4.3 Reflections on Walking Time: Replicated Walking

Across their differing compositions and presentation, these seven works use replication as a way of researching the presenting, ordering, and re-imagining of time and place. I start here with time. Sound exists in time, it appears temporally successive, it disappears in the act of appearing. I record time passing and translate this for a listener; I write of moments in time, mediated for a reader. This seems straightforward—someone listens, someone reads, time passes. But what is the nature of time as I deal with it?

Studying the nature of ‘measured time’, physicists believe that this varies with place and motion; time passes faster at the top of a mountain than at sea level and someone walking experiences less time than someone who is still (Rovelli, 2019, p. 37). This time is personal, unique to an individual; we each have our own time. A particulate view of time suggests time as a container formed of sub-divisions—hour, minute, second and on, down to the infinitely small, but where one would still have to step from one container to the next. For Rovelli, this means that once you arrive at the smallest container ‘a minimum interval of time exists and below this, the notion of time does not exist—even in its most basic meaning’; quantum physics does not need time in its equations (Rovelli, 2019, p. 74).

So, time is individual, and it may not exist. Yet we experience something that we call time; day follows night, night follows day, the seasons change in a predictable way. So, what then is this experienced time? Rovelli suggests that Aristotle, having asked himself this question, concluded ‘time is the measurement of change. Things change continually. We call “time” the measurement, the counting of this change’ (Rovelli, 2019, p. 56). In a similar manner to Aristotle’s idea of time, Hume’s model of time also works with the experienced—‘aspects of the past are retained, and aspects of the future anticipated from within the present.’ (Somers-Hall, 2013, p. p63). So, we each have our own ‘present’ ‘like a bubble around us’ (Rovelli, 2019, p. 40) (an image that seems conceptually reminiscent of Husserl’s ‘near sphere’ (p. 20)) and for centuries humans measured the passage of this time as the cyclical succession of day and night. ‘The order of ancient or prehistoric times was circular, not progressive’ (McLuhan, 2017), a diurnal rhythm, ‘an elementary source of our idea of time: night follows day; day follows night: we count the days. In the ancient consciousness of humanity, time is, above all, this counting of days’ (Rovelli, 2019, p. 56).

I regard all my works as working with time that is the continuous flow of the measurement of things changing. They also generally locate themselves around pre-clock intervals of experienced time—the turn of the day, or the turn of the seasons.1 Four of my replicated walking works (p. 71) are based on diurnal time, a single day in the case of the first three (Orford Replication, One Day in June, Búðahraun) and seven in the case of seven days in June. Each takes slices of the continuum and invites a listener to fill in the gaps. Two work with the turn of the seasons. Búðahraun was recorded across the summer solstice. The constituent river walks of No. 2: ‘no trace’ (p. 57) were made around the winter solstice and the spring equinox. As the piece plays, the sounds move from winter to spring and back again.

Whilst I don't think of any of my work as dealing with the granular, particulate nature of time, some works (presented in the next chapter) do make reference to the terminology of ‘clock time’, my works that come from circumnavigations of islands, both real (Around the Wind (p. 109); Beàrnaraigh (p. 118)) and imagined (Alnay (p. 136); A walk round Contención Island (p. 147)). Prompted by any circumnavigation of an island being either clockwise or anti-clockwise horology parallels emerge—the shape of the island and the shape of a clock face, the movement of hands across the face of a clock and the movement of the clockwise circumnavigating walker, archipelagos of minutes grouped into hours, themselves grouped into days. 2

Whilst time features in all my works it is in my replicated walks that I explicitly experiment with time, re-positioning the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Hume’s model of time, a continuum model, suggests a flow of remembered past through present to anticipated future (Somers-Hall, 2013, p. 63). As I create my replicated walks, I work within my ‘present’ but, as I replicate a walk, that present becomes part of my remembered past and my ‘now present’ is both experienced and anticipated based on this past. In my walking there is a process of sequencing; I am experiencing, remembering and anticipating, I am living with and through my own ordering of events3 but this is experienced differently by an audience, depending on how I present the work.

