methodology it is possible to view various versions of the composition, omitting and combining selected elements. Certain commands allow a user to see simply a zone of blank space, with an eerie repetition of the sound 'ore' playing in sequence over the image. Or, the raven can be isolated, it's flying patterns traced on the screen in silence. Or the Victoriana furnishings with the sound of rain, or the sound of knocking with the colour red. Or, the very fact of the death of the girl can be isolated. With every other element represented, revealing a shape of her that remains untouchable and unheard, while every other shape and sound echoes her absence. Or the man's boots thumping along the floor without legs.
Ekleksographia:
William Blake and the Naked Tea Party
March, 2010
Holly Pester
Holly Pester is hollypester.com.