“Soft Shadows and Bright Light: On Recording and Reality”

In this presentation, I explore some of the ethical practices encountered in developing two personal art projects that relied extensively on field-recordings. Both 51° 32 ' 6.954” N / 0° 00 ' 47.0808” W (2008) and Some Memories of Bamboo (2009) involved working within a relatively circumscribed parcel of earth – one hectare of London’s Lower Lea Valley as it started to be transformed for the 2012 Olympics and 15 tranquil hectares of North-Western Kyoto, respectively. In each case, the work unfolded in predictable stages of listening, recording, sequencing and then presenting; and yet, for all their predictability, each and every one of those stages became burdened with the weight of ethical as much as aesthetic choices.

Late in the reaches of Michel Foucault’s work, he began to sketch out a notion of ethics that was conceptually alert to notions of constraints and limits but was simultaneously animated by a practical curiosity towards crossing those very limits (franchissement). An ethics that is happy to quietly ponder the possibilities of limits but is equally tempted to exceed them in practice is one that resonates well with the dilemmas encountered in my creative practice.

Among the ethical fault-lines which I map are ones that relate to the representation of other people; to revealing or concealing the artist’s presence; to a kind of topographic truthfulness and to a parallel to commitment to acoustic accuracy; to the balance, ultimately, between the responsibilities of authenticity and the allure of artifice.