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contents: 4 … The Opposite of Wilderness … … … … … … …

4 6 7 10 13 16 17

… … … … … … …

Proposal Artist Sheet Construction Ideology 'Noise and Whispers' Preview Photographs Feedback 'Noise and Whispers' Review

18 … The Gates of Hell … 18 … Auguste Rodin … 22 … Notes/Research

26 … Distortion … 27 … Correspondence – Prof. Franklin and Jim Tanenbaum … 30 … Collaboration Request

31 … Distortion 6 … 31 … Proposal … 33 … Installation Photographs – Symposium of Acoustic Ecology

37 … Chord 38 … Subtext … 40 … A Letter to David Toop … 41 … A Proposal for 'Counter Culture Commissions' at Oval House … 44 … Notes + Achim Wollscheid

45 … Repeat After Me … 46 … Notes on Repetition

49 … Pragmatics and Parallelism … … … …

49 51 59 60

… … … …

Correspondence/Notes Research A Proposal for the Sound Wall Repent

65 … Distortion 1 … 67 … Opinion Super Highway

69 … Filmgruppe Chaos … 70 … Flutterman/Zeitgeister … 72 … Sportfilm – correspondence & ideology + Arthur Lipsett influence … 79 … The Future Born and the Undead

83 … Push Pause 91 … Telephones and Typewriters … 91 … Marshall McLuhan, Research and Sculptures … 96 … Workshop … 97 … Neuroarthistory Research–Prof.John Onians

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“Two levels of interpretation of sounds: one in which sounds are interpreted as signals that hint at a source ... the other in which they are interpreted as symbols. If sounds are uninterpretable they are called 'noise' ... noises may well be used in a symbolic way ...

2 + 2 = green is uninterpretable on the level of mathematical discourse. This proposition is not even false; it is pure mathematical nonsense, 'mathematical noise'. We cannot deny, however, that by its very form of nonsensicality this proposition generates a specific frustration in the search for its meaning ...”

Heinz Von Foerster Music By Computers – John Wiley and Sons Inc New York (1969:8/9)

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2 + 2 = green A proposal for NOISE and whispers

The Opposite of Wilderness

by Clay Gold

As I have a deep interest in language, speech and communication, I interpret Noise as the sum of all information, the sum of all humanity's interpretation, its language output; big, confident, unconditional, published and projected. News, Headlines, Publicity and Propaganda, is Noise.

Whispers are private, intimate, devastating; suggestions and rumours; unconfirmed, unconfident, confidential and conditional communication. The inner monologue is a Whisper, a word beyond our ear.

Before World War ll and for a short while after, we lived in a world of Whispers. The 'Walls Have Ears' Campaign exemplifies the need for secrecy which was felt in Britain. People got on with their jobs and only gossiped when they felt sure that no-one was listening. More recently, society has evolved into a community dominated by Noise. We are now encouraged to tell stories, initially “around the photocopier” and ultimately on a social platform or blog, to reveal our deepest thoughts publicly and speak out. Advertising sells a fake back-story for products, encouraging us to become emotionally involved. Companies are desperate for their brand to be a part of our lives, to live with us and transmit to the next generation. Even governments are not safe as we progress to the logical conclusion of this behaviour; NHS 'gagging orders' have been issued to prevent hospital horror stories emerging; official secrets are leaked. People, having been drawn into sharing their positive stories, can no longer be relied upon to keep quiet about their negative experiences or their nagging conscience.

In an effort to escape the noise of newspapers, advertisements and all presumptuous audio broadcasting, many people turn to their headphones for privacy, for escape. To blot out the noise which demands that we understand it, which demands that we play a role and relate to it, some seek privacy in personal entertainment, which demands nothing, no participation. They push away Noise, consumed by a useless media, a peddler of fantasies which leeches on basic emotion, whispering sweet nothings. They are free on a cloud of self-satisfaction, without responsibility; detached from Noise on a wave of Whispers.

But then comes alienation. Then comes the Wilderness. And there lies doubt.

There lies the space in which to realise that Reality has been substituted for Fiction.

If the space allows for it 'The Opposite of Wilderness' should comprise 2 x traditional 'Tannoy' PA speakers (see photo), such as those used in railway stations, diffusing a mix of simultaneous voice announcements and broadcast media; 1 x full frequency range (hi-fi) speaker delivering a loop of channel-hopping TV station stutter; 1 x sub-bass speaker of indistinct low frequency emissions, subliminal music and language, as though originating elsewhere; 1 x enclosed-ear headphones, which the visitor to the installation may don to achieve isolation from the Noise. They will then hear instead a quiet ambience and a gentle voice repeating, every few seconds, the phrase:

“I should be doing something.”

In a busy, or noisy environment, 'The Opposite of Wilderness' might solely consist of the headphone part of the piece.

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Noise & Whispers ARTIST SHEET NOTES to this table 1) All measurements are H x W x D and are in cm’s 2) Please supply a Hi Res (300 dpi) image of the work, or an image associated with it Artist

Title

Medium

Yea r

Editio H n

Clay Gold

The Opposite of Wilderness

Sound

201 3

1 of 1

W

D

Artist Minimu m Price £ n/a

Insuran Publish ce Value ed £ Selling price £ n/a

Artist Biography (250 words) C l ay Gold, from Canterbury, Kent, is a British sound recording artist with an interest in social cybernetics. His multi-channel sound pieces use location recording, synthesis, Foley and worldizing as part of an exploration into information, actively suppressed and promoted opinion; or c e n sor ship and propaganda.

Website www.claygold.co.uk Statement (500 words) Having a deep interest in language, speech and communication, I interpret Noise as the sum of all information, the sum of all humanity's interpretation, its language output; big, confident, unconditional, published and projected. News, Headlines, Publicity and Propaganda, is Noise.

Whispers are private, intimate, devastating; suggestions and rumours; unconfirmed, unconfident, confidential and conditional communication. The inner monologue is a Whisper, a word beyond our ear.

