Unspoken Word

I have been thinking about ways in which the spoken word has been used in sound poetry and sound art as well as in pop, experimental and electronic music. I have also been trawling through some old work and remembering how I have experimented with the sound of speech in the past. I thought it might be interesting to compile four pieces I made around ten years ago into a little downloadable collection, a ‘mini-album’, if you like. They are all rather rudimentary and rough experiments with digital sound editing and collage, and it’s interesting, while perhaps not unsurprising, how throughout they play within the time-honoured avant concrete conventions of the aesthetics of repetition and the logic of fragmentation.

Steven Ball

Research Interests

Artists’ Moving Image, Archives and Collections, Experimental Film, Video Art, Landscape, Urban
Space.

Current Research

As Research Fellow attached to the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, my research activity broadly encompasses the history and contemporary practice of artists’ moving image. The Study Collection includes video copies of artists' works, writing by and about artists, institutional documents, books, catalogues, posters, etc., it is accessible to internal and external academic and curatorial research. In this context my research activity involves the collection, cataloguing and digitization of copies of artists' film and video works, documentation and publications, the dissemination of Study Collection research outputs, and facilitating research in artists’ moving image across UAL and beyond. I am also developing research projects around the nature of the relationship of artists’ moving image practice to that of the wide range of contemporary collections and archives in their analogue and digital forms, online and physically located.

My other research interests are in the relationship between audio-visual media practice, spatial representation, landscape, and urban space within a practice encompassing audio-visual media, performance, curation and writing. These have manifested themselves in projects such as: Figuring Landscapes, artists’ moving image from Australia and the UK, touring programme co-curated with Professor Catherine Elwes (Camberwell), (2008 ongoing until 2010); The Centres Project, an ongoing exhibition and publication research project in collaboration with Irene Barberis, Metasenta Projects, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, which has included the Transcentric exhibition at Lethaby Gallery (2008); After Lethaby video performance with Martin Blazícek, (Czech Republic), Lethaby Gallery, 2009.