As a human with uncertain vocations, I have always egocentrically mythologised myself as being a ‘normal, regular person’ looking in on the absurd art world. I think it is all too easy to dehumanise those of us working in the trades as unsophisticated, especially when (we) artists position themselves (ourselves) as interrogators of the world. The reverse is also true, the fiscal world will endlessly I suspect this is where my certain bone-deep resistance to, and discomfort of, banal theoretics comes from, because I never had anyone to share these ideas with. Everyone works, in some capacity, and that work shapes us. I wish to avoid the unavoidable by drawing from my own lived experience. While I may be extractively treating this world as subject, I am definitively not the other, an ignorant outsider. I assimilated into this hard-edged world filled with pride and dysfunction, and only by ascending through the mundanity, brutality and challenge of the work, can I now actually see the pregnant space that it is for artistic exploration. A great, refreshing voice that was shown to me was that of Tim Ingold (2013, pp. 47). His writings intersect the art world and material reality in a revealing way, as he observes: ‘Building is an activity; it is what builders do. Add the article, however, and the activity is brought to a close. Movement is stilled, and where people had once laboured with tools and materials, there now stands a structure – a building – that shows every sign of permanence and solidity.’
‘These definitions, however, belie the creativity of the ‘messy practices’ that give rise to real buildings. Whether of sketching, tracing, modelling, staking out, digging, cutting, laying, fixing or joining, all involve care, judgement and aforethought, and are carried on within worldly fields of forces and relations. None can be placed unequivocally on one side or the other of any distinction of fundamental ontological import, such as between intellectual conception and mechanical execution.’ (pp. 59)
I booked out a Zoom H3-VR from the ORB and brought it home to Sussex, seeking to explore the ambisonic paradigm within a sonically active environment. Spatially representing a construction site, I felt, could be enhanced by ambisonic recording; situating the listener on site, to simulate the effect of being among the workers. To become, even just tangentially, without any expended effort or blood, sweat and tears, one of them.
I was concerned about inadvertently demeaning them and their work by treating them as a curious subject. However, the emptiness of the moments and sounds captured, the unguardedness of the conversation renders the recordings as an authentic capture of only that moment, as it happened. That is not to forgo all problematic qualities of the act of field recording, but I was disarmed by the men’s receptiveness to the process.
I recorded in a number of disparate locations across the relatively small site, (three to four distinct plots designated for building, with two complete and a further two in the planning phase) with a view to capturing distinctly differing activities, and reflecting the wide range of works occurring on any given day. First, I recorded Dave fitting door liners, then Will and Dalo cutting and glueing floor tiles, and then Jorge, Ryan and Rees carrying out tree surgery and digging a trench. Alongside these broader physical activities are subtleties of conversation and interpersonal dynamics, these smaller facets are almost what excite me more. Relating one character to another, authentically, for the listener is a conceit I want to explore.
References:
Ingold, T. (2007) Against Soundscape. in A. Carlyle (Ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris: Double Entendre.
Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Oxon: Routledge.