The principal work the Sensingsite collective showed was an in-progress audio-visual patchwork titled ‘In the Westfield’, concerning the Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford, its “economy of distraction” and occupation of the hyper-capitalist landscape. Through their methodologies developed through working with site, they question the meaning of landscape, the field, collective work and field recording as terms and practices.
The “scrappy and awkward” presentation, arbitrarily shuffled, echoed the impermanence of the fetishised, ever-shifting neoliberal consumer landscape. I understand the upending of traditional, bucolic interpretations of ‘landscape’. Yet, as artists or passersby, none of us can be outside the economy of extraction, consumption and exploitation. The “recordist is not unbiased”.
I actually ran the gauntlet of Korea’s Shinsegae Centum City* flagship store a few times, the largest mall in the world. Nightmarish experiences, needless to say. Korean hyper-consumerism is a different beast. But I understand the primal, anthropological substrate that they are exploring. Perhaps nowhere am I more out of place than when dragged through luxury goods, grass-stained, hair mussed, slack-jawed and tight-fisted.
I just felt this another pretty flawless example of my frustration with research-forward projects; where the ideas are thick, the artwork is thin. Am I seeing this everywhere unwarranted, proposing we suggest nothing? What is wrong with me? Riled continually, why do I idiotically bat for the apparent reduction of language?
What is it that I want, if not this? I think transformation of stimulus into art piece or composition demonstrated in Dorothee Schabert’s guest lecture resonates more with me than this nominative, memetic pointing at things. That perceptual experience isn’t simply reiterated, it’s reshaped.
They key expression they brought up, is that art is a “host” for research and theoretic resonances. Interestingly, Sensingsite stated that they had reached an evolved freedom from theory by having “disaffiliated” from institutional models. For an emphatically non-institutional collective, Sensingsite sure moved like one. Couching works in these unsubstantial terms of place, space and site is a convention so deeply attached to the ontological landscape of the art institution, as I see it.
Maybe that’s why I involuntarily roll my eyes and grumble watching a member of Sensingsite walk purposefully past Vodafone and JD Sports, vocalising above the hum, drawing curious reactions. I felt a connection to my reading of Peter Cusack, his problematisation of artists’ use of the “world as human composition” in soundscape works. Examining these aural and visual “thresholds” of perception, through the insertion of the artist as public performer, creates a sense of othering in regards to the shoppers around them. It struck me as a mild, facile kind of provocation.
Transparently, or tellingly, in discussing the ethical and semantic concerns of ‘In the Westfield’, the collective noted a tension in the ratio between “memetic recording exercise” and participatory performance. Instinctually, I felt the former coursing through the work more, yet perhaps they are symbiotic. In Sensingsite’s agenda-less, unintentional method of recording, memetic recording is a conduit for repercussive, perceptual discoveries as a group.
“Times are tough.” The unnamed ghouls of war and politics circle the room again. During the second Presidential Debate in September 2024, Trump infamously said “I have concepts of a plan.” Risible as it was, and continues to be, I think it somewhat apt in relation to these densely researched, ‘social-science-but-not’ projects that we often engage with.
The themes interrogating notions of landscape that Sensingsite brought up align with a curious lineage of recent lectures and self-directed research that I have attended. I am certain that pursuing this field will prove inspirational in this project.
*Note: THAT’S a place/space/site/landscape/hellscape that I would interested in a study of. It’s like the spaceship from Wall-E.