When a museum exhibition ends, all we’re left with are memories.
Well, that and a catalogue.
Museum exhibitions are collaborative projects, culminations of the work of many people with a variety of skills: Continue reading
Bits of a diminishing din
despite their intention
these patterns drift aimlessly, beginning somewhere unknown then ceasing to be
repetitious, becoming instead a series of fits and stops —
pauses and actions,
moments and timelessness,
floating before, through, and beyond.
Are they ending or just moving out of range,
dissipating or merely being replaced?
Their tragic trajectory from attack to decay
yearns to be collected and preserved,
begging to be caught, like dust in a filter
as if, along with their unique identities within a greater ambience,
they are also whispering pleas to be saved.
At least they are to these ears.
Why follow this urge to collect? What is the point of preservation?
If a tree falls in the woods, should someone record it?
Why bottle up these moments only to have them forgotten without
a guarantee of their rediscovery?
Because there is a chance
to reach across time, to touch someone
you will never meet
and let them know that they are not alone.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Without location, these fragmentary
patterns drift among disorder
in the spaces between echo and decay.
They do not withstand a second listen,
these collected memories of significant events unseen,
but they are no less powerful.
Signals and receptors, objects motionlessly spinning,
all
clinging to the revolving stillness of forever.
Another moment has passed. Your time
is not mine,
it is hours —
an aura
to archive,
and let history
forget.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Presence, as defined by audio recording engineers, is an ephemeral quality of sound, an almost instinctive sheen that is known when heard. A sound with presence is imbued with authenticity, it contains qualities that the listener believes to be real, to be live, to be happening in the same space as the listener. Continue reading
I hit the RECORD button and I start to hurt – but most of that is probably just in my head.
Sitting quietly should make me calm, should relax me, but instead I usually tense up when making a field recording. My goal is to remove my sonic self from the world while capturing the sounds around me. I view myself as a ghost, as a watcher, as an instrument of collection. My goal is to have a pristine record of what it would sound like if I weren’t there.
But I am there, and I make noise. We all do, and more often than not we barely even realize it. Continue reading
Phonomnesis 