Summa: diary (August 17-23, 2024)

August 17 (Saturday). Typology.

Studiology:

  • The studio is the womb within which the artwork gestates. The artwork’s character will, to some extent, be determined by the working environment. Thus, rarely will an orderly artwork emerge from a disorderly studio.
  • The studio is an extension and manifestation of the artist, and the cocoon or chrysalis within which their transformation takes place. It should be the environment in which they’re most comfortable and themselves.
  • The studio is a laboratory within which to construct apparatus, methodologies, techniques, and technologies. A place for invention, experimentation, exploration, analysis, and discussion.

August 19 (Monday). Saturday afternoon, I re-examined the mixer array. The Allen & Heath Xone:96 is designed for use by DJ artists. As such, it has a very tactile surface and is eminently versatile with regards to inputs and outputs, loop circuits, and frequency control. To my mind, the device is an instrument too. In the hands of an abstract turntabalist like Maria Chavez, both mixer and turntable are conjoined components of an instrumental whole. Perhaps, my mixer could, allied to its own array of modifiers, constitute a third strand — one that wouldn’t generate its own sounds but, rather, colour those created by strands 1 and 2 as they pass through it.

9.00 am: Studiology. Strand 3: the build. The set-up is routed via two fade-controlled channels: channel A comprises four Moog MoogerFooger units; and channel B, a T C Electronic Alter Ego II echo device. Channels A and B can influence channels 1-4. There’s also a digital amplifier and cabinet emulator unit (Strymon Iridium) inserted into the signal path of the total output.

11.00 am: Coffee and catch-up with the artist Anastasia Wildig, who’s dog-sitting for friends of ours, locally. 2.00 pm: An afternoon of trialing and testing modifiers, in order to establish optimal signal chains.

It doesn’t come any more mundane than this: a photo-survey of the upstairs lavatory’s cistern, which as been dribbling into the pan like some incontinent old geezer. (The shape of things to come.) I’m hoping the manufacturer can guide be through the process of remedying the problem.

August 20 (Tuesday). 6.00 am: Arise. 7.30 am: Writing. On with ‘Malchus’ Ear’. Several key concepts have begun to emerge. I made a comparative analysis of six contrasting representations of Christ’s betrayal, from the fifteen to the eighteenth centuries. This was the task for the day.

1.00 pm: Someone in my household (not me) put two eggs on the hob to boil and forgot to turn them off. ‘BANG!’ One egg exploded like a mortar and splattered shrapnel over the work surfaces, utensils, and walls. The saucepan may be a right-off. Needless to say, lunch was served late today. A scrubbing and an odour of burnt eggs ensued. This was now a culinary war zone.

August 21 (Wednesday). 6.00 am: Arise. 8.00 am: Writing. I began a draft section based on the study that I’d undertaken yesterday. Are there different volume-levels of silence in pictures? I can’t think clearly without writing. Writing develops ideas and crystalises thought. Concepts may present themselves to my mind when I’m not writing, but only after a period of writing.

Giotto, The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas) (1304-6) fresco, Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

One of the studies illustrative of the relationship between sound and the Bible is the above artwork by Giotto. At the centre, Judas betrays Christ with a kiss. On their left, Simon Peter reaches out with a dagger to take-off Malchus’ ear. In the background, on the right, someone has raised and blows a ceremonial ram’s horn. This is an explicit signifier of sound in the pictre’s silence. I’m struck, too, by the radiating lines created by the clubs and spears; they resembles the graphic representation of sound emitted from a loudspeaker. It’s as though Giotto visualized, using devices native to the scene, the noise of the tumult rising above the two parties.

August 22 (Thursday). 6.00 am: Arise. 7.00 pm: writing. I’m a frustrated time traveller. One of my online work distractions is digitally-tinted and temporally adjusted restorations of street cinematography from the turn of the twentieth century. There’s often a moment when children stop in the middle of street in front of the cine camera and stare quizzically and unselfconsciously into the lens. Likely or not, this was their first encounter with the alien technology, which stared back at them impassively with only one eye. Likely or not, they didn’t comprehend the transaction that was taking place and never saw what the cine camera had observed. Undoubtedly, they wouldn’t have comprehended that they were looking through that lens into the future where, a century and a quarter later, we would be observing them long after they and everyone else in the film were long dead. They’re dead and, yet, they live (on the surface of the film). They look at us in silence (The technology had no ears.) The silence is not only an absence but also a presence — as ‘loud’ as the sounds of the street and the hubbub of the crowd in motion — now lost in time.

Manchester, England (1901).

Back to the future. Or, rather, back to a narrative and a text that pre-date cinematography by nearly 2,000 years, a painting that’s over 500 years old, and a sound inside my head … right now.

August 23 (Friday). 6.00 am: Arise. The storm woke me. The wind rattled the bedroom casements , and rain clattered like dried rice thrown against the window panes. I was fearful that the broad bean canes would’ve been floored and the protective netting over the raspberries, in a garden several streets away. Casualties were avoided, mercifully. By 7.30 am, all was well with the world.

Writing. From a discussion of explicit and implicit sounds in pictures to one of the same in the text of the Malchus ear narrative. Thereafter, I continued research into the effects of losing the outer ear on hearing.

12.30 pm: Another long-overdue Skype conversation with one of my former PhD tutees. 1.30 pm: I returned to the ear and medical papers on the impact of ear severance. Without the fleshy outer ear (the auricle), which acts like an inverted megaphone, sound is quieter and harsher. Not that Malchus would have noticed the difference through the pain and an ear canal filled with blood.

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021)Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: SoundFacebook: The Noises of ArtXInstagramArchive of Visual Practice.

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