The idleness of shadows

 

DFTPTMMYAIN, part 3 – The. 2022. Christof Migone. 

Earlier this year, I was one of the twelve artists invited by the Canadian artist and writer, Christof Migone to take part in his 12-year project: Different From The One Place Time Mood Mindset You Are In Now. 

With a knowing nod to Alvin Lucier’s, I am sitting in a room (1969) the invitation was to participate in, The:  the third word and part, of Christof’s annual dozen. Like Lucier’s magnetic room, The, composes its form from an instructed action: 

Room you are not in. Room where you usually make (sounds, images, objects, etc.), but that is currently running on idle. Idling in unintentional sounds. Room is lit but faded in and out after the fact (I will do the fade in fadeout). Camera captures room or detail (up to you), only one position throughout. Presence might be felt but is not present. You were there and you will be there again, but you are not there now.

The room where I make is spare, small and recently painted. It’s also the place where I keep and shelve the things I made and make with. On a desk in the corner there is an iMac with one Sonic Egg studio monitors on either side. An old straw hat perches ergonomically on the left-hand egg. 

The room has one window. When the iMac is on stand-by or off, the window is reflected in its screen; the dusty emptiness of the room behind made visible through the glass darkly. On sunny winter days, the light from the window casts shadows on the wall opposite, shadows that breath slowly in and out of perceptibility. I use these shadows as an opportunity to stop and stare and let myself dawdle in their idleness.

I made two films in response to the instruction. In the first and selected film, the stare of my iPhone is fixed on the wall where shadows appear. I pressed record, left the room and closed the door to. Twelve minutes or so later I returned to press stop. The twelve minutes recorded are uneventful. Shadows are slight and fleeting. The distant spin of a washing machine whines through its cycle. A draft from the open window, pushes and pulls the room ajar, creating spontaneous creaks, which occasionally synchronise with the fluctuations in light and less light.

In a more composed second attempt at idleness, I fixed the stare of the iPhone upon the iMac screen. I muted the microphone, and started a metronome before leaving the room, to return twelve minutes later and press stop. Visible through the blizzard of dust which covers the screen, the reflection of the metronome keeps time silently. An occasional particle of dust, drifting through the air is caught in the sunlight of the silenced room. This silence is replaced with the audible draft of the previous twelve minutes. The silent metronome announces and measures loss, whilst time creaks and idles in the dust.

In the late winter of 2021, sitting in front of the dim mirror of the iMac screen, I started to experience a bright and recurring flash in my left eye. Unlike the stained-glass spiral scotoma of a normal migraine, this light was briefly white and peripheral. Some days later drops of liquid dilated the aperture of my pupil and the attentive lens of the optometrist found a small tear in the retina of my left eye. As if to celebrate my visual field was immediately flooded with millions of black dots. That evening in a small, dark and automatically locked room, small bursts of a laser welded a line around the edge of my retina, the light so bright that my left eye seemed to lose the notion of sight. 

Through winter 2021 and spring 2022, there were four more tears and four more laser surgeries to weld my retina back into place. This has left my vision full of floaters, the remains of cells, casting their shadows on my retina. Like the wall and iMac screen, my visual field is full of dust and the idleness of shadows.

Emergency Eye Clinic: Southampton General Hospital

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I am not imagining

I am not Imagining. 2022. Sebastiane Hegarty

I am humbled to have had a new work on paper, short-listed for Best Imagined Sound in The Sound of the Year Awards. The other three nominees were poets Jonty Pennington Twist, Philip Burton and Alastair Hesp, who was announced as the winner in May.

The shortlisted sound is one of a series of new works, which use words and the percussive palpitation of a typewriter to imagine sound [and silence] on paper. The typewriter used is a recently acquired and rather beautiful, cream/green 1959 Imperial No 5 “Good Companion”. The typewriter arrived, fitted with a brand-new ribbon; my words the first to be written in its uncoiling, ink-soaked line of thought. 

In his book Gramophone, Film and Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler considers the typewriter “an innocuous device, an ‘intermediate’ thing, between a tool and a machine,” which ‘cannot conjure up anything imaginary’. But as a medium the typewriter corresponds with the silence of thought and noise of form, and in correspondence it dwells ‘at the cusp where thinking is on the point of settling into’ shape and form on paper.(Tim Ingold)

The noise of these words. 2022. 

In this new series of sounds on paper, the action and restrictions of the typewriter become an inherent component of the work.  The weight, vertical orientation and standardised A4 paper size, are regulated by the dimensions and habits of the machine, whilst the type is set in face and point: this Imperial No.5 types, in a rare Book Type Face, approximately 10 letters to the inch. 

