1 Jun 2011

Sounding Touching

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There was one particular way that I experienced the Museum differently on my little reconnaissance missions in March and April. This new dimension of experience related to hearing the space with fresh ears, actually listening at last to its special atmosphere.

Wandering around the galleries in an effort to find the most appropriate route through which to guide those experienced “Noli Me Tangere” became as much a question of paying attention to the acoustic fate of vibrating air molecules - energised by my movements, by those of other visitors, by the Museum’s staff, by the sounds that stole their way in from outside – as it was a question of looking at structures and objects.

One aspect of how the Museum made sound dynamic was through the different flooring surfaces, their material qualities and the ways that they were constructed. Each offered their own resistance to the weight of a footfall, each absorbed or reflected the report of my shoe flexing my bulk down.

Over the weeks that I had spent thinking about how to respond to the Soundwaves commission, I became interested in the idea of touching. What crystallised this purely provisional notion came from an unlikely source. Making my way back from a trip abroad, I suddenly wanted to read something very different from what counted as my normal fare. At the airport newsagents, there was a deal where if you bought a newspaper then a book came with it, at greatly reduced price. I settled into my seat with a copy of John Connolly’s “The Whisperers”. Now, as I look at the cover of the book, there in muted tones next to me as I am typing this on my kitchen table, it is difficult to appreciate how I managed to miss a fuller sense of the genre conventions that might inform my read. But there I was, squeezed into my seat, enjoying writing of great pace and charge, surprised to discover that the thriller I thought I had begun steadily turned into a horror novel. Connolly is an excellent author and I have since eagerly sought out other books in his Charlie Parker series. In “The Whisperers” the narrative device that struck me, wrapped up in an intriguing plot with characters to match, was an artefact that ‘spoke’ to those who came into its proximity.

Here was something interesting. Perhaps, I thought, it would be possible to work on the idea that the objects behind a museum’s glass could reach out to the passing visitors and impart their truths through vibration. This could bring touch into contact with sound and give me the title of the work “Noli Me Tangere” or “Touch-Me-Not”. If you could not physically touch the objects on display, could hearing provide a surrogate access?

As I thought about this accidental impetus from John Connolly, I remembered that one of my students, Rob Mullender, had already delved much deeper into this territory. His work involves how “sound can be, and has historically been, made from other types of energy”. Rob’s writing and his artistic practice together open up the complex connections between sound and these other types of energy. He is one of those students from whom I will learn much more than I can ever teach him. Opening a draft document of his that is on my hard-drive, I’ve just found two great quotes. In ‘Edison’s Teeth’, Steven Connor writes that “…touch accompanies, mimics, performs sound rather than translating or defining it.” In “The Skin of Film”, Laura Marks has it that “…distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: in other words, how we might usually conceive of vision… Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture.”

Walking in the Museum, I am constantly touching, but touching with my feet rather than my hands. This ‘touching’ is simultaneously a ‘sounding,’ in the sense of making noise – sharper, softer, fuller, more hollow – and in the sense of sounding out, of feeling a way.

Inspired by Connolly’s novel and by Rob’s work – but conscious that my reach will never match their own – I began to appreciate how this soundwalk could develop.