Accepting that everyone will always have their own unique perception of any art work, in the context of replication, a listener can construct their own, different sets of time.4 In the context of an installation, shaped by the Japanese concept of ma (Nitschke, 1988), I am considering what is happening in the space and time between the speakers as much as within a single speaker or across multiple speakers.5 For a listener in a multi-channel sound installation, where each speaker is offering one walk through time, the sounds mix and there is a simultaneity of effect. What a listener hears is all my ‘presents’, with none having contributed to a listener’s remembered past and so they cannot be experienced as such. They are experienced as a set of now’s—installation time. Thus, my experienced time between walks and that relational time that positions one walk with another within remembering, is removed; for a listener, as they start to listen, my time is un-sequenced and condensed and their time, installation time, is ongoing.

The number of replications that I use varies across the works. Whilst in Búðahraun there was an original and a single replication, One Day in June and Orford Replication both had an original and seven replications. Working with Hume’s model of time, ‘aspects of the past are retained, and aspects of the future anticipated from within the present’ (Somers-Hall, 2013, p. 63), the more replications there are, the more remembered pasts there are to contribute, and the stronger the relationship between past, present and anticipated future becomes for me as I walk. As I pass specific points in a walk, I recall what I heard there on previous occasions—at dusk, or in autumn—and on this basis I anticipate what I might hear on present and future walks—at dawn, or in spring. The time between replications shapes these relationships. Short intervals of three hours have an immediacy whilst intervals of 12 weeks take place in a longer, more contextualised remembered past. For me, the durations work to different rhythms.

In an installation the listener is within the installation space and, as sound mixes, they are within the sound, aware of all the walks together. However, with speakers positioned so there is no single position where sounds are focused, there is no single position where all walks can be equally heard. To listen to all the walks a listener must move, must walk, around all of the speakers; they can approach an individual speaker and concentrate with it.6 This was perhaps most marked in seven days in June (p. 85) where my positioning of speaker and text obliged a close, individual positioning as a listener leant towards the speaker to read the accompanying text. Within each single speaker there is the time, place and movement of a single walk; as they move to the next speaker a listener too moves in time, their own time, the time that it takes them to walk between two speakers and my presented time within the speakers, the time from one recording to another and the passage of time within a recorded walk.

If my recorded walks were short, a matter of a few minutes, then speaker to speaker might all fold into a single extended ‘now’. But they aren’t short, they extend over many minutes into hours and if a listener stays with them, they may begin to create their own rhythm of replication and build their own ordering of installation time. A listener walks from their first speaker to their second and to their third (which may be different from the first, second, and third that I recorded), moving to take in all the speakers in the installation. From these they now have a remembered original (which is in their remembered past), have an experienced present and an anticipated future and they can build this across all the speakers of the installation. This is unique to them and different to my remembering as I walked. But, unlike my original walks, their ongoing act of co-creation of time allows them options that I did not have when creating the recordings of the walks. A listener can move back in their installation time, they can revisit speakers, not just once but as often as they choose; they can re-order and extend time as they wish. Thus, although I conceive of my recordings as being part of, say, one day, in reality they are ‘always at once past and to come, registering bygone sonic moments and casting them into an indefinite future that is never exhausted by playback in the present’ (Cox, 2021, p. 70). My act of replication in creation of the work is paired with listeners’ acts of replication in its reception with a set of recordings that have become untethered from time.

Speakers may be placed equidistant from each other within the gallery space suggesting commonality, and this may indeed be the case. The speakers in seven days in June each played a recording that was a common time interval, one day, apart. However, my composition may mean that recordings coming from the speakers can be differing recording intervals apart; they can also be differing geographical distances apart. Thus, once again time and, in this instance, distance, become malleable. So, in the case of speaker one, speaker two and speaker three in begin to hear (p. 80) a listener takes three or four seconds to walk between two speakers and the distance within the gallery that is covered to walk between two speakers is perhaps 12 feet or four or five paces. However, a listener is hearing the elapsed time between when the recordings were made (for speaker one to two this is 21 days and from the end of the recording from speaker two to the start of that from speaker three is 40 minutes). They are also hearing across the geographical distance between the two places where the recordings were made (for speaker one to two this is just over 2000 miles and for two to three is about four miles) although, as with my rhythms of time, it would only be with some sort of prompt, or telling, that a listener would know this.

