INTRODUCTION:
A CONFRONTATION BETWEEN MATERIALITY AND PHENOMENOLOGY
“…artistic practices are not ‘exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure the distribution of these activities…” (Ranciere, 2004, 42).
Listening into the Lattice is a new interdisciplinary initiative that explores possibilities, affordances, and challenges for rendering chemical data from archaeological glass fragments as audible experiences. Beginning as an open window through which two collaborating researchers discuss and demonstrate our methodologies to each other, our working practice has energised an interdisciplinary field where epistemological expectations embedded in paradigms specific to each field confront one another. This paper discusses unique conceptual questions arising from this complex collaboration. In particular, it focuses on how the material development of the work provides a means of both asking and investigating concepts from within my artistic practice. Following a brief introduction to the researchers involved, I highlight some key challenges we have encountered in initiating and presenting this new interdisciplinary project. Following this, I discuss the data we are working with in this phase, some interesting issues around data sonification in general, and some more difficult questions that arise from the nature of the material we are exploring. I then detail the first phase of the project in terms of sound design, synthesis and spatialisation. Following this, compositional considerations and critical observations are elaborated, and next steps suggested.
IN THE REFLECTIVE LATTICE:
HOW QUESTIONS ABOUT KNOWLEDGE REFLECT MATERIAL CONCERNS
“Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.” (Spielberg, 1989)
Interdisciplinarity highlights differing epistemological approaches at intersections between fields. Important questions arise, such as ‘what counts as knowledge?’ where concepts like ‘data’, often understood as embodying a rigid facticity from one discipline, are seen to be more plastic, more sculptural, when examined from another standpoint. Furthermore, a persistent logical-positivist worldview tends to conflate data, fact, and truth. It seems instead that meaning arises as a dynamic changeling, an entanglement of subject, object, and apparatus (Barad,2006), in which data and context are inseparable.
In addition to these epistemological questions, we have also uncovered slippery ontological issues. Our project creates pressure waves from data that functions as a virtual stand-in for a material that is generally microscopic, translucent, and intangible. Listeners apprehend this from various locations and positions. The ‘weird materiality’ (Langballe, 2019, Morton, 2015, 2016, Harman, 2020) of this sound experience casts a critical ear backwards from the point at which sound was used to interpret the chemical data to the act of analysis upon the ancient glass artefacts themselves. Any analysis, including the chemical analysis that created the data used in our project, proceeds in an ontological inquiry by a process of reductive dissection. Under the knife, structures are teased apart, peered into to reveal unseen spaces and a description of parts and their function is attempted. The form of the whole is then derived from the parts, or so the theory goes.
The working method of our project is then to take data derived from analysis and, like Frankenstein’s monster, sonically re-animate it. This approaches alchemy in the sense that ours is a contemporary attempt to fabricate a flickering sound signal from an ancient recipe. Where the recipe is incomplete, our interpretation in connecting the fragments becomes more creative. This hermeneutic process highlights interesting aspects of the data we are working with. In particular, some regions of this dataset have fewer physical referents than others. The data dimension of ‘vessel-type’ is speculative, and ‘colour’ seems inconsistently described. The data calls for interpretation, and highlights where it is itself an interpretation, despite being rigorously analytical.
