https://vimeo.com/162418910
I have long been interested in historical and contemporary accounts of experiencing the sublime in landscape, and this has led me into newer fields of research, those of somaesthetics and affect. Having first-hand experience of the sublime, through pulse-quickening teetering on vertiginous mountaintops to tumultuous swims, is something I am always looking to present in my work. This has been through film documentation, as shown in ‘source’, my journey down the length of the River Tavy, or in installed pieces such as ‘through a glass, darkly’ or ‘breath’. In each of these, my body’s agency created the experience for the viewer.
This summer I created film work in conjunction with the University of Plymouth’s Coast Lab wave tanks. Following this successful start, I have been invited back to work further with the tanks, and also to experiment with their state-of the art motion capture and high-definition underwater equipment. I am working with the Coast Lab to enact an art experimentation, which draws on an audience’s physical and emotional responses to the sublime.
In my work I often use mapping as a way of orientating myself as the maker, or to transcribe a trajectory or story. Sound is an important orientation tool, but is often trumped in the Cartesian hierarchy of the senses by vision. It is my hope with this project to place sound as the primary stimulus within an artwork, and to map this not using traditional cartographic tools, but by analysis of the oscillation and amplitude of sound waves, and sonograms of pulse rates.
In the same way that landscapes can impose a physical frisson upon us, so too can sounds, and I have long wondered whether I could impose a link between the two. In this series of proposed work, I intend to use elements of a piece of music long associated with the sublime, Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture, to assess whether it can vary a viewer’s heart rate, which would then, once monitored, using simple mobile technology, in turn be translated into a wave sequence within water. In this way, one can begin to map the terrain of emotions and the physical response to sublime stimuli.
When the poet Baudelaire first heard the Tannhäuser overture in concert in 1860, he was "ravished and flooded" by it, as he told the composer in an appreciatory letter. Queen Victoria, who heard it in 1855, thought it "quite overpowering, so grand and in parts wild, striking and descriptive". This ‘wildness’ and the overwhelming nature of its chromatic schemes and bridges aligns it perfectly within a sublime cannon of that era, conjuring Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderer and J.M.W.Turner’s storm scenes. I think it is entirely fitting, that, as the overture coincided with the gradual waning of Romanticism in art and a turn towards the scientific realism, it should be used as a contemporary scientific stimulus, a tool to locate the sublime in science. By isolating key phrases, perhaps repeating them and creating patterns, one can explore the effect of sound on consciousness, and by extension, its physical manifestation, a quickening pulse, a faster heart-rate. To this end I have started playing in the wave tank, working on creating wave sequences, and I am looking to create a film-work which documents these patterns and utilizes the sound patterns and sequences of breath, the heart-rate and some elements of the overture.
I have long been interested in historical and contemporary accounts of experiencing the sublime in landscape, and this has led me into newer fields of research, those of somaesthetics and affect. Having first-hand experience of the sublime, through pulse-quickening teetering on vertiginous mountaintops to tumultuous swims, is something I am always looking to present in my work. This has been through film documentation, as shown in ‘source’, my journey down the length of the River Tavy, or in installed pieces such as ‘through a glass, darkly’ or ‘breath’. In each of these, my body’s agency created the experience for the viewer.
This summer I created film work in conjunction with the University of Plymouth’s Coast Lab wave tanks. Following this successful start, I have been invited back to work further with the tanks, and also to experiment with their state-of the art motion capture and high-definition underwater equipment. I am working with the Coast Lab to enact an art experimentation, which draws on an audience’s physical and emotional responses to the sublime.
In my work I often use mapping as a way of orientating myself as the maker, or to transcribe a trajectory or story. Sound is an important orientation tool, but is often trumped in the Cartesian hierarchy of the senses by vision. It is my hope with this project to place sound as the primary stimulus within an artwork, and to map this not using traditional cartographic tools, but by analysis of the oscillation and amplitude of sound waves, and sonograms of pulse rates.
In the same way that landscapes can impose a physical frisson upon us, so too can sounds, and I have long wondered whether I could impose a link between the two. In this series of proposed work, I intend to use elements of a piece of music long associated with the sublime, Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture, to assess whether it can vary a viewer’s heart rate, which would then, once monitored, using simple mobile technology, in turn be translated into a wave sequence within water. In this way, one can begin to map the terrain of emotions and the physical response to sublime stimuli.
When the poet Baudelaire first heard the Tannhäuser overture in concert in 1860, he was "ravished and flooded" by it, as he told the composer in an appreciatory letter. Queen Victoria, who heard it in 1855, thought it "quite overpowering, so grand and in parts wild, striking and descriptive". This ‘wildness’ and the overwhelming nature of its chromatic schemes and bridges aligns it perfectly within a sublime cannon of that era, conjuring Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderer and J.M.W.Turner’s storm scenes. I think it is entirely fitting, that, as the overture coincided with the gradual waning of Romanticism in art and a turn towards the scientific realism, it should be used as a contemporary scientific stimulus, a tool to locate the sublime in science. By isolating key phrases, perhaps repeating them and creating patterns, one can explore the effect of sound on consciousness, and by extension, its physical manifestation, a quickening pulse, a faster heart-rate. To this end I have started playing in the wave tank, working on creating wave sequences, and I am looking to create a film-work which documents these patterns and utilizes the sound patterns and sequences of breath, the heart-rate and some elements of the overture.