In Vacant Space, 2015
Speakers, cabling, media-player, solar-panels.
Dimensions variable
Installed crn. Manchester and Peterborough Streets for Audacious Festival of Sonic Arts, Christchurch

For the 2015 Audacious Festival of Sonic Arts I created a site-sensitive work which attended to the rhythms and ghostly sonic phantasms of a block of land in central Christchurch. The work relied on a iterative process of recording and playback similar to that employed by Alvin Lucier in his 1969 work, I am Sitting in a Room. 

At the site, formally part of the Christchurch’s inner city, I created a long recording (8 hrs). The following day, I played this recording back through speakers which I had mounted there on materials found on site, recording again as I did so. Over the next week I repeating this process each day, creating thick slabs of sound-time in which rhythms and patterns slowly emerged within a system tending toward an abstracted tone created by the repeated act of recording and play back itself.1 

What emerged from this process was a sort of ghost of resonance, no longer that of the now absent building, but rather that of the architecture of redevelopment – community gardens and carparks.1

In enclosed space, this tone would be dubbed a 'resonant frequency’, however, at the Manchester / Peterborough street corner, where no such enclosing structures were present, this action gestured at something other than the conditioning effect the acoustic properties of built-space have on the behaviour of sounds within them; a gesture instead at the absence of resonance; at the rhythms of a city in recovery. 

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1 Henri Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm-analysis is useful for understanding this interpretation:
[We] will listen to the world, and above all to what are disdainfully called noises, which are said without meaning [are said to have none], and to murmurs, full of meaning — and finally [we] will listen to silences. … For [us], nothing is [truly] immobile. [We] hear the wind, the rain, storms; but if [we] consider a stone, a wall, a trunk, we understand their slowness, their interminable rhythm. These objects are not inert; however their time is not set aside for the subject. It is only slow [in appearance,][and] in relation to our time,to our body, the measure of rhythms. [Even] an apparently immobile object, the forest, moves in multiple ways: the combined movements of the soil, the earth, the sun. Or the movements of the molecules and atoms that compose it (the object, the forest). The object resits a thousand aggressions but breaks up in the humidity or conditions of vitality, the profusion of minuscule life. To the attentive ear, [the forest] makes a noise like a seashell. Without omitting the spatial and places, of course, [we] make ourselves more sensitive to times than to spaces. [We] will come to 'listen' to a house, a street, a town,as an audience listens to a symphony. … The rhythmanalyist will give an account of [the] relation between the present and presence: between their rhythms. A dialectical relation: neither incompatibility, nor identity — neither exclusion nor inclusion. One calls the other, substitutes itself for the other. The act of rhythmanalysis transforms everything into presences, including the present, grasped and perceived as such. The act does not imprison itself in the ideology of the thing. It perceives the thing in the proximity of the present, an instance of the present, just as the image is another instance. The act of rhythmanalysis integrates these things — this wall, this table, these trees —in a dramatic becoming, in an ensemble full of meaning, transforming them no longer into diverse things, but into presences. Like the poet, [we] perform a verbal action, which has an aesthetic import. The poet concerns himself above all with words, [with] the verbal. Whereas [we] concern [ourselves] with temporalities and their relation within wholes. [The] act of the artist has the power to evoke a time (the wearing away of the pair of shoes), and the presence of a long period of destitution. Therefore a series of presents. … S/he who walks down the street, over there, is immersed in the multiplicity of noises, murmurs, rhythms (including those of the body, but does s/he pay attention, expect at the moment of crossing the street, when s/he has to calculate roughly the number of steps?). By contrast, from the window [at a distance], the noises distinguish themselves, the flows separate out, rhythms respond to one another. On red, cars at a standstill, the pedestrians cross, feeble murmurings, footsteps, confused voices. One does not chatter when crossing a dangerous junction under the threat of wild cats and elephants ready to charge forward, taxis, buses, lorries, various cars. Hence the relative silence in this crowd. A kind of soft murmuring, sometimes a cry, a call. Therefore the people produce completely different noises when the cars stop: feet and words. From right to left and back again. And on pavements along the perpendicular street. … At the green light, steps and words stop. … A second of silence, and then it's the rush, the starting up of cars, the rhythms of the old bangers speeding up as quickly as possible. At some risk: passers by to the left, buses cutting across, other vehicles. Whereby a slowing down and restart (stage one: starting up —stage two: slowing down for the turn — stage three: brutal restart, foot down, top speed, excluding traffic jams …). The harmony between what one sees and what one hears (from the window[at a distance]) is remarkable. Strict concordance. … After the red light, all of a sudden it's the bellowing charge of wild cats, big or small, monstrous lorries turning toward Bastille, the majority of small vehicles hurtling towards the Hôtel de Ville. The noise grows in intensity and strength, at its peak become unbearable, though quite well borne by the stench of fumes. … Then stop. … Let's do it again, with more pedestrians. Two-minute intervals. Amidst the fury of the cars, the pedestrians cluster together, a clump here, a lump over there; grey dominates, with multicoloured flecks, and these heaps break apart for the race ahead. Sometimes, the old cars stall in the middle of the road and the pedestrians move around them like waves around a rock, though not without condemning the drivers of badly placed vehicles with withering looks. Hard rhythms: alternations of silence and outburst, time both broken and accentuated, striking s/he who takes to listening from [their] window, which astonishes [them] more than the disparate movements of the crowds. … No ear, no piece of apparatus could grasp this whole, this flux of metallic and carnal bodies. In order to grasp the rhythms, a bit of time, [of distance in and of time,] a sort of meditation on time, the city, people, is required. Go deeper, dig beneath the surface, listen attentively instead of simply looking, of reflecting the effects of a mirror.
- Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanaylsis. London: Continuum, (2004). pp. 19-31.