In an effort to escape the noise of newspapers, advertisements and all presumptuous audio broadcasting, many people turn to their headphones for privacy, for escape. To blot out the noise which demands that we understand it, which demands that we play a role and relate to it, some seek privacy in personal entertainment, which demands nothing, no participation. They push away Noise, consumed by a useless media, a peddler of fantasies which leeches on basic emotion, whispering sweet nothings. They are free on a cloud of self-satisfaction, without responsibility; detached from Noise on a wave of Whispers.

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Block of wood from Ebay

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Mannequin hand from Ebay, spray-painted gold and glued hard into the block.

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Above: Wooden box adapted to conceal rackmounted minidisc player and amplifier.

Below: Completed pair of spray-painted hands and headphones.

Presenting the headphones as a sacred object, with religious significance.

Wilderness is escapism, alienation; it is Jesus' wilderness, a place for isolation and a place to complete spiritual training or return the mind to focus back in on itself.

The opposite of wilderness is a place of no learning, non-enlightenment.

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The Opposite of Wilderness is a piece I created for the Noise and Whispers exhibition at GV Arts Gallery in North London last November/December. Originally intended as a piece of multi-channel multiple speaker media noise with an added option of a headphones piece, intended to offer a means of escape, I was eventually asked to contribute just the headphones part of the project. I originally intended for there to be 4 pairs of headphones, all diffusing the same piece, but I quickly realised that, as the subject matter I was dealing with was alienation and escapism – this was not something that could be a shared experience – so it became a piece for a single pair of headphones. I'll just describe the piece, as it is very simple and then talk a bit about the influences and ideas behind it. (Picture) A pair of gold painted headphones are offered by a gold mannequin hand, mounted on a block of wood and fixed to the wall of the gallery, with a single spotlight on them. The sound being played into the headphones is a 20 minute recording of me, sitting in my shed, repeating the words “I should be doing something”, over and over, every few seconds. This recording is played twice, on a loop and the second time around there is a slightly different background environment. So the whole piece is 40 minutes long, and this is what is playing on a loop in the headphones. I tried not to change the way I repeated the words in any way, but I did not want it to sound robotic or looped, so I just sound bored – the recording is up close, a single condenser microphone, quite heavily compressed, so my breathing is almost as loud as my speaking – there is also some quite heavy sighing to break it up. I just say “I should be doing something” whenever I feel like it and my emotion doesn't change. In the background, the first time around, which is just whatever else was picked up during this mono microphone recording, can be heard birds, some knocking of wood and general work going on next door and some church bells ringing. The second time around there are more church bells added, much more melodic, from a different church in a different country – but again this is very much in the background and barely audible.

Comments and views at the preview ranged from “It's just a guy saying the same thing over and over” and “I think it's a bit sarcastic” and “You're getting quite angry as it goes on aren't you?” to making people actually think that they shouldn't be here, they should be doing something!

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One influence I must mention is John Cage. The recording of "I should be doing something" is essentially a recording of my studio environment, my shed, with the addition of my apparent procrastination, although I am actually doing something. This is 4.33 in the sense Cage meant when he said that he listens to that piece every day. But in this case it is a background to the auditory imagination, as is so much environmental sound. This is also suggestive of an idea that headphone listening does the thinking for you, that it is an escape from not only environmental noise, but also mental noise. Cage takes a backseat approach to composition which I believe comes from his paying close attention to nature, that which is effective without man's interference. His compositions arise spontaneously, in surprising ways and may be perceived as poisonous or delicious to the listener. And if it sounds like I'm talking about mushrooms, it's because I might be.

The piece is about distraction and escapism. The wilderness in the title refers to nature but with the added inference to Christ's wilderness, visited for 40 days and nights as part of a path to messiah-hood or enlightenment. It is with this in mind that I decided on an object with religious or sacred object imagery, a golden hand, to offer the headphones to the visitor. This religious wilderness is not escapism but a step into pure perception, a decreasing of external stimulus in order to inspire a communion of the inner and the outer existence. The opposite of this is complete denial of either. The actual audio environment as created by human beings has propelled us to the invention of headphones as a means to deny it. Noise canceling technology is further proof that we are displeased with our creation but are prepared to individually withdraw from it, rather than work to rectify the discrepancy. Human beings no longer look to enrich their experience but seek to expel their creations...The Opposite of Wilderness is essentially 4.33 for the headphone environment. In the recording the microphone is present to pick up the voice, which is up close and personal, but it also cannot help but pick up the activity occurring in the background. The opposite of ears, the opposite of perception, which excludes that which it regards as irrelevant.

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PROPAGANDA

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'Noise and whispers' Preview: Thursday November 7 2013

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Martin A. Smith – Curator of 'Noise and whispers'.

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FEEDBACK “I really enjoyed your piece at the Noise and Whispers event. I tried to comment about something negative but its nothing of substance really. I would have put your cards closer to the piece rather than in the corner. That is the only thing that comes to mind. Small but sometimes I can be annoying about those kind of details. Just a personal thing. Below is a better explanation of how I felt when I first saw your piece: My first impression came from the visual aesthetic of the gold hand mounted on a stained wood block holding a pair of gold headphones. I found this to carry quite a bit of depth, almost to signal that it is the pinnacle, the key to expose the answers, a trophy of culmination.

The sound was close and personal, focused on a simple statement repeated over and over across the backdrop of an open room. "I should be doing something." The succession of this group of words carrying each a different uniqueness in prosody and meaning. Due to this repetition, I began to relate to the pressure of always needing to do "something." To compete with this world and take part in all its madness. The words gathered momentum, adding signification to the meaning. After understanding the intentions of the artist, the message of the piece became more clear. We live in a world of noise, and perhaps, this piece holds the key to it.”

Mark Geary Hi Clay!

