Silent Light, Luminous Noise: Photophonics, Machines and the Senses

This research takes the basic physical premise that sound can be synthesized using light, explores how this has historically been, and still is achieved, and how it can still be a fertile area for creative, theoretical and critical exploration in sound and the arts. Through the author's own artistic practice, different techniques of generating sound using the sonification of light are explored, and these techniques are then contextualised by their historical and theoretical setting in the time-based arts. Specifically, this text draws together diverse strands of scholarship on experimental sound and film practices, cultural histories, the senses, media theory and engineering to address effects and outcomes specific to photophonic sound and its relation to the moving image, and the sculptural and media works devised to produce it. The sonifier, or device engendering the transformations discussed is specifically addressed in its many forms, and a model proposed, whereby these devices and systems are an integral, readably inscribed component - both materially and culturally - in both the works they produce, and via our reflexive understanding of the processes involved, of the images or light signals used to produce them. Other practitioners' works are critically engaged to demonstrate how a sense of touch, or the haptic, can be thought of as an emergent property of moving image works which readably and structurally make use of photophonic sound (including the author's), and sound's essential role in this is examined. In developing, through an integration of theory and practice, a new approach in this under-researched field of sound studies, the author hopes to show how photophonic sound can act as both a metaphorical and material interface between experimental sound and image, and hopefully point the way towards a more comprehensive study of both

As Above, So Below

An online speculative fiction work in repsonse to a Leverhulme Artist in Residency at the Brunel Museum, London. Hosted by SKELF, and online curated project space

Coding Bodies

This paper discusses the role of text and the voice (both external and internal) in the interplay between the histories of audio-visuality and in the histories of the senses and the arts. More specifically it will look at the emergence of modernist discourses centred on voice, the auditory and the visual, whereby the roles of text, sound and image were being radically reformulated under the auspices of Phonography and Film. In the last 15 years, scholars such as Smirnov, Kahn, Levin, Thoben and Naumann have traced exploratory audio-visual practices from the late 19th century to the present, often engaging with tropes surrounding the role of the apparatus-as-sensory-proxy. I will take a slightly different route in this regard, discussing how the metaphor of the machine-body extended into the realm of memory, language and aurality via Dada, Sound Poetry and Phonography. This will take the form of a Lecture performance, drawing together various media and combining these with a live auscultation sound work

The Haptic Optic

An essay which discusses an alternative Atomist metaphysics of vision and touch, by way of my Eidola Series: shellac-on-silk rubbings of analogue camera equipment

Works for Air

This exhibition brings together three artists who share a certain preoccupation with transformational processes. Although they work with a variety of materials, and employ disparate approaches and aesthetics, all operate within a field of ideas which ultimately resolve around the trope of a work of ‘art as a translation or transcription’. Tim Knowles’s work is characterised by a kind of soft, cranky invention – often of bespoke devices for sensing and transducing movements or fluids to generate traces; tree branches sway in the wind and draw on strategically positioned paper. A plotting device fitted in the back of a car records the different momentums of a long drive. A helmet mounted wind-vane directs its wearer through the landscape according to the vicissitudes of the air. For this exhibition, Knowles exhibits speculative plans and models for a watercraft, which similarly bears its occupant in whichever direction the wind takes it. Heather Ross is concerned with how we come to know the world, and engages with the systems invented to store and convey information on a deep and intuitive level, mining systems of classification, descriptions, texts and images for their interpretative possibilities. Her series of diptychs consist of photographs and paintings which seek to synthesize them according to that which was lost in their capture – birds in absence. Ross’s gravitation to the birds’ call and the impossibility of truly knowing their place and essence inflects and distorts the original photographs to generate a sustained and compelling record of place and emotion. Rob Mullender’s response to air is more instrumental – his practice typically involves the creation of objects or systems which synthesize or mediate sound. His sculpture is a figure of subjection; a cast of an empty space, held in stasis and locked into a network of ties and ligatures, whose purpose is to vibrate when driven on a car’s roof-rack, producing a buzzing drone. Part processional incantation, part self portrait, this work is both instrument and agent, only exerting its agency through an engagement with performance. Visual, mechanical, corporeal and social, these works constitute a body of evidence, traces of processes and events that have been moulded and vitalised by our most common shared element

