sound mapping, across the universe.

i was fortunate enough to participate again in This Is Not Art - the festival of festivals that takes over the ex-industrial city of Newcastle every year.

one of the down sides to realising my own work in the festival is that i didn't really get to full participate as a punter. i spent quite a lot of time organising and invigilating the shop-space i set up for garments for listening.

the rest of the time was as the listener-in-residence.

i did get to eavesdrop on some pretty fantastic workshops, discussions, performances, gigs and general ambience of newcastle at festival time.

each day, that list of sounds was transcribed onto 5 large blackboards outside the festival club - the fantastic great northern hotel.

the list was a combination of ambience and people's conversation - all sounds heard. and as it rolled out over the course of the festival, people enjoyed catching up on some of the happenings. it was so great to observe people reading and becoming more aware of the sounds of the festival, and also their own sound-based contributions.

there were a few times where, in the process of transcribing onto the boards earlier listening sessions, some fantastic sounds would reach me and i would jot them down too. some great conversations happened too - about what people said, or the nature of the festival - or even if the work was in fact poetry.





i really enjoyed taking on a 'role' as an artist for this project. rather than a producer of things, i was the provider of a service. miwon kwon has criticised this in the past, but i still enjoyed it. and felt that i contributed in a positive way to the event as a whole.

some of the sessions/events I listenly attended to* included:

The TiNA opening party
Songbirds by Joe Moriglio
GLI.TC/H: hacking codecs in the pursuit of communication by Evan Meaney
Listening to Place by Clare and John Andreallo
There might be a Bed in the Street by Crack Theatre
Spelling Bee hosted by Lawrence Leung
Media Lab Melbourne Presents.. with Pierre Proske from Media Lab Melbourne
Technology as/with/in Performance - a panel facilitated by Cat Jones
Save Me (which was called something else on the day, but i didn't note it) - Shani Moffat, Natalia Ladyko, Aesha Henderson and Matina Moutzouris
Science, Sound and Imagination - a panel chaired by Nick Keys
and
a pop-up performance outside customs house that i haven't quite been able to find what it was.

I really enjoyed this project, actually, and am looking forward to pitching it to a couple of music/art festivals coming up soon.

I do love seeing people walking around with their program - the bible for the weekend. But I must say, i hope sometime very soon, there'll be an online version that can be updated and distributed easily. Naturally there were stacks of changes as (mostly) weather fucked with people's projects (including one of my own), and there wasn't really an effective way of noting the changes.

Perhaps i also should have written up the changes on one of the blackboards, so that peeps coming to the festival club could see.


Regardless, congrats to all the artists who put work on, especially with the crappy weather, and the people who descended on Newcastle for the weekend.


*full TiNA program here