“Sorry it took me a long time to send you my comments on your work. I went to the gallery to listen to it again to remind me, but also of what I thought to be a change of listening conditions. I really enjoyed your work! I found myself listening to it absolutely thinking that I had to do something, but thought I really wasn't doing much but listening. Might've been lost in thought for a moment when I was over at the gallery, i felt that the sentence was very strong and that it was specific to me. But then we do all have our own rhythms wherein we are feel the urge to be doing something! I also had a thought about how you delivered the phrase, sometimes your breathing would be quite loud and say "I should be doing something" like it was a sigh. Yeah I really liked that haha.

Anyways, I hope this helps! Good work, please let me know when you have other exhibits. I'm sure it will be good!” best regards mario c.

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'Noise and Whispers' Review 08/12/2013

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The Gates of Hell “Your unconscious mind truly is your genius.”

A-Course-in-Demonic-Creativity (ISS) - Highlight on Page 10 | Added on Monday, May 28

I love Auguste Rodin's 'Gates of Hell' – unfinished, overflowing with inspiration and incredible ideas, and containing many of his individual masterpieces such as 'The Kiss', 'The Thinker' and 'Three Shades'. He worked on The Gates for 20 years without completing it, externalising his obsession with Dante's 'Divine Comedy' – creating a living metaphor for the book. There are hundreds of characters in the Gates, each created in great detail with a specific character, and this was a major criticism of the piece, which fell out of favour with critics and commissioners alike. It's extremely busy, with no focus, a brave move in the late 19th century. Rodin is a considerable influence for me, especially through such works as 'Thought' and portraits of muse Camille Claudel, which emerge realistically from the rock from which they are sculpted; beautiful distortions, human forms twisted, wrung from nature.

A seated man sculpture, in thought. Microphones for ears, a speaker for a mouth, web-cameras for eyes – a fuzz-box for a mind.

A chaotic, vibrating world struggles to enter hell through the senses of humankind, where all identity is lost, where all is distorted into a creation of human reality...(culture) Hell struggles to suck a chaotic, vibrating world in through the senses, to a place where all identity is lost, where all becomes distorted, only to escape into the creation of human culture...

“The Buddhists say that the heaven world is more dangerous than the hell world. Because it's more enticing, there's more temptation to stay there.”

WS Burroughs documentary http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watchonline/play/7790/William-S--Burroughs Compare this with the Julian Assange statement that countries with heavily censored media reveal more optimism than the democratic, so-called free countries, because you know where you stand – in the land where anything goes, anybody may believe anything - so everybody believes nothing.

Global warming deniers are the personification of the denial that we are a part of nature at all. Embracing this effect of our progress offers us the opportunity to realign ourselves with our origins, our planet, and is a reminder that the unilateral desire for financial profit necessarily creates suffering along the line.

For the human race to succeed Everybody needs to be successful.

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Nietzsche; Human, all too human. "It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions."

Pp484 Modern Philosophy Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002 "Opinions grow out of passions; inertia of the spirit lets them stiffen into convictions." pp486 "He, however, whose spirit is free and restlessly alive can prevent this stiffening through continual change..., he will have in his head, not opinions, but only certainties and precisely calculated probabilities."

Even as he speaks, even as I hear I cannot listen. Even as I see I cannot watch. I'm so tense that nothing attaches itself to me. I'm so solid, vibrationless, stiff and deliberate, I cannot absorb. I reflect. My senses seized.

The senses represent the gates of hell. The human mind is hell, where knowledge is recreated to apply to the bearer or humanity in general. The devil is the fuzz box, feeding us ideas & interpretations. (The fuzz box should be red.) What are the ears listening to? Information What are the eyes seeing? TV. Themselves on tv, repeatedly.

What is being felt (the mannequins touch one another, why? Contact mics on the body. What is being smelt & tasted?

What is not being seen? What is being ignored? Clear signal. Nature. Weeds? Something that man is not interested in tampering with, an annoyance, something that must only be moved from man's sight as it is displeasing to him.

What is not being heard?

What is coming out of the mouth? A distortion of what enters through the ears.

Some thoughts. The Thinker was a figure from Divine Comedy, Rodin's 'Gates' - part of a supposed commissioned portal for museum of decorative arts, Paris, who sat at the gates of hell, pondering the fate of the poor souls passing through.

Man's thoughts are the interpretation of what he experiences via the senses.

Before man there was no hell, there were simply lifecycles. There were no knowledge or innocence, there was simply behaviour.

Man comes to pass, with hell in his skull, translating thoughts into action, turning upon nature & fighting with it, to control it, to satisfy his senses. He gives up hunter-gathering to struggle with nature.

The human mind is hell, distorting truth & perverting the journey of the fallen angel, & the senses are gateways to that hell.

The mind is devil, misrepresenting nature, to the consciousness, as fact. The best we have is our vision, sight, (or touch) to turn to for truth, but we deny it, & apply conflicting messages to its meaning. As soon as we begin to interpret, we are distorting.

Truth dissolves in passing through the gates of hell.

This is where the dead go & is where they live, not existing with a consciousness, no longer with a memory or active faculty of their own but within a memory, the consciousness of a still living being. Eternity is as long as you deserve, it's what you earn.

The human mind is Heaven (an attractive distortion of reality), and the human mind is Hell (a foul distortion). This is where these ideas exist, they are nowhere else. And what goes in enters first as vibration either subtly or violently or anywhere else on

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the scale between. But inside is Hell, whether pleasant or tortuous, a lie, a misrepresentation.

Heaven is a distortion of Hell.

The senses are gateways to Hell.

Hell is populated not by lost souls, but by either vivid or fading memories.

There are as many variations of Hell as there are living humans in the universe. And there the dead live. Those that have not evaporated. And there too reside good and bad, for nothing that is natural is good as nothing that is natural is bad. Only in Hell do the concepts "good" and "bad" exist.

Humans project the content of their mind willingly & unwillingly.