Divine agency: Bringing to light the voice figures of Margaret Watts-Hughes

In 1885, the Welsh singer and philanthropist Margaret Watts-Hughes embarked upon an extraordinary series of experiments on the shaping of materials and images with sound. In attempting to measure the loudness of her voice Watts-Hughes conceived and commissioned the making of an instrument she called the eidophone. Consisting of a mouthpiece and receiving chamber, across which was stretched a vibrating India rubber membrane, she discovered that the apparatus produced patterns in a variety of powders and fluids by way of its resonant articulation of sung notes – phenomena she named voice figures. A desire to ‘fix’ these patterns directly led her to applying the eidophone to pigments on glass. This article will evaluate a recently unearthed archive of these works – never before seen in colour and previously thought lost – by examining details of the images in conjunction with Watts-Hughes’ writing in order to gain insights into her practice. It will attempt to situate Watts-Hughes as an interdisciplinary practitioner, working within and around the contemporaneous discourses on early sound recording, science and the supernatural. Noting concordances with spiritualist practices and (given their relationship to radical social movements) implications for notions of female voice and power, an implied metaphysics of the voice is discussed, along with the possibility, or otherwise, to disinter the sound from these singular works of art. In an era where digital tools and practices enable the extraction of an audio signal from almost any form of visually represented sound, this article concludes with how we might contend with the voice figures – works of immense complexity which problematise this tendency towards direct sonification

As Figuras de Voz de Margaret Watts Hughes

Estas imagens são tiradas de um arquivo único de cerca de 50 obras da cantora e filantropa galesa Margaret Watts Hughes – imagens que até 2016 não haviam sido descobertas e eram tidas por perdidas. Datadas do final do século XIX ao início do século XX e consideradas os únicos exemplos existentes, elas são o resultado de um envolvimento profundamente espiritual e incomumente dedicado com a voz, materiais e imagem

Works For Air

Works for Air Tim Knowles | Rob Mullender | Heather Ross Open: 7th – 28th October 2016 | Preview: Thursday 6th October 5-7pm This exhibition brings together three artists who share a certain preoccupation with transformational processes. Although they work with a variety of materials, and employ disparate approaches and aesthetics, all operate within a field of ideas which ultimately resolve around the trope of a work of ‘art as a translation or transcription’. Tim Knowles’s work is characterised by a kind of soft, cranky invention – often of bespoke devices for sensing and transducing movements or fluids to generate traces; tree branches sway in the wind and draw on strategically positioned paper. A plotting device fitted in the back of a car records the different momentums of a long drive. A helmet mounted wind-vane directs its wearer through the landscape according to the vicissitudes of the air. For this exhibition, Knowles exhibits speculative plans and models for a watercraft, which similarly bears its occupant in whichever direction the wind takes it. Heather Ross is concerned with how we come to know the world, and engages with the systems invented to store and convey information on a deep and intuitive level, mining systems of classification, descriptions, texts and images for their interpretative possibilities. Her series of diptychs consist of photographs and paintings which seek to synthesize them according to that which was lost in their capture – birds in absence. Ross’s gravitation to the birds’ call and the impossibility of truly knowing their place and essence inflects and distorts the original photographs to generate a sustained and compelling record of place and emotion. Rob Mullender’s response to air is more instrumental – his practice typically involves the creation of objects or systems which synthesize or mediate sound. His sculpture is a figure of subjection; a cast of an empty space, held in stasis and locked into a network of ties and ligatures, whose purpose is to vibrate when driven on a car’s roof-rack, producing a buzzing drone. Part processional incantation, part self portrait, this work is both instrument and agent, only exerting its agency through an engagement with performance. Visual, mechanical, corporeal and social, these works constitute a body of evidence, traces of processes and events that have been moulded and vitalised by our most common shared element. This exhibition is supported by CRISAP (UAL) , Londo

Protium, an Infrastructure for Partitioned Applications

Remote access feels different from local access. The major issues are consistency (machines vary in GUIs, applications, and devices) and responsiveness (the user must wait for network and server delays). Protium attacks these by partitioning programs into local viewers that connect to remote services using application-specific protocols. Partitioning allows viewers to be customized to adapt to local features and limitations. Services are responsible for maintaining long-term state. Viewers manage the user interface and use state to reduce communication between viewer and service, reducing latency whenever possible. System infrastructure sits between the viewer and service, supporting replication, consistency, session management, and multiple simultaneous viewers. The prototype system includes an editor, a draw program, a PDF viewer, a map database, a music jukebox, and windowing system support. It runs on servers, workstations, PCs, and PDAs under Plan 9, Linux, and Windows; services and viewers have been written in C, Java, and Concurrent ML