5.6 Reflections on A Pattern of Islands

I suggested at the start of this chapter that island-ness offers places that are bounded, edged, touched with magicality, isolation and solitude, and the potential to be seen as a utopia or a prison, a heaven or a hell. My islands, both real and imagined, have been bounded, by the sea and by my embodiment—my practical enactment of Brinklow’s ‘the smaller the island the better’ (2013)—and, as I made many of these works alone, they have been places of my solitude. My enjoyment of islands, my islomania, my being enisled, generally inclines me towards my islands as utopia but it was the emergence of the Covid-19 Pandemic that made a reality of my imagined island as prison.

Across my pattern of islands, I continued my re-imagining of time. Time is held within my personal archipelago in multiple ways. There is the immediately apparent time within each Random (Island) time-signatured dance, and with the randomly chosen, differing across steps, duration of recordings—matters of seconds and minutes. Walking Contención Island works with the experienced, cyclical time of a day, but here it is sequences of days, across three containments in a global pandemic that together crossed a year. Day follows day follows day, time as the counting of days (Rovelli, 2019, p. 56); across the days of the first lockdown the continuous occurrence of the walks (each itself a closed, continuous circle recalling a clock face) slowly grows into an evolving, and eventually unaltering, island shape. This took about 21 days and is my embodied, human-timescaled, version of island formation. Exceptionally, this can be matched by island formation by tectonic phenomena such as earthquake related mud volcanos, but it is generally in stark contrast to the unimaginable, millions of years, geological timeframe of island formation and erosion by the sea. The continuous nature of this time is also reflected within my use of scrolls—a continuous printed medium—as my means to present the continuity of the days and their poetry and images across the three works.

The scrolls chart the relationship between the evolving island creation and my accompanying writing, and when laid on the floor in the context of an installation, prompt the act of reading/walking. As well as each being the product of a discrete set of walks, they also together form a triptych. Whilst the poetry—as lines in a mesostic or the haiku—offers snapshots, a cluster of now’s within each day, across all its constituent days, an unrolled scroll can be taken in at a single glance (although it cannot so be read). On the third scroll of the triptych, the daily images merge into a single image with no obvious division of the (continuous) time within it. Each work of the triptych is a measurement of things, and the differing time durations of the three lockdowns is measured as the lengths of the scrolls laid out on the gallery floor and also plays out through the sound pieces’ alternating sound and silences from the three speakers in the installation.

My works are about my movement, and their pace of change is embodied and thereby slow. This pace of change also contributes to their apparent homogeneity which is also responsible for their gradual and often apparently seamless evolution. This is well illustrated in Around the Wind (p. 109) and Alnay (p. 136). Both are circumnavigation pieces and so offer a steady sonic progression along a continuous shoreline. They stand in some contra-distinction to radio pieces (such as the radio presentation of seven days in June (p. 88) where I chose to disrupt the seamless nature of the original walks and their recording, by using sequential cuts from one walk to the next and also by using text reading as sonic punctuation.

In the late 1970s, in the world of the three-minute pop single, triggered by his experiences of he and his friends ‘exchanging long cassettes of music chosen for its stillness, homogeneity, lack of surprises ... continuous, a surrounding’, Brian Eno produced his first album of ‘ambient music’ Music for Airports. Eno wrote that he intended ambient music to be in tune with its setting and, as a consequence of its composition, to be capable of being both the subject of close listening attention and being the subject of no listening attention at all (Eno, 1996). The act and experience of listening to my works is shaped by their duration; listening to a long sound work requires considerable concentration from a listener or else, or perhaps as well as, the willingness to let go, and surrender to the sonic passing of time. Concentrated listening is not a casual act; it is a deliberate attempt to engage with the totality of sounds from all sources including, as Holbrook identifies, the sounds of the site of playing and their interactions with the presented work (2019). Pauline Oliveros writes of the need to develop the practice of deep listening as an explicit act (2005a);1 this is neither automatic nor easy so it’s not surprising that such listening appears to be quite unusual.

Rather than an effortful, concentrated listening act, surrendering to the sonic passing of time feels to be an act of concentration that has aspects in common with flow state experiences, as described by musicians and composers experiencing periods of timeless creativity (Harmat et al., 2016). Sound artist and musician Jez riley French [sic] reckoned that during a period of listening something changes after about 20 minutes, when he found a sense of absorption, and the (lack of) perception of external time.2 Speaking personally, I recognise that I have periods of listening to sounds when I realise that I have been listening and that I have little idea of how long I have been listening for. However, maintaining this over long periods seems difficult and most, if not all, listeners will have periods where their concentration levels fall. Whilst my works, due in part to their duration but also to their slow pace of change, invite a meditative, intense, immersive listening, in my direct experience of audience members in my installations it is more common for people to engage in the manner suggested by Eno, swinging back and forth between attention and not—I have watched individuals listening in an installation whilst also reading a novel. I often include written material, text works, as part of an installation, such as the concertina-fold book of seven days in June and the triptych of scrolls in Walking Contención Island. This raises a further dimension of Eno’s swinging attention, that of the relationship between attention to a sound work and attention to its accompanying text, for both a listener/reader and for me as the artist composer.