And this contributes to the quality of their afterlife. But what of nature which is neither good nor bad? What happens to nature at the gates of hell? Judgement occurs. Distortion happens just the other side of those gates, where all things are judged and applied to the various purposes of the devil, the keeper of Hell.

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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Revised edition) (William Blake) Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age ========== The origins of good and evil lie in religion and the errors of their sacred codes, fundamental to which is the separation of soul and body, the latter being repressed in the service of the former. ========== Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. ========== Both priest and philosopher forgot that all divine energy resides in the human breast, not in an abstract out there, whether heaven or the origin of the universe. ========== How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five? ========== Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. ========== As such, the form and structure of The Marriage is designed to compel this perception of the infinite in everything, the “firm perswasion” that it is imagination that shapes the world rather than vice versa, a conscious reformation that, as Gross remarks, is a vital, libidinous and necessary response to the grinding development of political systems of his day ========== Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. ========== The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. ========== He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. ========== The cut worm forgives the plow. ========== The busy bee has no time for sorrow. ========== You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. ========== As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. ========== Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. ==========

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The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answer’d. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? ========== I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answerd, the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite this the North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience only for the sake of present ease or gratification? ========== If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. ========== [Plate 15] A Memorable Fancy I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation. In the first chamber was a DragonMan, clearing away the rubbish from a caves mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave, In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with gold silver and precious stones. In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air, he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite, around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs. In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living fluids. In the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the metals into the expanse. There they were reciev’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries. ========== The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains; are in truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds, which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning. ========== But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights. ========== Some will say, Is not God alone the Prolific? I answer, God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men. ========== These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence. Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two. ========== Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free; lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not!

For every thing that lives is Holy ==========

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How elegant spoken language might be, how fluid, were it not for the containment of the phonetic alphabet and the prison of the written word.

“In Koehler’s opinion, his investigations prove that the chimpanzee shows the beginnings of an intellectual behaviour of the same kind and type as mans. It is the lack of speech, “that infinitely valuable technical aid,” and the paucity of images, “that most important intellectual material,” which explain the tremendous difference between anthropoids and the most primitive man and make “even the slightest beginnings of cultural development impossible for the chimpanzee” [18, pp. 191-192].“ http://marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch04.htm Pure fiction is not distortion. Metaphor is not distortion. Poetry and art are not distortion. Photography, however is a distortion because of its connection with consciousness.

And yet … perhaps art signifies the actual origins of distortion … early humans looked at naturally occurring striations in rock, in their caves, and they saw patterns, shapes which reminded them of the other creatures in their environment. They embellished the markings, using found materials, plant dye, forming characters and caricatures with whom they forged relationships – imagining them alive as spirits and gods. Repetition – when you spend all day hunting buffalo, you return to the cave and see buffalo in the lines on the walls; you spend your evenings developing this obsession and you believe it will bring you greater success in hunting; and it probably does bring success because such devotion to a cause can lead that way. And so a form of worship evolves.

Superstition evolves. If buffalo, landscape and good weather appear in the naturally occurring marks of your abode, this might encourage optimism and a stronger desire to succeed.

The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes, most of which took place before humans, before mammals, before vertebrates, before multicelled organisms, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.

The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark (Carl Sagan) - Highlight Loc. 733-35 If a distortion (a lie, libel) is challenged (eg. in a court) & upheld it becomes successful. Distortions live & flourish or pass away unsuccessfully. Dawkin's 'memes'.

All non-fiction is distortion (work of memory). The only works of non-fiction which are not distorted are Operators Manuals. This is because they are used to create or recreate or maintain useful items, so cannot afford to be distorted. If an OM contains a line of distortion by mistake, it will either become obsolete, & corrected for the next edition, or if it proves useful somehow, it will be successful & become an hereditary trait.

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The telephone distorts & is being distorted simultaneously purely through the use of low quality, narrow bandwidth technology. Radio is broadcasting distortion even when it presents us with fiction.

And TV is also 100% distortion because of its need to manipulate rather than simply entertain. Because the medium is owned by a 3rd party, distorting the content.

Is the telephone a feedback loop though?

Radio & TV are exploited by their commercial aspects, as are other media which output multi-content. Multiple content media needs looking at.

What if we're not perfect?

Latest thinking says touch is as important as vision – http://brainworldmagazine.com/page/15/?attachment_id=dbhljkprq When Heraclitus said that “the eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears” it could be that he meant seeing an event with one's own eyes was more reliable than listening to gossip, rather than seeing is better than hearing. He was maybe referring to distortion of information... http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/heraclitus_2.html#Jz9j bQprC67SPTkI.99 “Most sensory cells are set at near their physical limits for detecting very weak signals; for instance, the inner ear is set to detect a movement of the tympanic membrane (eardrum) of the width of a hydrogen atom, and the eye is set to detect single photons from starlight on a dark night.” http://www.dana.org/news/brainhealth/detail.aspx?id=10064 The Gates of Hell do not discriminate.

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DISTORTION “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” Gregory Bateson from.... film trailer http://www.anecologyofmind.com/

“Aristotle … considered aesthetics to be the theory of those cognitive processes in which judgement enters perception...” pp xiv “...on the complexity of an organism's central nervous system, the meaning of a signal can vary from...food...to the most complicated relationships of an environmental situation.” pp8 “Man's CNS permits him to go one step farther by creating signals that are themselves results of long and ramified cascades of inferences.” pp8 Music By Computers – edited by Heinz Von Foerster and James W Beauchamp – John Wiley and Sons Inc New York 1969

Fuzz Map

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Dear Professor Franklin, I was extremely interested to read your essay 'Perception and Species Specific Worlds' as it recently came to my attention via Academia.edu.