The typewriter’s mechanical carriage of language is noisy and visceral, words strike out rhythms of sound, whilst the gesture and movement of my digits are choreographed and back spaced in correspondence with the words being formed and the systemised array of the Qwerty keyboard.

In this physical correspondence with language, sounds are both audible and imagined, appearing then in the moment of being written and imagined now in the moment of being seen.

A pin drop. 2022

silence was live

Silence on Loan. 2022. Performance broadcast live on Instagram

On the last Monday of January 2022, the annual performance of Silence on Loan, took place at Winchester School of Art Library. It was performed alone in the early morning before the library opened to the public and without an audience present. During the silence I wore industrial Ear Protectors, so even I could not hear the silence as it occurred.

The annual performance was announced in advance on social media and this blog, which included an invitation for people to not attend or listen. The performed silence was however, broadcast live (and mute) via Instagram, so that those who wished, might watch and not listen, together. The Instagram recording of the broadcast was unceremoniously deleted (by accident) immediately after the performance.

In order for those not listening to inform others of their lack of attention, a limited edition, I Am Not Listening, pin-badge, was available to purchase and wear on the day. The 1” pin sold out, adorning the lapels of people not listening, as far apart as New York and Keyhaven, Australia, Berlin and Wolverhampton. 

This year, Silence on Loan was unheard by what could have been its largest audience to date. A big thank you to all those millions of people around the world, who were not listening.

• 

• 

• 

I am not listening.

Last year the annual performance of Silence on Loan, was postponed by the ‘silent epidemic’ of COVID. In January, I had hoped to perform a socially distanced version, completely alone in the Winchester School of Art Library, where the publication is held – a lonely withdrawn silence, performed but unheard. But lockdown restrictions meant that visiting the library was not permitted and the annual performance had to be rescheduled, eventually taking place in August 2021 – coincidently in the same week as the publication of my essay Withdrawn from use: silence, listening and undoing, in the journal Organised Sound 26/2 (Cambridge University Press). 

This year silence has been recalibrated, returning the annual performance to January so as to synchronise with the original month of publication and the inclusion of Silence on Loan into the Artists’ Books Special Collection at WSA in 2019. But this year’s performance is different to the previous three. In remembrance, perhaps, of the socially distanced, isolated performance which never occurred, the 2022 performance will take place behind the closed magnetic gates of WSA library 2.

On Monday 31^st January, around 8:30 am, before the library opens and without visitors or audience, the unpaginated spiral slither of Silence on Loan, will be taken from the shelf and placed on the turntable platter. The unheard audio cassette that has documented every silent anniversary will be rewound. Last year’s silence will be simultaneously erased and recorded over with this. I will keep vigil as silence rotates, my ears defended from it: silence occurring with no one there to hear.

There is strictly no admittance to this performed anniversary of Silence of Loan. But you are invited to not listen with me. You may not listen wherever you are, at home, at work, alone or in company. You may also watch but not listen via a live muted Instagram broadcast at @sebastiane_hegarty

A limited-edition badge and calling card for those who care not to listen is available from: sebastianehegarty.bandcamp.com/merch

Thank you as always, Catherine Polly and all the @WSAlibrary team.

Off the leash

Piss Walk № 6 is the first of my stained perambulations to be published in the form of a limited-edition set of 13 purchasable A6 postcards. Printed on uncoated 600gsm card and seamed in ‘sunny yellow’ the photographic sequence retraces the sixth of my early morning ‘lockdown’ walks, as I sniffed around the back streets of Winchester and along the river Itchen. Each card is rubber stamped on the reverse, with the date of the walk and numbered with its position in the sequence of damp patches encountered that day.  As discussed in a previous post, my lockdown walks had no predetermined purpose other than a modicum of exercise and time away from the paralysis of Zoom. Rebecca Solnit notes that the casual acquaintance of a meandering stroll ‘allows you to find what you do not know you are looking for’. My meander, coupled with the quiet physical vacancy of the ante meridiem environment, acquainted me with the occasional and previously unnoticed, damp trails of urine left by the toilet of local hounds. It became my habit to follow and photographically collect these moist encounters. A habit that has resulted in the creation of an unintentional archive of (to date) thirteen Piss Walks.

On the leash of the dogs’ morning privy, I tail the stained criminal records of an intimate act in a public space: an evaporating souvenir of corporeal presence. The obsolete technology of the picture postcard would therefore seem to be an appropriately ephemeral method of recording and mapping these trails.  Sent back to where we are not, addressing those we are apart from, the cheap, disposable souvenir of a postcard, announces presence whilst confirming absence. As it passes visibly through the public body of the Royal Mail, the postcard reveals a dysfunctional relationship with intimacy, a mischievous liaison, characterised by the saucy offence of seaside communique and an obsession with bodily function. 

