5.5 Imagined Islands

5.5.1 Alnay

four rants for the summer solstice, was walked during the summer solstice of 2017, and as I was creating it I was aware that I was walking along a number of the same paths on multiple steps of the rants. Tracing out the routes that I used to navigate my way between the locations, rather than the ‘as the crow flies’ lines of the score, began to identify these common routes, traces that formed an integral part of my walking there. So, when my walking at this scale was applied repeatedly it traced out a walked edge, a lived boundary, a limit of my embodied walking. When I added regular routes I had walked when doing bird counts, and those walked during other ad hoc visits, a shape began to emerge.1 The lines started to create an edge, an outline, and the shape on the map began to remind me of Fair Isle, or Papa Westray, or Beàrnaraigh. Whilst still an outline, it was becoming a shoreline, and so emerged the idea of the creation of my own imaginary island (below).

I visited my imaginary island on the summer solstice in June 2021 and, starting at sunrise, I made a quadrophonic recording of my walking the shore in a clockwise direction (a circumnavigation as I had done in the (A)Round Islands works). I also composed a prose poem from notes made immediately after completing the walk (right).

I presented it (as with four rants for the summer solstice) on its seasonal counterpoint, the winter solstice in The Arches, Newcastle University. For the poetry I recorded my reading of this and incorporated it immediately prior to the start of the walking recordings. The work started 24 hours before the precise moment of the winter solstice and looped until 24 hours after. An A0-size poster showed a view of one part of the shoreline path, titling, the poetry and the outline of Alnay. This was on display in a cabinet on the southwest wall inside the Arches (below).

This work was also presented as Island Suite: movement 2; Alnay, a four-hour 15-minute, stereo, radio broadcast at Radiophrenia 2023.

As I had begun to do with the replicated walk No. 2: ‘no trace’, two of my island pieces (Alnay and the earlier work four rants for the summer solstice (after John Cage, 1977)(p. 131)), continued to work with ‘season-time’. Each was recorded on a summer solstice and then presented on a winter solstice, two seasons later. A listener, immersed in the haptic sensations of winter, hears high summer—something remembered from the recent past and something to come again in an anticipated future. For these (and No. 2: ‘no trace’) I used an outdoor, public, listening space, The Arches, a Grade 2 listed building on Newcastle University campus.2 The works were played at a volume that reflected the sound levels when I was walking and so, sonically, the works existed inside the sounds of the surrounding University campus, the sounds of a nearby main road, and the sounds of a major hospital. In this milieu, the ebb and flow of my sound works could be lost in the sounds of a mechanized road sweeper tidying the campus, or a more distant passing ambulance.

For a work installed in a gallery space it is a reasonable assumption that anyone entering the room has some degree of motivation to engage with the artwork. At The Arches, most people walking through have no expectation of encountering an artwork, and so can have no prior motivation to engage with it. Across the three works I observed about half a dozen people spend more than 10 minutes listening; I watched about a dozen people notice the poster or the sound, sufficient to pause and listen or read the poster.3 Perhaps one in ten passers-by registered the work playing, usually by looking around to see where the sounds were coming from, though not breaking stride to do so—here listening is little more than noticing. For most people walking through The Arches the works were effectively unheard, and the ten percent of people who walked through the space wearing headphones or conversing on their mobile phone were presumably oblivious to the work. This seems to accord with Max Neuhaus’s installation Times Square—a drone emanating from a pavement grid on a traffic island in New York’s Times Square. Neuhaus ‘re-imagined the listening public as “anyone who happens to listen” rather than those who seek out—and gain access to—specialized listening experiences’ (Ouzounian, 2020, p. 116).

There is a final dimension of this public space, that makes listening likely to be a constrained act. I mentioned above the haptic sensations of winter and with two works presented around the winter solstice, December temperatures (and windchill) are not conducive to sitting still to listen for prolonged periods of time.

On to 5.5.2 Walking Contención Island 

On via Interlude 3 

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