I am not a scientist and neither am I a philosopher, but the ideas which you present so eloquently resonate with an idea I have been developing for a couple of years. I am a sound artist, based in the UK. I am writing a book entitled 'Operation of a Complex Fuzzbox' which explores the notion of human beings as machines which turn Nature into Culture. I do this by using the analogy of a Fuzzbox. A simple Fuzzbox, or Distortion Unit, in case you are not aware, is an effect for processing a guitar (or any other instrument) in rock music. The clean signal of the instrument enters the box, is processed, and a distorted (overdriven, sustained) version is output. It seems to me that this is what human beings do, via the stereoscopic, stereophonic, gustatory, olfactory and somatic inputs, we process the clean signal of Nature and we output what is essentially a distorted signal (opinion, speculation, theory), which we assume to be a correct view or evaluation of the world. But, as you know, those sensory inputs are all limited in some way – the most obvious of which (to me at least, as my main area is that of 'sound') is that the frequency range of our hearing ability is way short of the frequency range made available in the natural world. All the senses have similar restrictions. We may have extended our abilities with technology, but still the natural limitations affect our everyday thought processes and therefore our decision-making.

My book addresses this by using the machine analogy, without referring to human beings at all, in the form of an operators manual for a distortion unit which apparently translates Nature into distorted Culture, primarily. Of course we have now reached a point, certainly in the technological world, where the majority of what we perceive is more cultural than natural – we are distorting the distortions – and I will be addressing this also.

I wonder if you would be interested in consulting me, with regard to the book? I am limited in my contemporary knowledge of perception, although I am researching hard, and it would be useful beyond words for me to attain your feedback and input, a critique on the ideas I am trying to formulate. I have to say that the work is more “artistic” than scientific; I am essentially putting human beings forward as creative/destructive converters of Nature or as objects of entertainment, rather than Seekers of Truth in the universe, as we like to see ourselves. But of course I need the analogy to hold water scientifically.

I hope that the idea is of interest to you. I could send you an essay that I have written, by way of introducing my particular take on the subject, as well as some or all of what I have written so far for 'Operation of a Complex Fuzzbox'. If you are unable to further help me (and your essay has already provided a great source of inspiration), perhaps you would be able to point me toward further areas of research.

Many thanks and very best regards, Clay Gold * Dear Clay, Thank you for the email and your interest in my perception paper.

Your project sounds very interesting and consistent with the thoughts of my paper. Unfortunately I am only superficially familiar with auditory perception having focused on the visual mode. I’m afraid I would not be of much help to you although I certainly do appreciate the thesis.

You might find it helpful to find a psychology textbook that’s good on auditory perception. As I recall Bruce Goldstein (Sensation and Perception) has several good chapters on audition as well as vision and he presents ideas quite well. Early editions from Amazon should be easily available. I’m sure there are also other psychology of perception books that may help as well. Since retirement I have given away my library of perception books and now unable to make specific suggestions, I’m

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sorry to say. In any case, I like your thesis and wish you well on the project. * Dear Clay, Sam forwarded your email to me as he felt your project was out of his area of expertise.

I have been recording sound for motion pictures, television, video games, etc. for 46 years. I recorded production sound for the last three years of “Avatar”, and you can see my resume on www.IMDB.com My academic background before running off to Hollywood is in physics and astronomy.

I have also been teaching various sound-related media classes part-time at UCLA since 1988. This year it’s “Sound for Directors”. In studying the physiology (and psychology) of hearing I have also had some exposure to the operation of the other senses.

I don’t know if I can be of much help, but here are a few ideas to consider: The human brain is often compared to a computer, but this is not a sufficiently accurate analogy.

Our consciousness (sometimes referred to as the sensorium) is fed sensory inputs only after they have been preprocessed by other brain modules whose functioning is completely automatic, and more importantly, beneath our awareness.

The brain is comprised of many of these subconscious satellite CPUs, and they serve as additional physiological “fuzz boxes” before the one you are positing, but have already distorted the signals before they reach it. (BTW, in the U.S. they are sometimes called “futz boxes”.)

Some examples: Visual Motion Compensation removes the blur from moving the image of objects (up to a point).

When you watch the credit crawl at the end of a movie, you can read the names clearly. When the credit roll stops, stationary objects appear to be moving downward for a few moments because that neural circuit takes time to disengage.

Aural Reverberation Compensation removes room reverberation from discrete sounds (again up to a limit). If you use a handheld monophonic recorder to record a lecture, it will sound much more hollow and echo-y that it did to your ears, even though it was in the same location. The stereo information from both ears is used to diminish the perceived reverb.

Another aural module reduces the sensitivity to sounds in the voice frequencies when you are speaking, so that your voice doesn’t overpower sounds at other frequencies.

This was an evolutionary advantage to let you hear the sound of rustling vegetation as a sabretoothed cat was trying to sneak up on you. This neural circuit actually begins functioning a fraction of a second before you speak, and if you are in an area with a constant wide-spectrum background ambient sound, say the susurrus of an air conditioner, you can hear it diminish just before you speak. Try it.

Tactile Stimulation Compensation removes the awareness of continuing constant inputs. You are aware of the sensation of donning clothes, but then no longer pay attention to them unless the stimulus changes, say by having the trouser’s crotch pulled up as you sit down in a car seat.

Olfactory Compensation removes your awareness of constant odors.

There are hundreds more for each sense, and perhaps you might find them worth investigating as they can certainly distort the inputs before they get to your fuzz box.

I hope this information proves useful to you, Jim Tanenbaum, C.A.S. * Dear Jim,

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Thank you so much for taking the time to write. I'm overwhelmed actually with your generosity (and that of Prof. Franklin) in offering your thoughts on my project.

I am familiar with a good deal of your work, of course. I, myself have spent 20 years as a sound engineer in the live music and theatre business, and am now operating as a sound artist. This, coupled with a layman's interest in psychology, ecology, philosophy and whatnot, is what has led me to attempt this work.

You have given me food for thought here and I will get back to you, if it's of no inconvenience, with further questions...

