Gen Doy New Collaborations Bursary 2014

Yesterday Lynn and Lucy and I met to discuss the final work made as part of the new collaborations bursary, the sound and video work on Greenham Common. Lucy gave me advice on the sound and voice part of the soundtrack, which was all recorded on the Common, and we discussed some general questions about the research behind the project and its development at the editorial stage.
However it has become clear to me that although I collaborated with Lynn and with Lucy, it was never a proper collaboration between all three of us at the same time. But perhaps this isn’t surprising, on reflection.
Although this wasn’t said in so many words, it looks as if we will continue to collaborate but in the same manner ie. me and Lucy, and me and Lynn. But this has been a very useful experience and Lucy has offered to come with me to sing and do other things with our voices outdoors in future. Lynn and I will also do something in the future, but I feel that the way she likes to work is more confident than mine, and she likes to make her work before showing it to people. But we actually make very nice work together though it’s probably in a kind of “organic” way, rather than by sitting down together and looking at work in progress. Lynn made a great job of editing the video footage from Greenham Common to go with my soundtrack, and it really worked well, the three of us thought, in terms of what the bursary proposal had set out to do ie investigate relationships of sounds and images.
So thanks to a-n for this bursary. It’s progress was a bit up and down but we all learnt something worthwhile and produced a good bit of work (and some stuff that still needs developing!)

Lynn has finished editing her footage of Greenham Common which she shot during our last visit there. We are going to meet to discuss it very soon, now that the sounds and the images are together. Our meeting with Lucy Legg (singer) is postponed as Lucy has gone to Australia for several weeks. If I don’t have any more news before Xmas, I wish anyone who finds their way to this blog a very Happy Xmas and New Year, and thanks so much to a-n for their generosity in funding this project. We couldn’t get permission to go to some of the sites I hoped to work at (eg. Orford Ness…despite emailing and honing, no-one would get back to me, despite the fact that when I visited in person last year one of the Head guides told me just to get in touch and it should be fine), but Greenham Common is full of historical and natural potential, so it was by no means an inferior substitute location. I have learnt a great deal, and Lynn has said the same, so the main thing now is to meet and discuss with Lucy and show her the latest work so that she too feels a valued contributor.

I had a good meeting with Lynn the other day and we discussed the visits we made to Greenham Common and the sound edit I had forwarded recently to Lynn. we talked about how the images (or darkness on the screen) might relate to the sounds in the longer edit (it’s on soundcloud, see the link eventually loaded into the previous blog). Sometimes the sounds will be in a fairly obvious relationship to the images, sometimes less obvious, and sometimes there will apparently be no relation at all apart from in the mind and sense of the viewer and listener. Things are moving on and I feel, towards the end of the project, that we really have taken a big step forward, not least because Lynn has agreed to have a meeting with Lucy, even though she was so reluctant to show any of her footage to Lucy before she was totally happy with it. So this is great.
I’m going to think carefully about what is the best way we can all get something out of the meeting and draw up a little agenda, without making things too formal. ….and also a list of problems and issues that have come up over the period of months we have been involved in the project. It has certainly been a collaboration, though as I am at the centre of it, I got the most out of things. I want to make sure the other two people get something out of it for their own practice as well, which they can take away from this project and hopefully apply to their own individual practices.

The link above is to a short sound piece I made using a small amount of the material I recorded and performed at Greenham Common. I had to make a 3 min piece of work to accompany an application for a Royal Scottish Academy Residency, and there is an arts centre in the Western Isles that is interested in hosting an artist whose work is relevant to one of their themes for next year ie. Archaeology , so I thought I would also put a link to this work on soundcloud and include it in my a-n blog. I hope the link works! Now, so far the sound work doesn’t really show much evidence of collaboration. Lynn and I had a discussion about when we should meet with Lucy and we had differing opinions about this so I am to make some notes about what such a meeting could/might achieve and we are to discuss it again. We also discussed what kind of piece we would make from the sound I have recorded at Greenham and the films that Lynn has shot so far. We have decided to make a film lasting about 15 mins which will try to convey some of the layers of history and archaeology of the Common, and see how the sound and images can play off against oneanother in a kind of dialogue. Maybe the two of us as collaborators can’t always agree verbally but strangely, the work usually brings the best out of both of us. Maybe collaboration is not always about words, but about communicating through the artistic material that we have made up till the point of editing, and then the dialogue comes when the editing really starts and the material takes over from the two individual people…even though they previously thought they were collaborating!
Lucy has become rather sidelined in this I feel, unfortunately. I meet with her but so far we three haven’t met together at all. I will work out how to tackle this for the best.

The sound piece is made up of speaking, singing, “playing” as instruments some of the remains of the airbase fuel station known as Pol21, recordings of the sounds of the Common (lots of planes fly overhead), and an attempt to convey the depths beneath the surface..a stone is dropped into the rusty mouth of a metal fixture shown in the last couple of posts. There is no added reverb or anything, all the sounds are just as recorded on Greenham Common and all were recorded on site. More soon. I will start a bigger sound edit very soon.

I went to Greenham Common again yesterday on my own to record at the site of POL21, where remains of an underground fuelling station are. There are also metalworks above ground. I really immersed myself in the atmosphere of the Common and of this site in particular. I created sounds making them emanate from the metal “mouth” again, breathing at the same time as the sounds were emerging. I also sang into the “mouth”, recording all this. I dropped stones into the mouth and discovered there was some sort of liquid, probably water, a long way beneath. The sounds were mesmerising. I experimented with singing and speaking words which would grow increasingly indistinct, and vice versa…from indistinct to distinct, as if this was the way in which things would emerge from somewhere in the past or in the ground and gradually become intelligible only to become obliterated and indistinct once again. I’ve been thinking more and more about the collaborative aspect of this and really want to get the project back on track, after all it’s suppose to be about investigating the relationship of sound and image, and experimenting with these two components, not necessarily about making films that seem “good”. I’m wondering though if Lynn being more experimental with the visuals can be done at the same time as using more abstract sounds, or should one aspect (the visuals or the sound) remain fairly accessible while the other element is less “illustrative” or “mimetic” or whatever the best term for this might be? Of course there is also the way in which sound alone can evoke visual images without anything produced by the camera…..the mind is more imaginative than cameras, computers, etc