COMPOSITION: HOW I MADE THIS AND CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS ARISING OUT OF THAT ACTIVITY
Compositional choices open up possibilities for data representation, but also restrict them. Listening into the Lattice highlights several unexpected ways in which the use of sonification in artwork opens a door to critical enquiry into the nature of data, listening, and the role of context in how we compose relationships between meaning and sound. An earlier section mentioned the ‘weird materiality’ that exists within “the unmapped interior of [the] union” (Harman, 2020, 11) between artefact, data, sound, and listener. I would like to highlight some key epistemological problems that are coincident with this ontological ‘weirdness’.
Data, in its collection, use, presentation, and interpretation, is always indebted to degrees of inference and facilitated subjectively. There are many ways in which this can be presented. I will begin with subjectivity. Ancient glass artefacts or any object of study are, as everything is, apprehended from a perspective. By perspective, I indicate not only a physical position in space with respect to the object, but also a temporal position, along with the cultural and/or (perhaps) ideological or religious perspectives of a percipient. From the Enlightenment and into the twentieth century the pursuit of scientific objectivity has sought to remove the observer from the context of experimental observation, for the obvious and sensible reasons of removing interference and bias from the knowledge produced by observation of experiment. However, a positivist fusion of naturalistic rationalism and empiricism have sought to establish a social dogma of verificationism for knowledge in general, outside that of a particular experiment and inclusive of all ways of knowing, particularly those mediated by academic institutions. In order to remove acknowledgement of subjectivity and perspective from descriptions of experience in favour of an ‘objectivity’ that Merleau-Ponty has referred to as a ‘God’s-eye view’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012), and Nagel as a “view from nowhere” (Nagel, 1986), a generally reductive methodology has been employed. The object of research is dissected, parsed until the scale of the cut is smaller than that of the observers unaided perceptual frame of reference.
Mechanisation of laboratory apparatus sought to remove the observer by taking them out of the physical performance of the experiment, wagering on the assumption that mechanical measurement is less fallible than human attempts. However, it became recognised in the twentieth century, particularly in Quantum Mechanics, that removal of perspective is impossible (Barad, 2006). Perception through an apparatus (like a microscope) is still perception by a subject. Experimental action at a distance (whether performed by magic, quantum entanglement or simply by use of the internet) is still action, directed by some subject. Thus information always reaches a point in which it must be interpreted from some perspective, which provides hermeneutic feedback as to how it is understood.
Another problem is that any measurement is dependent on a frame of reference that establishes a unit of resolution to which that measurement is valid, even if subjective considerations are not taken into account. This idea is illustrated by Mandelbrot’s variable measure of the length of the British coast (Mandelbrot, 1967) and demonstrates that scale establishes a boundary beyond which information loses meaning. While this limit of resolution is concrete as a practical limit, it also proposes a philosophical issue: if something is “fact” (or moreover “true”) on one scale or from one perspective, can it be false from another? Can an object both exist and not exist at the same time?
Finally, this brings us to classical problems raised by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Edmund Husserl for which this paper can only offer the briefest sketch. As all phenomena are approached from a perspective, every case of artefact, data, or sonification represents some ‘adumbrated’ incomplete and subjective description of a phenomena (Husserl, 2014). As students of Kant would narrate it, the object of study becomes therefore mind-dependant (Kant, 1998), a kind of idealism. Students would then disagree about the nature of this mind-dependent object: can it be apprehended rationally, though speculation? Or is it constituted ideally, from a bundle of qualities that are picked out by the senses? Empiricism has generally arrived at a description of an object as a bundle of qualities, which is unsatisfying as it does not tell us what a thing is, really, any more than the idealistic Kantian version. In the situation we are examining we might imagine that our data are a bundle of qualities arrived at through analysis of the bundle of qualities that made up the artefacts in the first instance (Hume, 1739, 1748). These have been processed by the bundle of perceptions that make up the mind of the investigator and the interpretations of those who understand the data. Under this model a large degree of indeterminacy exists in the ‘striations’ (Deleuze, 2004) between parts of the bundles, around these bundles (their context), and in terms of inference when bundles are conveyed between subjects. That such a great deal of indeterminacy exists within a framework intended to make a case for objectivity and fact, even, perhaps, truth, indicates that something is wrong.
Another approach locates the question on a different scale. Acknowledging that an object cannot be measured with infinite accuracy, but rather only to a degree of tolerable resolution, and that furthermore, it must be read, interpreted, and applied, all point to the possibility that removal of the subject is not the best way towards understanding phenomena under consideration. After all, if the subject is removed and measurement is only valid to a scale established by a measuring subject, how is that frame of reference for accuracy to be calibrated? Why not instead take the knowledge of the phenomena under study and the investigator as part of an entangled field which includes both observer and observed? An active, phenomenological perspective halts empirical fragmentation of object and experience by circumscribing these within a smooth (Deleuze, 2004) continuous field in which the subject and object of study are entangled. In Listening Into the Lattice this field is constituted not only by the materials and methods detailed in the preceding sections, but also by the environment they contribute to the formation of, an environment that includes participating listeners. A multiplicitous notion of environment, as sketched here, points to the idea there is not a correct way to apprehend this work. As with the sound itself there is not a ‘sweet spot’ in which the music sounds correct for one position in the room and skewed for all others. Instead of a phenomenology, Listening Into the Lattice proposes environmental phenomenologies.
By widening the frame of ‘the work itself’ from the utilitarian masquerade of a fixed object to a field in which object and perception-of-object interact, we highlight our own perceptual apparatus and our ability to perceive our own becoming, alongside but independently of the (becomings of) objects under our consideration.
In moving from discussion of data, sound design and spatialisation to aesthetic experience, we move from structural functions of materials to the circumstances of the presentation of the work in general, from situation to circumstance. Movement towards phenomenologies, plural, draws attention to the multiplicity of contexts and perspectives possible for constituting them. The sensed movement of awareness across scales of perception and frames of reference is for me central to individual aesthetic experience, and manifests in a mixture of dwelling and discovery. This makes aesthetic experience a productive state, exploratory rather than discriminatory. Awareness of shifting contexts offers possibilities for action and investigation in a way that relates to the originary Greek meaning of aesthesis, and less to notions of judgement that have largely replaced it in common usage. Robert Irwin speaks of such awareness and its relation to the form of a work in Notes Towards a Conditional Art:
“Art as pure subject is a non-thing. That is, it has no actual physical dimensions or, if you wish, infinite physical dimensions. This art exists in the pure void of concept, and as such it is the infinite potential from which all our actions are drawn….” (Irwin, 2017)
Listening Into the Lattice was composed as a field that seeks to make this type of activity possible. Practically speaking it has not yet achieved it.