I have never been keen on the analogy of a computer for the brain, it implies that every problem will be met with the same solution process. I much prefer the comparison with a planet, which I read somewhere once, I forget where, with its implication of unpredictable evolving ecological systems, variable according to the different climates affecting each, in different regions. My idea with 'Operation of a Complex Fuzzbox' is to follow this idea, that the processing of signal at the various inputs of a unit (human being) is dependent upon previous (and current) experience or "learning" which is unique to each unit. But I do not wish to imply that we are separate from nature, but rather we are interfacing with nature and turning out a distorted version. Interpretation, opinions and adaptations ... all ideas have come from nature, are output and fed-back in, redistorted. The Newton's apple story beautifully encapsulates this with an almost biblical simplicity nature literally bops him on the head and out pops this idea, this theory, this culture which we live with 300 years later.

I am extremely interested in this pre-processing that you mention, which suggests very clearly that nature's clean signal is filtered almost immediately, to keep things simple for us. This editing of the signal into something that can be passed on for deeper processing... I'd like to know more about this, if you can point me in the right direction. It ties in with what you say about reduction in the voice frequency range when speaking, which again, is absolutely fascinating. And the fact that it happens before speaking is very intriguing - perhaps this is linked to why sound seems to fade away when we are reading or concentrating; as thinking, or using the inner voice, could be read as being in an "about to speak" situation.

To use a filmic example, I am put in mind of Andrei Tarkovsky who said something like a completely naturalistic soundtrack would be an absolute cacophony as everything in the picture would have to have a sound associated with it. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on this.

My desire with 'Operation of a Complex Fuzzbox' is to draw attention to the neglected issue of our unique situation in nature, aiming perhaps to provoke thought in others, rather than provide any answers or great scientific analysis, as this is out of my league. The complete piece, in the form of a manual (I am looking for a graphic artist to work with), would not mention human beings at all, as such, but it should be obvious. The back-story is that I am selling the idea to an alien race, that human beings can be an object of fun for them, or a toy, turning nature into culture for their entertainment.... but there will be no mention of the aliens!

I have attached an essay that I wrote which outlines some of the ideas which have drawn me to attempting this work.

I would very much like to exchange ideas with you, and if you are able to occasionally shoot me an email, even if it is just a link or a thought, I'd be absolutely delighted to hear about it.

Many thanks once again, Clay.

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ILLUSTRATOR REQUIRED I'm looking for an experimental illustrator, collage artist, book designer or any interested visual artist to collaborate with me on a book project.

IDEA: Spoof operator's manual for A Fuzzbox as an analogy for The Human Mind or consciousness.

TEXT: Mostly complete but I am adaptable in the spirit of collaboration and wish to work closely with someone in order to develop the idea.

INSPIRATION: http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate/index.html http://www.haynes.co.uk/zombie/ (Haynes manuals generally) http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php http://www.forbeginnersbooks.com/ http://peteraschwanden.com/ClassicOriginals.html The Velvet Monkeywrench by John Muir Schematic drawing Marshall McLuhan I'll be adding to this list...

Please share amongst your artist friends, leave a comment, join, leave, make suggestions and recommendations and help me out if you can... This is a great project for somebody if they want to illustrate a book...

I NEED: you to email a proposal or some thoughts or an expression of interest to: claygold[at]post[dot]com or message me here on F/book and I'll get back to you.

THANK YOU!

“Much of this book concerns the limits of communication within and among individuals. Man is immersed in a world which he perceives through his sense organs. Information that he receives is coordinated through his brain and nervous system until, after the proper process of storage, collation, and selection, it emerges through effector organs, generally his muscles.

These in turn act on the external world, and also react on the central nervous system through receptor organs such as the end organs of kinaesthesia; and the information received by the kinaesthetic organs is combined with his already accumulated store of information to influence future action.�

Human_use_of_human_beings - Highlight on Page 43 | Added on Monday, June 03, 2013, 09:57 AM

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Clay Gold – Distortion 6 The piece requires two good quality full-range loudspeakers, a fuzzbox and a means with which to play the source material. This is a dual-mono, acousmatic piece, and each loudspeaker might feasibly be placed in a separate room, or they might be facing away from each other, depending upon the space. I can provide all the necessary equipment.

Sounds that are produced in nature are not necessarily perceived accurately by humans, and they are not always interpreted with any great precision either. Music provides a cultural analogy for this, in that different styles provoke different responses, or interpretations, from people.

Under pressure from the world with which we are interfacing all of the time, we primarily reveal spontaneous reactions to stimulus which we later develop into solid responses, which ultimately define us as individuals. The temptation to push information rapidly to its limits is strong when we are under duress. We may distort information and later feel obliged to retract the distortion; or, alternatively, persevere with it. The urge to be heard is stronger than the desire to be understood.

Nature, defined as 'The material world, especially as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities' (Dictionary.com, n.d) operates a system of connectivity, an ecology, a unity of operations which is consistent the world over. While according to Texas A&M University: 'Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion ‌ and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving' (tamu.edu, n.d).

Culture will be as utterly diverse as the historical or geographical references of the human beings contributing to it. If distortion is 'to twist out of a proper or natural relation of parts' or to 'misrepresent information' (thefreedictionary.com, n.d), then the mind distorts incoming signal at both the input and processing stages of the body before producing results via the output of the mouth or the body in the form of speaking, writing or signalling. Sound carries meaning, and meaning captures our attention. Language carries two meanings, those of content and tone, and is therefore doubly attention-grabbing.

In a sense, distortion is a series of assumptions made almost instantaneously about the environment. This could even be a further definition of Culture. The trait of manipulating truth or Nature into new information which benefits us temporarily is extremely useful and has been inherited successfully and will continue to be transmitted.

Culture

=

human distortion of Nature

By way of demonstrating this, the piece 'Distortion 6' requires that the left, or first loudspeaker will diffuse several clean, mono recordings of natural soundscapes, with no audible man-made sounds. In the right, or second loudspeaker, will be heard a simultaneous, distorted copy of the same recording.

