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14AB2 is an audio-photographic installation. The piece is built on three simultaneous drones, spectrally processed guitar samples. The source materials are between five and fifteen seconds, extended to around 60 seconds each, and low-pass filtered. In removing high frequencies, I am resisting any reference to other spectrally processed electronic sounds, and blurring the harmonic content of the samples. The resulting texture is three drones that clash harmonically. The harmonic content and relationships of the individual samples is unimportant. The resulting cluster of chords form what is, in effect, a blank canvas on which an audience member can project their experience of the piece. The blurred, fuzzy timbre of this compound drone forms the foundation of the soundscape, and aesthetically is akin to Monty Adkins’ Five Panels suite, particularly Panel No. 2, To Ethan.
Monty Adkins: Panel No. 2, To Ethan
These guitar samples are found sounds from my computer’s hard drive; some are unused materials from old projects, others’ intended purposes have been forgotten. This stumbling upon old source materials draws a convenient parallel with the other audio in the piece: numbers stations, and demonstrates the macro stream; I have used numbers station recordings in works prior to this project, and continue to be fascinated by them.
Duga-3 or ‘Russian Woodpecker’ shortwave transmitter, nr. Chernobyl, Ukraine.
Numbers stations are globally transmitted shortwave radio stations, broadcasting bursts of numbers, morse code, or synthesised melodies. Whilst their geographical origins can usually be estimated, their purpose and content is unknown. Analysis is speculative, but the general consensus is that their purpose is, or was, for espionage. In a 2000 NPR feature on numbers stations, they are described as,
Any of several hundred shortwave radio broadcasters, all of which are using high powered, big transmitters, large antennas, macro coverage…which do nothing except broadcast meaningless streams of numbers. They never say why they’re doing it; they never say who they are.
NPR, 2000
And by Hugh Stegman in the same program, as, “messages to somebody. We think it’s spies.”
The macro method of broadcasting these messages renders the recipient impossible to determine. Combine this with the unknown content of the broadcasts, and numbers station broadcasts essentially become abstracted messages. I find myself drawn to this high level of ambiguity, and giving the illusion that there is a message hidden within 14AB2. The audio clips, taken from numbers station compilation The Conet Project (1997), are parts of longer recordings, but have not been decoded, and I have not coded any message within the broadcasts that I have used. The title, however, does contain a message, but neither the content, nor the fact that there is a message encoded, is revealed to the audience. Creator of The Conet Project Akin Fernandez states in a BBC interview (Fanshawe, 2005) that, to his knowledge, no numbers station has ever been decoded. He is generally regarded as an expert on the subject, and no government has confirmed or denied use of numbers stations.
The photographs have been processed with a Hex editor (software that exposes the code of the image). After some experimentation, I settled on a form of editing in which I selected a large piece of code, and arbitrarily moved it to another point. I previously experimented with adding more characters to the code, and copy/pasting small parts of the code dozens or hundreds of times. As Hex editing is a destructive process, often the resulting images were either completely destroyed, or were glitched beyond my personal tastes. This process (micro stream) continued until I was satisfied by the resulting image.
As I do not posses knowledge of coding, the results of this method of processing images were not predictable, but often, moving one large section of code elsewhere would result in several large tiles in the image; I settled on this as it satisfied my preferences, and also tips a nod towards the disruptive solid colour panels in Uta Barth’s white blind (bright red) (Lee, 2004, p.37), the sharp lines echoing the disruption of the drones by the numbers stations.
Top: 14AB2 centre image
Bottom: white blind (bright red) – Uta Barth (2002)
My aim with this processing was to further abstract the already blurred photographs, so that it is clear that the subject of them is not specific or necessarily identifiable, and can be interpreted as anything, -one, place, time, and so on.
The images in the piece roughly correlate with my synaesthetic response to the drone track; the colours contained within each image are an approximate representation of the colours I perceive their respective drones to be. In terms of seeing sounds in the images, the flicker effects project a soft rumble of noise, similar to the background noise in some of the numbers stations audio clips.
This synaesthetic matching was an unintended aspect of the process of producing 14AB2, realised only when presenting the work. I have used this matching as a starting point for a close examination of my experiences of synaesthesia, and I am now concerned with producing works that attempt to trigger synaesthetic responses in myself, and free-associations (including synaesthetic responses) in an audience. Upon reflection, this meso stream feeds into the subsequent pieces in the portfolio, but also becomes a macro thread: I realise that my previous work subconsciously attempted this to some degree (I often described my process as simply making music that was beautiful, or made me feel something), and I have become so fascinated with the unpredictability and wide range of experiences of my pieces that it will likely influence future works for some time to come.
Despite the fact that I produced 14AB2 as an abstract piece, numbers stations and The Conet Project are reasonably well known, so in using them, Cold War connotations are unavoidable. Whilst I avoided using morse or musical numbers stations, assuming that they would be more recognisable or associative to an audience (particularly musical broadcasts; of which many are folk tunes), vocal numbers stations are perhaps the most well known form of these broadcasts, which would further hinder the lack of intention within the piece.
Thus, 14AB2 has become a test piece for the ideas I am exploring in this project. The numbers stations audio is, in parts, synchronous with text that appears superimposed on two of the images, whereas the images are processed with various lighting effects in video editing software, that give the illusion that the sound and image are connected, a clear example of Chion’s audio-visual contract,
Certain…videos and films demonstrate that synchresis can even work out of thin air – that is, with images and sounds that strictly speaking have nothing to do with each other, forming monstrous yet inevitable and irresistible agglomerations in our perception… Synchresis is Pavlovian.
Chion, 1994, p. 63
I have endeavoured to work with asynchronous sound and image since producing 14AB2, precisely because of this. Chion’s assertion that synchronous sound and image is Pavlovian feeds into what I feel the finished product of 14AB2 is. Even though it was not intended, the audience will most likely view the image and sound as being related. Whilst this is true of the numbers stations audio and text, I was not intending it to be true of the drones and photographs. When gaining informal feedback from audience members, the drones’ apparent complimenting of the visual effect, along with the voices, is mentioned above all else.
I also wish to remove audio-visual hierarchy from my work; producing pieces in which the sound and image are equally important (or unimportant). The flicker effects on the images in 14AB2 can give the illusion of either the image affecting the sound, or the sound affecting the image; however it is likely that most audience members would experience the sound as diegetic, and an effect or by-product of the image. I feel that asynchronous (non-diegetic) sound and image works around this. If the two do not appear to influence each other in any obvious way, I speculate that an audience would experience them both as equal, the sound not simply “satisfying simple curiosity” (Eisenstein et al: 1928/1985). If this aim of producing works where sound and image are unrelated is achieved, perhaps my work would better suit the label of audio and visual rather than audio/visual.
Whilst this apparent discontinuity creates what could be called a semantic gap for the viewer/listener to fill (Tagg, 2012), my hope is that neither aspect of the piece will be interpreted as more important than the other. An audience member may decide on, or perceive a hierarchy when experiencing my work, but I do not wish to force any such hierarchy, and none is implicit in successive works. This meso stream thread extends through the remainder of the portfolio, and will be discussed further in subsequent commentaries.
Phil Maguire - .haul / S 