Dan Scott

Dan Scott                                 http://www.trishscott.org/danscottblog/?page_id=836

Listen In

My first impression of the sound from Scott’s installation is    that it is slightly confusing as he uses polyphonic sound (which is when there is a lot of sound playing at one time). However I find it interesting how the radio speakers are suspended in the air allowing the spectator to wonder freely listening to the range of different radio broadcasts. When I first met this artist I liked how he was fascinated with sound and how he would record everything like our conversations, also I remembered him talking about how most of the time people try to block out the sounds that you would hear every day and that by keeping your ears open you reveal a whole new world .

Radio is at once intimate and communal. It exemplifies Lacan’s notion of l’extimite: the intimate that is outside, the exterior that is inside. Radio represents an imagined community of listeners, each unknown to the other, but still ever-present in the wireless imagination. Yet these listeners are invariably silent within the broadcast. Listen In seeks to eavesdrop on the listeners; to sound out an ethnographic encounter with the radio audience.
Listen In also engages with the history of radiophonic activism In 1932 Bertolt Brecht lamented how “…the radio is one-sided where it ought to be two-sided.” He called for a radio of communication rather than distribution. Interventions into broadcast space such as the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s and Tetsou Kogawa’s MiniFM boom in Japan turned broadcasting and listening into a simultaneous event; a forum where listeners encounter themselves.


So Listen In turns the ear on the ear. Influenced by Brecht’s utopian dream of a two-sided radio and utilising Tetsuo Kogawa’s MiniFM techniques the piece hijacks the bandwidth and draws the listener out of the static, letting the gallery audience listen to listening.

I like how the sound changes from different perspectives, creating a range of sounds that clash as well as layer on top of each other. I also like his philosophy of how he makes broadcasting and listening into the same event and how he makes the audience listen to listening. I think this is an interesting technique to use in my outcome as it will involve the audience and evoke responses; however instead of using radio broadcastings I will use my primary sources which would be my sound recordings that I have taken from my surroundings.

Context:

Headphones, Epoche, and L’extimité:

A Phenomenology of Interiority*

By Charles Stankievech

A history and a phenomenology of interiority (which we perhaps

lack) should here join a history of a phenomenology of listening.

- Roland Barthes

“A legion of disembodied voices float in the air today: from car radios to

IPods, from parabolic speakers to multi-channel sound fields. In the midst of this

Continuing assault, the following question surfaces in the maelstrom: where does

Our subjectivity begins and where does it end? What is our inside and what is our

Outside? When we use the term phenomenology we think of our experience of the

Surrounding environment, but can there also be a phenomenology of the interior?

If so, what would it sound like?”

This demonstrates a key factor when it comes to archiving that in order to discover something you have to question its existence. It also creates a sense of reality as you will often hear the muffled sounds of a car passing with the radio on or someone wearing ear phones with music blaring out.

Oliver Sacks’ essay “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See” is an

Interesting example of the type of interior conceptualisation the mind is capable of in spite of blindness. Sacks recount various examples of blind people whose interactions with the external world are visually created via alternative modes of perception and re-organised cerebral processing.

"David Griffin discovered in 1938 that bats use sonic pulses to navigate and termed this process Echolocation. Technological echolocation is used in both radar and sonar, in non-destructive testing ultrasonics and in medical ultrasonography. It is also used in architectural acoustics, where a spark of sound is released in a space. The resulting reverberation signal provides an acoustic impression of the space. If recorded, this acoustic impression can be applied to

any sound file to create a virtual rendering of this sound file as if it were played in the recorded space."

this tells us that sound can give you an impression of a space, allowing us to understand the depths of a place with out being able to see it.  sound is a major sense which allows us to feel a certain way and can often bring you back to an experience, there for i will use layers of sounds to depict my experience over the summer holiday.

So Listen In turns the ear on the ear. Influenced by Brecht’s utopian dream of a two-sided radio and utilising Tetsuo Kogawa’s MiniFM techniques the piece hijacks the bandwidth and draws the listener out of the static, letting the gallery audience listen to listening.

I like how the sound changes from different perspectives, creating a range of sounds that clash as well as layer on top of each other. I also like his philosophy of how he makes broadcasting and listening into the same event and how he makes the audience listen to listening. I think this is an interesting technique to use in my outcome as it will involve the audience and evoke responses; however instead of using radio broadcastings I will use my primary sources which would be my sound recordings that I have taken from my surroundings. As my main focus is architecture I will show how sounds can be affected in different spaces, and how sound can create an impression of a place, I will do this by recording sound and experimenting with it to find the different sounds you create just by moving it. In addition I will draw what I hear and this will create an impression of that place.