Clay Gold, Canterbury 2013 claygold@post.com

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Clay Gold Clay Gold, from Canterbury, Kent, is a British sound recording artist with an interest in social cybernetics. In November 2013 his piece 'The Opposite of Wilderness' will be installed as part of GV Art's 'NOISE and whispers' sound art exhibition in Marylebone, London. In March 2011 Clay Gold's 5.1 piece - 'Airtight Orange Plastic Coffin' - a filmless Horror soundtrack, was presented in a completely dark cinema environment at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, as part of 'UNSOUND', a festival of experimental music and sound art. The piece continues to tour as part of ((audience2)) in the U.S. Clay Gold's multi-channel sound pieces use location recording, synthesis, Foley and worldizing as part of an exploration into actively suppressed and promoted opinion; or censorship and propaganda. www.claygold.co.uk claygold@post.com

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Symposium of Acoustic Ecology, November 8/9 2013

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“Bateson's understanding of the process of perception is basically phenomenological. Our senses assemble images or representations of the world, but we have no access to the formative processes themselves. What we have to deal with is the report, not the direct perception of objects, processes and mental “going on”. The reports are filtered through our presuppositions and through selective habits and assumptions formed from personal and cultural experience.”

Understanding Gregory Bateson p44 Distortion takes place in conscious mind, the seat of the formulation of opinion. Distortion is considered, designed, mulled over & ultimately output. This can happen in an instant and may be revised, refined; or it may be ruminated upon for weeks, months, years; but it never will occur from the subconscious, the seat of valuable truth and stored clear signal, which may never be output as it must first rise through consciousness, filtered, be processed in order to be enunciated.

Output.

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/subtext\ One

year

in

the

making,

/subtext\ began as a desire to present fragments of a subversive or banned text in the easy-going manner of a television commercial.

Having studied several quite criminal and offensive works of literature for the piece, I settled upon 'Steal This Book' by Abbie Hoffman, the sincere and often humorous 1971 handbook on how to become one of America's 10 most wanted, and to survive outside the law once you are there. In a breath the book endorses a shoot-to-kill policy targeting police, whilst describing how to become an adept at schoolboy pranks designed to cause severe indigestion for “those who sit at the tables of power.�

Using female voice text-to-speech software I cut Hoffman's words with Buddhist writing and a section from H.G. Wells' 'Mankind in the Making'. And, along with Foley, field recording, synthesis, piano and Worldizing, used it to carve a hypnotic 5.1 scenario, as though access to the Media were now the right of the revolutionary; as though capitalism were no longer the message.

Referencing 'THX 1138', '2001: A Space Odyssey' and 'A Clockwork Orange', the 5.1 radiophonic work /subtext\ disembowels ritualistic propaganda by documenting the subliminal rise and the eventual effortless crushing of a religion or a revolution.

Cl ay Gold 2013

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w w w. cl aygold. co.uk http://sound cloud. com/yourper c eptioni sdi storted

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Dear David Toop, Thanks again for agreeing to give this a listen. I really do appreciate your giving up time for this.

Without going too much into the thinking behind the piece, other than what you know already I would just like to add that, for me, the piece is like a burst of noise, like a gunshot perhaps, which has been 'stretched out' to reveal the information concealed within. Much like Kerouac's 'Visions of Cody' where the entire book is the spontaneous thoughts of the author on seeing his friend reflected for a second in a car bumper or fender. As Stockhausen has said, a Beethoven symphony speeded up into just one second becomes just a sound; a sound whose “inner life� has been composed by Beethoven. It's rather like unravelling the information contained in a strand of DNA. And one more thing, the only important aspect which you may miss by not listening to the 5.1 original is that the main narrative voice throughout is the only sound to occupy the centre front speaker, until towards the end of the piece when this voice descends into the sub-channel and the voices of the two technicians which you will hear, appear to replace it in the centre speaker.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Best regards, Pete Cudmore (Clay Gold) 'Subtext', presented in 5.1 at Lincoln University, March 2013

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PRETEXT/CONTEXT\SUBTEXT A Proposal for 'Counter Culture Commissions' at Oval House Who are you?

I am Clay Gold, a sound artist and sound designer from Canterbury. In 2011 a 5.1 audio piece of mine was presented in a dark cinema at the Walter Reade Theater in New York as part of 'UNSOUND', a festival of experimental music and sound art.

Electroacoustic music and location sound recording form the basis of my art.

I have 20 years experience as a live sound engineer in music and theatre, working in particular with the company 'Stomp' for 6 years. I spent a year between 2010/11 as a sound technician with Franco Dragone's Company in Macau.

What do you want to work on?

I am interested in combining live performance with acousmatic surround sound atmospheres. The piece will be designed to play with audience perception of what is performed, what is recorded and what is environmental sound, and to challenge conscious understanding of how and what information is retained by the brain.

For the piece I will be collaborating with the cellist/vocalist Laura Moody who combines those two instruments in physical and theatrical, as well as musical ways.

Ten years with The Elysian Quartet plus working with 'The Gogmagogs' and recently 'Without Warning' physical theatre companies, performing a broad spectrum of contemporary styles and compositions has left her with strong improvisational and experimental playing skills. Together we will be devising the piece outlined here.

A starting point for the construction of this piece is a feeling that our society is being distracted by information gathering, the fear that CCTV and social networks retrieve something from us, and ignoring the subliminal stream of information that is being poured continuously into our subconscious, especially through advertising and news reporting. Propaganda, or Public Relations as it was renamed by Edward Bernays, is defined in the opening sentence of his 1928 essay as 'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses', which he thought was essential in order for human beings to cooperate.

Hitler thought the same. He used radio; the subsidised Volksempfänger found its way into every German home, ensuring that his message was delivered personally through the media of music and literature as well as news and political announcement.

