Listening Seminar 3

Details

Nicola Woodham - Data Chant (2013) stereo sound, 5 mins.

There is an endless chatter, a voice just behind your shoulder, it moves round with you, the imagined monitor. An insurer advises you about home security, she is caught in a glitch, moving around inside your brain. But what is insured? Fragments echo and loop, folding back onto themselves. In between the layers, a sonic figment looms. This piece is a development of ideas explored in a live audio play ‘The Gift Experience’ which ran in 2013 at Weekend OtherWorld at Goldsmiths College and Block Party, Enclave Gallery, London.

Nicola Woodham is a sound, performance and video artist. She creates fictions with the voice: disembodied, distorted or as echo, as a means to critique forms of surveillance. She recently took part in the Totemic Festival, Freud Museum and FLOWS, Vibe Gallery, London. She is part of a collaborative project ‘Zeros and Ones’ with artists from Stockholm and London and also writes for Electric Sheep Magazine.

Robin Bale

The piece begins with the sound of a poured libation splashing on pavement and an invocation to Hermes, perhaps other chthonic gods and psychopomps. It then traces an echo-haunted path through a variety of aural spaces, the dimensions of which morph in response to the mumbling, singing and chanting voices that inhabit them, accompanied by the unending rumble of traffic. The city is reconfigured as a reverberant abode of ghosts – although not those ghosts fondly evoked by companionable antiquarians and their associates in the heritage industry.

http://www.robinbale.blogspot.com

Robin Bale is a London-based poet/performer and sound artist. He makes improvised performances utilising verbal and non-verbal vocalisation and basic musical equipment. He also makes recordings that experiment with aural space and mixing aesthetics. Robin is currently a Fine Art practice-as-research PhD candidate at Middlesex University. The working title of his project is “Making (a) Public: the performer and the polity”.

Catherine Linton - She's a bird/ She's a bitch/ She's a Fox

I / Not she has a story to tell. I / Not she makes, She / Not I tells it. It is a female tale, with many I’s and she’s, reflecting on the self, mixing muses from the past and present, forming visual and voiced palimpsests, as light as wings, with dark hirsute tails.

I / Not she lives, thinks, breaths, dies by the gaze and framing, makes up rules, her own set of controls and constraints to play with, manipulate, the stuck single states it tries to impose. She might appear to submit, be dominated, then moves, is multiple, transforms to outwit. Her soft yet firm voice subdues it, has done since I / Not she, and many she before her, took up the pen to fend room of their own.

Catherine Linton is a MAMA of English Literature and Fine Art.

Justin Hopper: Extracts from Public Record: Estuary

Public Record: Estuary is an album-length cycle of audio poems designed to be heard on a walk around the ancient Essex fishing village of Leigh-on-Sea. The poems are inspired by reports of minor sea disasters in the late-19th century Thames estuary, off the coast of Leigh. With texts sampled from period newspaper reports, travel- and nature-writing, folk songs and other primary sources, Public Record: Estuary haunts the coastal landscape with trace memories of its own in-between nature – neither river nor sea, ancient nor modern, city nor countryside.

Justin Hopper is a writer and artist from Pittsburgh, USA, living and working in London. His work explores the relationships between landscape, memory and myth in both nonfiction writing and audio artworks, which combine ideas from documentary poetry, folk song, journalism and ambient poetics.