Sometimes I present my text as sound-recordings of my reading of my poetry integrated within the field recordings, and thereby spoken into the space of an installation. This means that ‘listening’ will involve all three of Chion’s categories of listening (Chion, 1994). Not only will the listener engage in causal listening, where they attempt to identify the sound sources, and a degree of reduced listening with a focus on the traits of the sound itself ‘independent of its cause and of its meaning’ they will also engage in semantic listening as they interpret and make meaning of my speech.3 Engaging with the work remains an act of listening; both the field recordings and the spoken word are apprehended via audition.

However, across all of the installations described in Chapters 3 to 5, I have experimented with various combinations of sound and printed text. I have presented printed text, to be read within the installation space, in a variety of forms—cards, pamphlets, concertina-fold books, scrolls, scripta continua. Sometimes I used multiple forms within one installation—in Walking Contención Island I used the combination of three scrolls and three scripta continua. There is a potential paradox in having text, that invites reading that may prompt contemplation and thinking, placed in a space alongside sound that invites listening and may prompt contemplation and thinking. I have suggested that reading/listening will be a back-and-forth process so the two are offering a fusion that blends each with the other, each drawing from and feeding into the other. A listener, standing before a printed text whilst hearing a sound work, engages with a shifting, turning concentration, not quite Eno’s description of a work being the subject of close listening attention and being the subject of no listening attention at all because, as the works draw from a common source, the swing is between different ways of apprehending my embodied experience. Back and forth from printed text to sound, and back, to and fro and back and forth, listening in the light of what’s read, reading in the light of what’s heard, interconnectedness of senses, two ways to the sensing of what is inside. When concentrating on listening, presented text becomes a more or less abstract pattern, dark marks held on a white ground, seen as a sculptural whole, rather than as a semantic message; it is perhaps easiest to imagine this in the case of the scripta continua. Equally, as a listener begins to read the texts and their cognitive processes of seeing and reading take over, what is heard moves back, out of concentration and into our normal relationship with what we hear when concentrating on what we see, that of a fluctuating sonic presence.

I stepped into the world of cinema when experimenting with duration and listening to No. 2: ‘no trace’, and I now return to that world to consider the linking of my sound and printed text. Whilst a listener reads a printed text, the sound work still plays and at this point it becomes the soundtrack for their reading. Chion discusses the impact of the soundtrack of a film on how what is seen is interpreted, and he describes a range of emotive and temporal effects (1994, p. 3). When a listener reads a printed text work inside the sounds of a sound piece they are reading while contained within the sounds of my walking, however closely or distantly they are hearing it. It is the context for their thinking and interpretation of the text; their reading is shaped by the rhythm of my footfall, the sounds of the place that I am walking in, and reading and sounds are synergistic. But if this is the effect of sound for the read text, what is the reverse, the effect of reading the text on hearing the sound? In discussing the use of sound in film Chion offers three categories of speech—theatrical, textual, and emanation (1994, p. 171). Theatrical speech has a ‘dramatic, psychological, informative, and affective function’ whilst emanation speech is ‘is not necessarily heard and understood fully’.

Chion describes textual speech as having ‘the power to make visible the images that it evokes through sound—that is, to change the setting, to call up a thing, moment, place, or characters at will.’ In film it achieves this by stepping slightly away from the main, theatrical, narrative of the film and working in a documentary fashion. It sets the scene or defines a position and in so doing seeks to locate the viewer inside the storyline. For the listener in my installations my texts do similar work to Chion’s textual speech, and to read the text is to be offered a moment from within the walk, a small, fixed point in the moving sounds, calling up a moment or a place. Both text and sound come from the same creative experience and offer a cross-referencing synthesis, a new whole that re-imagines my walking in place. My text references moments that can be apprehended within the recordings—footfall on gravel, bird call, wind—and similarly the sound contain traces of the moments that appear in the text. Though my sounds and text relate to each other in this way, there is a limit to how tightly I try to direct this effect. In cinema, speech, sound, and music are co-ordinated by the director into a close set of associations designed to achieve the desired impact. I work with sound and text from the same creative experience and place them into the same installation space, to allow a listener to work with their inter-relationships, to build their own directorial associations; text and sound as a cross-referencing synthesis, a new whole for a listener to re-imagine my walking in place.

In the works described in this chapter I have experimented with various ways of working with a place and these evolved into a method where I repeatedly walk from, and back to, a single common point in a single day. This built on the replications presented in but took place over a longer period of time, often involved where I was living during the creation of the work (my locale (Tilley, 1994)), or were places that I knew through years of visiting. In Chapter 3 I explored my embodiment and, shaped by making work based on real islands, and through my practice of walking in a place and at a scale that emerged from my own embodied limits of walking in a day, I came to understand that I was working with islands of a certain size. Thus, I could evolve to creating imaginary islands, places that could be bounded, circumscribed, contained, and edged by my walking, my embodiment, rather than by the sea. I could create my own islands wherever I chose and in so doing could also examine the metaphor of the island and its associated ideas; this became place-ness as island-ness.

Across islands, both real and imagined, I have created an archipelago of human-scale islands within a sea of ideas, place realised through geography, biology, socio-culture or my imagination. With their commonalities and differences, they together present an ‘archipelago of the mind’, sites for listening, hearing, reading, thinking. This was the path that led to my creation of my final work described in the thesis, Walking Contención Island, an imaginary island, created in a pandemic of containment, in a city, in my locale, made, and re-made, by the traces of my embodied walking. This final work drew together, consolidated and then extended, all the ideas that went before to become an aesthetic and literal conclusion of this PhD.

On to Chapter 6 In Conclusion 

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