Changing the format from a multi-channel sound installation to a radio broadcast prompts a different compositional approach which in turn offers a different experience of time and movement. In facing composing my first work for radio I could see no straightforward way to present what I had created in an installation over the radio.7 Whilst it is possible to create a single mixdown of multiple walks this would not produce the effect I wanted. It would be easy to produce a stereo mixdown of the eight tracks in Orford Replication but this would result in a loss of clarity of the sound and risk losing the ideas held within a multi-channel installation (diurnal-time, place and movement). Within such an eight-track stereo mixdown, picking out one individual original recording would be almost impossible; in a stereo mixdown coming out of a single/pair of speakers, there is little chance of any of the movement and separation to recreate time that an installation allows.

From my first work for radio (Orford Replication (p. 73)) I gradually worked through a series of compositional experiments.8 I chose to present a series of time segments using sequential cuts across walks that also moved along the route of the walks—minutes zero to seven from walk one, minutes eight to 14 from walk two and so on.9 In works for radio there can be no visual ‘crutch’ (Voegelin, 2010, p. 37) and there is no possibility of using accompanying text works as tangible objects, so over time I increasingly integrated recordings of my accompanying texts. Speaking my poetry is a further, embodied act, an act of reading to which I bring my memory of both the composition of the poem but also my memory of the walk from which it comes and my physical act of walking. My embodied act of speaking the poetry becomes one further act of replication.

Each section would have its accompanying text, often as haibun, and the presence of the spoken text, as well as the impact of its content, also functioned as ‘sonic punctuation’. Each haibun marked a step in time towards the next iteration of the replicated walk. For most of these steps there was also an audible transition in the content of the field recordings, so the text offered an additional way for a listener to place themselves, in their own time and place. Within such a presentation there is a progression across time tied to a linear progression along the walked route, but it retains the underlying idea of multiple walks, multiple times, the presentation of a larger whole, and a larger unit of time across the whole broadcast whilst not losing the clarity of individual recordings (though losing some of their content). However, the element of co-creation of time is changed as the listener becomes a more passive recipient of my replication, my composition of time within the work, though they can still imagine and experience movement at the transition points between the segments of the broadcast. In distinction to listening in an installation, where a listener moves between speakers, with works for radio they are no longer creating their own participative link between the sounds I recorded as I walked, and they are no longer involved in their own motion within the installation space and so are engaged in a more static reception of the work.

For the radio works I relinquish any attempt at a predictable relationship between the work and how, where, and on occasion when, it is listened to. The range of listening devices frees a listener from any single space.10 In the absence of a gallery-installed location that both the work and listener inhabit, a listener could be in their home or in a public space, still or moving. It could be the sole focus of a listener’s attention, or a low background murmur. Listening may be a shared experience or, with a pair of earbuds, as Chambers described when discussing the arrival and impact of the Walkman^®, ‘an intensely private act’ (Chambers, 2017). Such listening also offers the option of a listener imposing their sonic world onto their surroundings, thereby ‘domesticating the external world’ (Chambers, 2017), your own personal sonic world becomes the sonic bubble within which you move, the soundtrack of Husserl’s ‘near sphere’. In this sonic world a listener can also choose when they listen. Whilst Radiophrenia operates on a ‘live broadcast only’ basis, the other two broadcasters that I have worked with run an archive facility. This frees listening to these radio works from the constraints of scheduling. Not only can a listener choose how and where they listen, they can also sequence their listening in a personal way and choose when they listen.

In three of the seven works the replication is based around a place across time, and the way in which I have defined place in these works is as a circumscribed, usually small, geographical location. The replications are in one place over time. I walk the same route with echoes of Richard Long’s A line made by walking (1967). Long walked the same line, back and forth, marking the grass with a single line; in walking one day in June, where my route crossed a slope of bare peat, the tracks of my eight sequential walks coalesced over the day to produce a single route. However, in two of the works, begin to hear and seven days in June, my ideas expand to an abstract place. In these works the point of commonality that is the focus of the replication changes as I experimented with different points of common reference—biology, and culture.11

