To join this activity, email me at [email protected].
The activity’s Curatorial Guild (ie. its participants!) will endeavour to have an Introductory Meeting on **Friday, April 15th, 4:00pm.
Current members of this Activity’s Curatorial Guild: Elyse Longair, Brandon Hocura, Bojana Babic, Jung-Ah Kim, Mo Horner + Neven Lochhead.**
A first and separate ‘Round’ of this activity is offered from March 18 - April 10.
House Band: Activity Pitch
House Band is an activity that merges collective sonic experimentation and spatial thinking. Members of the activity’s Curatorial Guild will begin by negotiating, modelling and installing a unique strategy for the clandestine distribution of sound in and around the historic Etherington House. Here, multi-channel or surround-sound technologies will be approached and used as a discursive or relational space, with participants occupying discrete nodes of sonic amplification in a distributed array of a 6.1 sound system. The activity will oscillate between independent sonic exploration (recording, collecting, remixing, downloading, chopping-up, etc.) and “Collective Editing” sessions, during which the Curatorial Guild will tackle together questions about the interrelationship, overlap and co-contamination of the group’s assembled sounds, aiming to produce agreements about the progression of a shared mix or edit.
While this activity will produce a culture of open sonic experimentation, the Etherington House will provide us with a necessary and generative set of ‘enabling constraints’ that will guide our production and help to forge a cohesive dynamic for the House Band, in three important ways:
Firstly, the architecture of the house itself provides us with an exciting but also limited set of opportunities for the placement and playback of sound in the space. We will need to inventively seek platforms, surfaces, nooks and peripheries where speakers can nest themselves and from which our sonic materials can be heard, felt and sensed. Secondly, in navigating the complexities of this architectural space, we will also need to consider sound’s potential to be in relation to a range of other occupants and guests of the home, such as the exhibiting artists, the Agnes staff members and publics who attend the exhibition. We will need to determine what attitude the sonic material generated by the House Band will take in relation to these other guests and hosts -an ambience? An interruption? A support structure? A haunting? Thirdly, we will need to consider the addition of the House Band’s sonic material to the Etherington House in relation to the curatorial framing of the ongoing A guest + a host = a ghost project, which seeks “methods for transitioning the house back into a home that furthers the cause of art in the community.” How might we interpret, respond to, or refuse this prompt through sonic means? What forms of sound can actively “transition” or “prepare” a space for its future function as a home? What ‘cause’ of art should we prepare it for?
<aside> 🤔 What if you don’t have any experience with sound? You are still more than welcome to join this activity! There are many ways for you to consider and play with sound beyond needing to be capable of complex audio recording and processing, although some instruction or assistance with that will also be available, if needed to develop your ideas. What is key here is simply your interest in sound, and its relation to space and architecture, as well as a willingness to think about these themes in an openly collaborative context with other participants.
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Collective Editing Sessions + Editing Timeline Installation
”Collective Editing Sessions” will be contexts where participants will “plot” the dynamic of a shared soundscape, discussing and negotiating the progression one another’s sound occurring over the span of a shared timeline. This could be seen as kind of “jam-session” in a conventional band, where individual players in a group determine when and what they will play over the duration of a song. Similar decisions will be discussed during “Collective Editing Sessions” by the House Band through the use of materials such as stickies, wall tape and floor plans to imagine and chart the trajectory of the sound through space. This will occur first in an “analog” format, before we commit the group’s sounds to a single “digital” playback file, to be diffused into a relational surround-sound set-up installed in the home. Our resulting soundscape will then play on loop in the house for an extended period. During this period we may also endeavour to leave traces of our Collective Editing Session timelines on a wall in the Etherington House as a score or a map to the sound that will be playing back in the house.
Some background on Collective Editing
These “Collective Editing Sessions” are drawn from a similar exercises created for my production intensives in Sound + Synthesis, delivered in Fall 2021 at Queen’s University as an undergraduate course. Photos documenting the residues from that group’s Collective Editing Sessions can be viewed below:
Sound + Synthesis: Collective Editing