The 13 postcards of Piss Walk № 6 have now been sold and sent. Protected and concealed by the hard-backed buff of a manilla envelope, each postcard has passed modestly through the systemised transit of national (and international) mail. Extending the scent of canine territories from Winchester to Brighton to Bristol, Wolverhampton and beyond the sea to Canada, the postcards are a souvenir of an evaporated walk, a memory dispersed, fragmented and lost in the post. 

In a second limited-edition, Piss Walk № 9 has been published as a complete set of ten postcards. Archived and preserved in an ironically acid free box, the postcards will remain enveloped and unsent as part of the Artists’ Book Collection at Winchester School of Art Library.   

I am also delighted that the damp traces of Piss Walk № 4, have been included in Right Here Right Now, Observations, Speculations & Hallucinations; a new book gathering together the personal lockdown of numerous artists, designers and writers. Published by Book-Lab 2020 (isbn: 978-1-71680-539-4), designed and edited by Danny Aldred, RHRN is ‘a kind of visual atlas [providing] multiple perspectives of the same moment.’ There are plans to exhibit the book at the Design Transfer Gallery (Berlin) later this year. 

Right Here Right Now is available in a print on demand format from: https://bit.ly/32AAx7X

I have thought I might ‘celebrate’ the end of the pandemic by offering a Piss Walk Tour of Winchester. In direct competition with English Heritage, Jane Austin’s House and the public tours of private education, the Winchester Piss Walk Tour would meet beneath a plague flag on Water Lane and proceed along the river Itchen, through the Water Meadows, around the u-bend of Winchester College, before passing down the cloisters of Winchester Cathedral and finally through the Water Gate, past The Quaker Meeting House and back across the bridge to rejoin Water Lane. Along the way I would recount stories of infamous stains and perhaps leave a trail of Piss Walk postcards in our wake. DM to reserve your place. 

Piss Walks

Piss walk 11:1 31.05.20

The arrival of ‘lockdown’ allowed me to indulge in daily early morning walks. My regular walk around Winnall Moors Conservation Reserve was unavailable, the Moors being closed due to recent flooding, so my journey had to take another path. Leaving home, I followed the meandering course of the river Itchen, down Water Lane, along the Riverside path, passing mam’s bench out to St Cross Hospital and then back along St Faiths Road to the water meadows, past Winchester College to Inner Cathedral Close, through the Water Gate toward Water Lane and home. With occasional variation this transit has become my habit.

At this early hour the streets and paths of Winchester are relatively empty, my solitude broken by the occasional key-worker, a competitive dribble of runners in pursuit of a personal best, and the hesitant, stray perambulation of dog walkers. Perhaps it is the quiet vacancy of my journey that focused my attention on the wet trails left by the toilet of dogs. Or perhaps because the piss was so fresh, it left a conspicuously dark trail, a trail which later in the day may have evaporated. Pulled by gravitational force, each stream of dog piss flows away from its source, immediately discovering and tracing its own unique path of least resistance. If this pee were a river, it would be running toward another body of water; a lake, the sea, an ocean. But this melancholy flow, rarely makes it home, the stream of piss, meanders, pools, dwindles and expires.

Piss Walk 6:14 08.05.20

Piss Walk 7:8 10.05.20

As part of an ongoing series of piss walks, I started to photograph the urine trails. These photographs draw a map of my daily promenade, but also that of the dogs.  You might even say that the dogs are taking me for a walk: I am on their tail, visually sniffing after their presence. The dogs too are following, inhaling the wet perfume tales of absent mongrels and pedigrees, which linger in the air. Steven Connor, considers all walking ‘a kind of self-ghosting.’ The dogs and I walk invisibly with each other, haunted companions following the ghosts of presence recently departed.

Although the intention was to document rather than curate, there was some aesthetic pleasure in the wandering form of particular trails: the piddle finding its course, as it seeks out the guttering cracks in tarmac and paving slabs. Whilst some trails fade over time, the stain of others remains conspicuously strong. They become familiar landmarks in the landscape of my walk, surviving until the rain pours down and the stain erased.

Piss Walk 7:10 10.05.20

Piss Walk 9a

There is a rhythm to the piss walks. Certain popular locations offer a sudden glissando of wet notes, interspersed by long periods of dry silence and the occasional damp patch. The reason for this melodic popularity is perhaps more architectural than bladder related: the perpendicular elevation of post or wall offers a place for the urine to mark. Perhaps the mere sight of an elevation incites a call of nature, or perhaps the fragrance of that call induces others to reply. The walls of Winchester College are a very popular – I like to imagine that the mutts of Winchester are using their kidneys to pass vernacular comment on the inherent inequalities of the private education system.

