Studio-Intensive Day 6
Started the sixth day well but got stuck in a one and three-quarter hour traffic jam to studio, a journey which normally takes twenty minutes. What did I do? Well, I planned my recording for Monday, sang along badly to Radio Three, thought about my plans for the day including my Skype conversation with artist Linda Duvall this evening and did a little bit of huffing and puffing. I try to think of space like this as a bonus but I don’t always manage it. Re-ran the early part of my day for positives but the loss of the yellow duckling is still very saddening. Little things make big impacts.
Worked at some admin. and began looking again at the a-n artist’s toolkit especially the do-it-yourself critique questions from Linda Ball’s toolkit 2007 –
‘quality of your work, ideas and concepts you have chosen to develop, direction of your work, quantity of work you have produced, relevance and quality of your research, ability with manual skills/techniques/processes, relationship with your audience/client, degree to which you have been experimental, quality of new ideas or innovative solutions, ability to be critical about your work, ability to be critical about others’ work, involving others in a critical approach to your work, keeping up-to-date with contemporary practice, ability to plan your time and manage your workload’
It is still relevant even though it is now 11 years old.
Talking of relevance, I started reading Albert Camus’ Create Dangerously. He writes
‘To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing’ (Penguin Modern 17:3). Written in 1957, this sums up this age of social media where nothing can be hidden and everyone has opinions based on few facts.
Preparing for my collaboration with Linda. This involves humming over Skype using particular spaces. It explores the intersection of space, and by implication, time; body and sound and by using Skype, brings in extra spatiotemporal resonances. Resonances are, of course, what I hope the humming will do. Last time we tried it, we were both physically present, and the level of empathy between us was such that the hum became one, became separate from us both but, at the same time, belonged to us both. I will report tomorrow on what happens.
