Texts

Echigo-Tsumari Triennial 2003, Japan

The recent Documenta 11 and 50th Venice Biennale exhibitions spawned a plethora of critical articles intensifying debate round the phenomenon of globalism – on the one hand the global rise and rise of large-scale biennale/triennale exhibitions, on the other globalism as both curatorial theme and format of these exhibitions. 

Education feature:
training the sound artist

A thrilling sono-cranial re-wire

Bruce Mowson
Nigel Helyer (see interview), whose sound sculpture Meta-Diva won the 2002 Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, questioned whether there were any courses in Australia which allowed for the study of sound in proper depth, responded by asking “Is there anywhere that teaches [among other sound subjects] psychoacoustics, soundscape concepts and electronics?” Given Australia’s predominantly deaf visual culture, it is typical that sound not be resourced at the level of other cultural practices.

My practice has a pluralistic approach to the sonic domain and embraces several strands of conceptual and technological development.  These in turn are manifest in a variety of modes, which range from gallery based interactive works, to environmental public sound works to Research and Development programmes in spatially located immersive soundscapes. As an introduction this document outlines four broad areas of current activity.

Imagine a child of the ‘jet-age’ living in an unobtrusive coastal village, mid-way between the dwelling of Blake, the artist, poet and visionary and that of his friend, the scientist and astronomer Halley.  The child proceeds with eyes wide open to technics and ears tuned to poetics ……

Theoretical papers often quote Plato’s Cave – such a nice, primitive dawn of consciousness image, with its shadowy representations flickering sootily across the cave’s rear wall and the line of onlookers warming their backs by the fire!  Strangely there is scant mention of the crackle of burning wood, or the sounds of those protagonists prancing around the flames, not to mention the perfectly formed sound reflections returning from the cave’s surfaces.  With a moment’s contemplation it should be clear that the ‘captive audience’ seated in the cave would have understood significantly more from their audio environment than from the appallingly low-tech visuals!

2 + 2 =….. was delivered as part of the “SoundCulture96” conference to parallel the “Silent Forest” installation and “A Silent Forest” radio broadcast. As such the paper provides a brief overview of some of my general interests as a sound sculptor in a confluence of morphology, spatiality and technology. The text, which follows remains in its original presentation form (bad jokes included).

“Are the sounds issuing from (the instrumentation connected to) Stelarc’s body real, or not?”

The small Sussex fishing village in which I spent my childhood contained two significant buildings, significant not for their formal qualities, they were both simple cottages, but because one had been the home of Halley, the astronomer and the other the home of William Blake the poet. Without being conscious of the fact, I grew up in a cosmos in which the arts and science were intertwined, it has marked my endeavours ever since.
Nigel Helyer.

This essay is a version of the exhibition catalogue for Silent Forest shown at the San Francisco Art Institute as part of SoundCulture96.

As a recent transplant to Australia, I welcomed the opportunity to write about this work, to introduce it to the city where I have spent much of my adult life. In framing my comments about Silent Forest, it was important to keep in mind what might be involved for an American audience in viewing this work by an Australian about Vietnam in the United States. It is true that San Francisco is not part of the U.S., but just the same….

The Plural Forest is lodged here, in an un-adulterated state, as a text that was written in 1994 primarily as a result of my research travels throughout northern Thailand and Vietnam and is co-incident with the gestation period of the “Silent Forest” project.

I have boxes and boxes of drawing books ~ ever since I was forced to keep them at Foundation College in Sussex.  The weekly scrutiny of our books was at first excruciating for me (convinced I would never be comfortable drawing) now it gives me delight, even though I simply draw to think things through!

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