Piss Walk 1:10 15.04.20

Piss Walk 4:7 15.04.20

The perpendicular is not the only landmark of preference. The corner of a path or road also seems attractive. In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard considers the corner a haven: ‘we take refuge in a corner’, it encloses us in ‘an imaginary room [rising] up around our bodies.’ An intimate, interior space of solitude: ‘in our corners we remember […] the silence of our thoughts.’ In opposition to the security of this poetic right angle, the reflex of a corner in the road, is an edge-land, a non-place, where the familiar meets the unknown: we do not know what is around the corner. Perhaps the profusion of pee is a way for the dogs to cope with the anxiety of this displacement, a method of owning and knowing where they are. Or perhaps it is more thuggery in intent, each dog scrawling a stinking tag on the perimeters of their manor and telling the rest of us to ‘piss off!’

Piss Walk 3a: 1 18.04.20

 

 

closed stack

As the publisher of the artists book Silence on Loan, I have been asked to supply the five Legal Deposit copies of the publication to The Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries in Edinburgh. The original Legal Deposit copy has already been deposited with the British Library and these five additional copies are for the remaining Deposit Libraries: The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford (BLO), The National Library of Scotland (NLS), Cambridge University Library (CUL), Trinity College Library, Dublin(TCD), and the National Library of Wales (NLW).
Each hand-stamped copy is identified with the initials of a specified library and accompanied by a typed letter providing details of the publication. As with all prints of Silence on Loan, the Legal Deposit copies are published without the protection of a sleeve or cover. The deposits were sent recorded delivery and signed for by The Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries. 

Together with the original copy of Silence on Loan in the Artists’ Book Collection at Winchester School of Art Library (University of Southampton), these Legal Deposits create a form of silent archive,  quietly gathering dust and harm in the ‘closed stacks’ of the libraries’ catalogue.

Searching for the publication via SOLO ( Search Oxford Libraries Online), I discover Silence on Loan is stored ‘off site’ with a status of  ‘closed stack’:  part of a collective silence, held, forgotten and perhaps never heard, but always being written. 

 

not arriving and then

And our ears
Are formed of the sea as we listen [1]

On Saturday the 4^th May 2019 a final silence was lost to the sea off the coast of Holy Island, Anglesey. One of four such disappearances, this concluding silence sank beneath the waves of the Irish Sea on a bright spring day, in [plain] sight of the South Stack Lighthouse. The Metadata of a photograph taken at the time of disappearance, positions the silence at an altitude of 72.07 m with the global coordinates of: Latitude: 53,18.1428N / Longitude: 4,41.3708W.

The quartet of missing silence consists (or consisted) of four single-sided records; each cut with a silent groove and lost to the seas surrounding the UK over a period of four years (the Irish Sea, North Sea, English Channel and Celtic Sea). Each record is labelled with a request for return, care of the British Library Sound Archive. A small advert placed in the Lost and Found section of The Times newspaper announces the site of the silence lost. Published on the day of disappearance, this advert functions as both a premonition and record of loss. The announcement, together with a photograph of the sea into which the record disappeared, and an empty, preservation grey, archival sleeve, are the only ‘proof’ of the records existence and its silence being lost.

In his book Sound, Michel Chion considers the ear as ‘a link between different worlds (real and imaginary) and different registers (physical and mental).’[2] Just as the silence lost directs our listening toward an imaginary absence of sound, so too the circumstantial (physical) evidence of loss requires that we imagine and believe silence once existed and has now disappeared. The emptiness of the archival sleeve quietly anticipates return, a return that may enable silence to sound [again]. And in this silence lost, we listen without listening for, we place our ear against the shell of sounds that have not yet been caused to vibrate. [Waves…]

not arriving and then
not arriving [3]

 

With thanks to Trish Bould for her help, photography and metadata.