In begin to hear replication occurs across time but the work offers a different point of sameness, and a more conceptual way of conceiving place. In each of the four constituent walks I am walking to a place, created by the same biological (and sonic) phenomenon, a species of bird at its nesting colonies, and their characteristic sounds. The work repeats across place, replicates, as at a point in each of the walks, there is the same sound, the massed calls of the onomatopoeically named kittiwake. Across the installation's speakers a listener can order time (as I have suggested above) but they can also hear four distinct walks, each in a different geographical place, coalesce into a single ‘biological-sonic-place’ as they stand before the installation’s white cliff and listen to the sounds of kittiwakes. This is a place defined not by geography but by the emplacement of the same biological phenomenon and its associated sounds. Given the work’s shifting geographical place the homonym of ‘hear’, not ‘here’, becomes an interesting linguistic addition to my conceptualization of place within the work. In seven days in June replication again occurs across time; my walking presents the rhythm of a recognised interval—(seven) days—and a listener can (re-)order this time. This work flexes the idea of place as, unlike the tightly geographically defined places in other walks, it is replication of walking across a broader place, a place defined by coherence of culture across recent history, ancient history, and geology. This is a locale (Tilley, 1994, p. 18). My seven walks are replicates along roads that each cross tribal lands, replicates in a place of centuries of subsistence culture, replicates on terrain that formed a land bridge between two continents and replicates on land that holds gold. A listener can build a place that shifts from remote beach to ancient shingle spit; from one gold trail to another, from modernity to a place of subsistence tribal community.

A view on the potential dimensions of, or types of, replication is offered by Umberto Eco as he considers the act of replication deliberately and explicitly built into the artistic process (Eco, 1985). With a focus on film and television, he uses the language of television to offer three types of replication—the re-make, the re-take and the series. The re-make as replication, he suggests, retells an original story; while it may use different actors, different techniques, or different settings, the characters, the story, and the outcome are the same. The re-take as replication uses some of the core attributes of an original story (story characters in Eco’s example) to tell a different but associated story, a sequel (or prequel). Here the characters, whilst the same people, may be older or younger, in a different place and/or in a different time. The series as replication takes the re-take but makes it an ongoing story; the series has the potential to evolve the original story to the point where it can seem to part company with the original, but it is still linked and recognisable as a replication through its lineage. Each of Eco’s categories has a degree of variability in the outcome of a replication and this variability is likely to be least apparent in the re-make, increases through the re-take, to the series where it is likely to be at its most marked. In Eco’s categorization my replications in Orford Replication, One Day in June and Búðahraun would seem to be re-makes. The final two works, begin to hear and seven days in June, shaping place more generally, would seem to be re-takes—walking in a place and then replicating it through subsequent walks in ‘the same place’ but one defined by something other than its precise geographical co-ordinates. In my creation of these works, in my walking sequenced over time, as Kierkegaard found, ‘Repetition is a form of change’ (Eno and Schmidt, 2001). In creation, all has changed to some lesser or greater degree, but in presentation their created change is hidden, cloaked in their simultaneity and it is then open to the listener to build their own repetitions, their own degrees of change.

In this chapter I developed what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. I began these walks in order to consider time, looking to re-configure time. However, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. So, I leave with seven days in June, a work in which I worked with an idea of place that went beyond a single, small geographical location, to a broader locale, one defined by coherence of culture across ancient history, recent history, and geology.

So, in my further consideration of place, here is a thought experiment ...

From your starting point, your base, your home, you set out to walk for one hour each day. You walk in different directions and along different routes. Given the time constraints on your walk you can only get so far before you have to turn back, to return to your base. As days pass you find that you are walking the same routes, in part or in whole, and in so doing you slowly trace out a virtual perimeter beyond which you can never pass.

You may perhaps recognise the realities of daily exercise during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns? My response to the pandemic grew out of such experiments with place and scale, my sense of embodiment and my experiences of replication. However, my response, my further ideas of place, was a culmination that crystalised my ideas of scale and ‘island’ that had always been present through previous works but had not been apparent to me as such; my response also contained several of the linked ideas that islands bring.

Initially I worked on real islands and walked circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the scale of my embodied walking this led to my enactment of my final work of this thesis, an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. This final work drew on, and extended, all the ideas that went before and, in that sense, is a literal and aesthetic culmination of this PhD.

In Chapter 5 (my final chapter before my conclusions) I describe my underlying ideas of island-ness, of scale of place, and chart and discuss these works.

On to Chapter 5. A Pattern of Islands 

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