Abstract

Annie Morrad, Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, University of Lincoln
Ian McArthur, UNSW Art & Design, UNSW Australia, Sydney

Abstract: Paradoxical (Data Driven) Space.

This paper takes the form of a twenty-minute performative audio/visual presentation that explores and plays with the thematic of sound disruption and the puncture of a linear visual. It seeks to involve the audience with the intent to present instants of sound across a social landscape that also includes paradoxical sounds that juxtapose a dichotomy of tangled engagement.

In using data from day to day activities based on the above Morrad and McArthur produce-interwoven compositional structures from which sound and image projects are produced. These sonic experiments are formed from the interplay of live and electronic sounds placed with images; projects exploring urban crowds (Canetti 1962) and their movement through structured and architectural urban space. This will be combined together with social noise interspersed with blank silence - this noise spread across into the silence a continuous rhythm that changes only through layering and an improvisational process of adding to or subtraction. The rhythms that are imbued within a social structure that create a time based pattern, are consonant with ideas referenced in Lefebvre (Lefrbvre 2004) with his understanding of daily rhythm the social pattern of time with opening and closing of places, the structure of time in the work place and within visual frames such as television and cinema. This includes the part rhythm plays in society through work and the very involvement of our bodies in keeping us alive. This method also echoes the approach of jazz saxophonist Steve Coleman who writes about rhythm and improvisation (Coleman 2007, Coleman 2011).

As we are affected cognitively, emotionally and aesthetically by our temporal experience of all the myriad modalities of sound, natural, urban, musical (Fonseca, 2014) our awareness of time shifts – compressing, expanding, each conscious and unconscious moment or event reflexively re-making and narrating the self.

Morrad + McArthur will be live performing this understanding of disruption, data and urban with video and sound.