[1] W. S. Merwin, “Coming to the morning” in: The rain in the trees. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf , 2018), 37

[2] Michel Chion, Sound: an acoustical treatise. (London: Duke Universty Press, 2016), 18

[3] W. S. Merwin, “The Sound of it” in: Garden Time, (Hexham: Bloodaxe book, 2016), 9

 

 

 

 

Recorded delivery: silence measured

As the publisher of the artists’ book Silence on Loan (ISBN: 978-1-5272-3880-0), I am required under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, to deposit a copy of the publication with the British Library. This copy must be ‘of the same quality as the best copies which, at the time of delivery, have been produced for publication in the United Kingdom.’ [Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003]

The Act applies to printed publications and excludes sound recordings. As an artists’ book in the form of a 10” vinyl record (or dubplate), the publication of Silence on Loan, poses some questions about what constitutes a printed publication. Cut with a silent groove, Silence on Loan is not a sound recording, but rather, a record of a moment when nothing was recorded. The absence of sound etched into the vinyl, ‘sets a mark upon on a surface’ and may therefore be called a print (but not a reproduction) of silence. Stored without the protection of cover or sleeve, this silent print is imprinted (again) with the plosions and fricatives of harm and damage that materiality asserts.
As a book, Silence on Loan is always being rewritten.

In my recent exhibition Various Silences, at Winchester School of Art Library, Silence on Loan was exhibited with a ‘copy’ made for Legal Deposit. Submitting the publication for legal deposit, poses questions concerning the reproduction of an original, which is still being written. Perhaps what is needed is not a copy or reproduction, but a doppelgänger: an apparition of silence. The inscription of one surface upon another, generates a silent palimpsest, a haunted silence. Visually the mechanics of rubber stamps mimic likeness whilst establishing difference: the subtle [dis]placement and frailties of ink creating unique traces with each duplication.

A letter written to accompany the legal deposit copy [apparition] of Silence on Loan, was typed on a (Brother) typewriter and duplicated in triplicate using two sheets of carbon paper. The materiality of this correspondence is reinforced by providing only physical address (no mobile number, no email address.) At the post office, silence was weighed, measured and sent (recorded delivery) to the Deposit Office of the British Library in Boston, Yorkshire.
A receipt for this deposit is pending.

 

Over the horizon

Tapping the air: weak signals at nightfall.
Off the Beat(en) Track.
Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art, Ontario, Canada. 2019

On this day, one hundred and eighteen years ago, a test signal was sent from Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight to the Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station on the Lizard Peninsular in Cornwall. At 5.32pm (the same time that I now post this here) a Post Office Telegraph was handed in at the Lizard Village Office, confirming receipt of the signal and declaring Marconi’s test ‘completely successful.’ The transmission was ‘a world record for long-range wireless propagation’ and the first time a wireless signal had been transmitted ‘over the horizon’. Prior to this, it was believed that ‘the operating range of wireless would be restricted to the [optical] horizon.’ (Rowe) But on Wednesday the 23rd January, 1901, in what became known as ‘Marconi’s First Great Miracle’ the arrival of three Morse code dots at The Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station, signalled not only the letter ‘s’, but also an escape from the visible: a flight from the material into the airy immaterial.

In that same year, at Poldu, some six visible miles from the Wireless Telegraphy Station, Marconi had begun construction of the largest transmitter ever built. The Poldhu station was charged with determining if wireless signals could be transmitted and received over the fathomless horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. On the 12^th December 1901, the faint dit-dit-dit of Marconi’s test signal transmitted from Poldhu, was heard some 2100 miles away, at a receiving point on the appropriately named Signal Hill, in St John, Newfoundland, Canada. The signal was too weak to operate the Morse printer and could only be confirmed by the (h)ear(ed) witness of Marconi and his assistant George Kemp. Without visible evidence, the existence of a signal was disputed, even today the authenticity of the transmission continues to be questioned. Pat Hawker, a writer for the journal Radio Communication, states: ‘[W]hatever clicks Marconi and Kemp heard on that windy Newfoundland cliff, they could not have originated from the three dots automatically transmitted from Poldhu.’ That the existence of this inaugural signal of wireless communication should be so spectral and suspect, seems appropriate for a medium in which the perimeters of the real and imagined, the here, there, then and now are so diffused.

Tapping the air: weak signals at nightfall is a recording of a micro-FM transmission, composed and performed live at the Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station in August 2018.
The transmission was based on field-recordings collected on the Lizard Peninsular and surrounding environment; a landscape littered with the history and architectural remains of listening and communication technologies. The transmitted soundscape mingles local sounds with recordings made on the Isle of Wight and physically transported over the horizon to the Lizard station. The architectural ghosts of towers, wires and blast walls are sounded out by the air moving through them and the by the geological dit-dit-dit of Serpentine pebbles tapping out Marconi’s test signal upon them. The transmission began as the first illuminated arc of the Lizard Lighthouse signaled nightfall: weak signals lost in and to the visible landscape.

Tapping the air: weak signals at nightfall is featured on the NAISA Radio programme, Off the Beat(en) Track. Curated by Darren Copeland, Artistic Director of New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA), the programme is available online as part of the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art.