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FINAL EDIT SUBMISSION

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Critical Self Evaluation

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Edit Process

When it came to editing my video and experimenting further, I tried to use close ups of the brick and other natural elements as a more translucent layer. However, this didn’t work, it made the image overbearing and too busy, so experimented with the sound to cr da r a similar type of layering.

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Hauntological Environmental Art

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470412918782337

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Project Viewing/Assessment

Due to the affects of Coronavirus, both the assessment and viewing of the degree show works will be online, meaning the piece I make must be accessible for an online platform. 

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Hauntology

Hauntology frequently incorporate archaic imagery, styles, or techniques and evoke uncertainty, mystery, inexpressible fears, and unsatisfied longing. 

It can easily be linked to the general methodology of deconstruction Derrida pioneered – as metaphors, spectres, being neither one thing or the other, challenge basic binary oppositions like ‘alive / dead’, ‘present / absent’ and ‘past / present’ and so are ‘deconstructive’ in nature. Or they can be linked to the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Žižek – the spectres Derrida discusses conceivably residing in an area beyond the abilities of the Imaginary and the Symbolic to reflect and describe the Real. Here the haunting metaphor can be extended: traditionally, a spectre invades the present to redress a balance there, to warn the present concerning the future. Hauntological spectres come to bother us and our images from any zone of deficit lying between things as they were / are / will be and things as they are thought or hoped to have been / be / be in the future, thus history haunts (Marxist) ideology, and (Marxist) ideology haunts history; theory haunts practice and practice haunts theory, Utopia haunts reality and reality haunts Utopia, and so on. Art that permits a hauntological reading would facilitate this process of haunting.

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Imperfect Audio

The New Yorker piece says that Daniel Levitin measures the imperfections by looking at Vibrato (not landing perfectly on the note) and Rubato (not keeping perfectly on the beat).

"Expressiveness is error. Just as, at a subliminal level, Choueiri could make music come alive in space by introducing tiny errors into the amplitude and timing of the XTC wave, Levitin could show that what really moves us in music is the vital sign of a human hand, in all its unsteady and broken grace. (Too much imperfection and it sounds like a madman playing; too little, and it sounds like a robot.) Ella singing Gershwin matters because Ella knows when to make the words warble, and Ellis Larkins knows when to make the keyboard sigh. The art is the perfected imperfection."

"Why should one reject the perfect in favour of the imperfect? The precise and the perfect carries no overtones, admits no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold, and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion for the infinite. Beauty must have some room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom."

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Abstract for 'Lo-Fi Aesthetics in Popular Music Discourse'

Adam Harper Wadham College, University of Oxford Submitted Hilary Term 2014 

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, 'lo-fi,' a term suggesting poor sound quality, the opposite of 'hi-fi,' became a characteristic perceived in certain popular-music recordings and eventually emerged as a category within independent or 'indie' popular music. It is typically taken to express the technical and technological deficiencies associated with amateur or 'DIY' musical production, namely at home using cheap recording equipment. However, this thesis rejects the assumption that lo-fi equates to a mode of production and charts it as a construction and a certain aesthetics within popular music discourse, defined as 'a positive appreciation of what are perceived and/or considered normatively interpreted as imperfections in a recording.' I chart the development and manifestation of lo-fi aesthetics, and the ways it focuses on various 'lo-fi effects' such as noise, distortion ('phonographic imperfections') and performance imperfections, in several decades of newspapers, magazines and websites covering popular music in the English-speaking world. I argue that lo-fi aesthetics is not merely the unmediated, realist authenticity that it is often claimed to be, but one that is also fascinated with the distance from perceived commercial norms of technique and technology (or 'technocracy') that lo-fi effects signify. Lo-fi aesthetics derives from aesthetics of primitivism and realism that extend back long before phonographic imperfections were positively received. I also differentiate between lo-fi aesthetics and aesthetics of noise music, distortion in rock, glitch, punk and cassette culture. An appreciation for recording imperfections and the development of 'lo-fi' as a construction and a category is charted since the 1950s and particularly in the 1980s, 1990s and in the twenty-first century, taking in the reception of artists such as the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Hasil Adkins, the Shaggs, Jandek, Daniel Johnston, Beat Happening, Pavement, Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, Beck, Will Oldham, Ariel Pink and Willis Earl Beal. 

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Sound Experiments

For this project I had planned to get Robert Goodlife to make the sound for my piece. However, as it was made clear i needed to have a more personal connection to the sound I decided I would make the sound myself. I have been collecting sounds and playing with the arrangement of these, while also incorporating field recordings I had taken. 

For the sound I wanted to use bad quality recordings as I felt as if this gave the audience a more intimate feel. The recordings I have chosen are an eclectic mix of sounds related to why the place was abandoned, mixed with sounds from the place itself and a leading more melodic undertone.

(Collection of 9 different sounds to create my soundtrack, collected from a website that provides sounds available for public use, not owned by anyone, so no permission needed)

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Titles & Feedback

‘As The World Turns’

‘Please Exit Via The Car Park’ 

I initially set my project title as ‘As The World Turns’, I had recently changed it after looking into further artist documentary. I had recognised that many of the titles liked to point out something that reflects on the fundamental issues that are shown, I felt that ‘Please Exit Via The Car Park’ felt as if it addressed these issues. Through discussion via email I have however decided to change the name of the project back to its original title as it was pointed out this type of name comes with other connotations as it is associated with other styles of work that aren't relevant to my practice.- such as referencing to Banksy, which I hadn’t previously considered.

‘As The World Turns’- In relation to the current situation where Coronavirus has changed the way in which people live and function on a daily basis on a worldwide scale. My piece is a reflection also on a disaster that the general public faced that changed the way they lived and how the places that meant so much to them have changed and are representative of what happened and the devastation that occurred in a more physical form. My documentary explores the ways in which people face uncertain situations and circumstances. Showing a reflection upon a disaster that happened at a particular time and place, and how this can still resonate with people and have relevance, as the themes that are considered important and human and still issues that are faced today although the world around us has changed so much and we have adapted as a society to this, this form of trauma still is very much prominent.

- Significance of Abandoned Places, what they can tell us and what we can learn from them