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I would like to explore this method from a counter-cultural perspective, by offering up subversive, banned or controversial literature, as spoken monologue, combined with recordings of sound to stimulate emotion in the audience and a live demonstration of something extraordinary that a human being is capable of; perhaps even adding something distracting for the audience to achieve during the performance like completing a form, giving away something of themselves...

The acousmatic phenomena cannot be engaged in dialogue. It is the voice of the terrorist who cannot be negotiated with, cannot be interrupted or diverted from its flow of demands.

'Counter-culture' defines cultural behaviour which visibly and actively stands in opposition to mainstream culture, as opposed to 'sub-culture' which operates underground, away from critical and disapproving eyes and ears. A counter-culture is an ephemeral creature, a party with figureheads but no recognised leadership, providing effective opposition to a mainstream culture. A large section of Abbie Hoffman's 'Steal This Book' deals with how to survive when counter-cultural activities become so subversive as to be a concern to the state and how to lower ones profile, become sub-cultural, to avoid arrest.

The human voice can bridge the divide between pitch and noise. It can harmonise, resonate and imitate. It can express many emotions. But the voice can only reach so low and rise so high in the frequency range; about 60-7000Hz. We would like to explore this as a metaphor for what is achievable by human beings in terms of counter-cultural activity.

What will it be like for an audience?

The audience for this performance will be treated to an original soundscape of machine noise, recordings of deserted and occupied public spaces, electronic atmospheres and speech, delivered in 4-channel immersive audio; a robotic (text-tospeech) female voice projected through railway station-type public address speakers, will relay the subversive commentary of Abbie Hoffman, one of the most interesting counter-cultural characters of the last 100 years, cut with Buddhist writings and a bit of philosophy. Among this will be a live performance featuring the cello and four octave vocal range of Laura Moody, one of contemporary performance's most exciting voices. The piece may also grow with development to include performers and other musicians.

The idea is to impress upon the audience a flow of subversive, philosophical and religious information (some of it detached from it's context and some repeated verbatim) in a gentle, unemotional, radiophonic manner with distractions and context provided by soundscape recordings and live human performance.

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Why do you want to make this piece?

Counter-cultural movements have influenced my work for some time, from the satire of Evelyn Waugh, to the beat and hippie writing of the fifties and sixties, Punk and books such as 'Ringolevio' by Emmett Grogan. Censorship intrigues me and I am keen to juxtapose the deadpan flow of information with text which is considered threatening to society in some respect.

As an artist, my interest in the human voice being symbolic of unrealised human potential will have a chance to breathe in the comparison between a subversive robot monotone and the 4 octave range of Laura Moody's vocal composition.

Tell us 3 influences on your work/ this piece Larry Wendt, a text-sound artist, uses the voice and soundscape recording in extraordinary and fascinating ways, even to the extent of applying effects to his own voice during lectures, building echoes and loops of his own speech as a backdrop to the presentation.

Karlheinz Stockhausen attended phonetics classes in order to better understand the combinations of sounds in the human voice and apply his findings to music, as he sought to smooth the flow of various electronic and concrete sounds, to let it roll like speech.

Julian Assange has said that there are three types of Information; that which is actively promoted and sustained in the public consciousness; that which simply comes and goes through a lack of interest or changes in fashion; and that which is actively suppressed because somebody does not wish it to be publicly accessible.

He is actively concerned with the third of these. We'd like to take a look at the first.

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'SUBTEXT' - Thoughts about Counter-Culture In death the robot voice begins to breathe. Some kind of harmony is achieved between Laura & the robot. An assimilation takes place.

As the robot voice moves into the sub speakers, Laura's voice moves up into the tannoy's and begins a mainstream tirade Buddha was like Candide, only he jumped into the real world & Candide was pushed.

Elements of an effective counter culture will be assimilated by mainstream culture until one immerses the other. A similar flow as politics.

Once organised it becomes a part of the society it wished to disrupt.

I think that despite the talk of guns & killing police officers & starting riots, what is or was most subversive abt hoffman's book are the schoolboy pranks - open a safety deposit box & deposit a dead fish - if caught say it's a family heirloom - or make prank phone calls to local govt officials spreading rumours - use your wits to get free food & theatre tickets even, this kind of direct action is achievable by most disgruntled or disillusioned members of society. Hoffman had no shame & was not afraid to look a fool in order to disrupt society. He's saying it's not an offence to be eccentric or stand up & behave differently or out of step with everyone else. He's teaching us how to nudge capitalist society where it hurts. And if u want to be more revolutionary... He can help u with that too.

The polar extremes of censorship & propaganda combining with a banned text relayed to an audience.

Achieve? Primarily a beautiful combination of acousmatic soundscape & performance composition.

Something for the audience to get lost in. A new aural location with an almost naggingly persistent commentary. Distractions. Total darkness at times. Laura coming in and out of focus somehow, with flickering light.

I want the audience to be aware that they have had a listening experience.

There's only so much you can do with your voice before you fall back on what is does best, express itself in words using a very narrow range of frequencies and metaphors.

It is in itself a counter culture exercise.

From the use of a false field sound environment, an out of date somehow but still subversive commentary, to Laura's almost anarchic use of the cello, a centuries old instrument; this opposes mainstream culture, by producing something stretched, and not reduced, this crosses boundaries of time, will have an element of nostalgia. Testing the subtlety of the short attention span.

Record a source from distance & close up & play back thru different speakers, the close sound very quiet & the ambient very loud. Disturb the perspective.

Or a delayed knock-on effect of artificial processing causing the source sound to increase in volume & ambience progressively, til a small sound becomes huge.

Achim Wollscheid - & social networks - connect exterior mic to interior speaker & interior mic to exterior speaker around front & sides of a house, sounds are digitally treated into tones & play "like a singing harmonica, environmental sounds turn into a musical melody." "creates a relay between the street & the living room... playing with the idea that "walls have ears." pp 251 background noise

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REPEAT AFTER ME

by Clay Gold

In a world of CCTV and phone hacking, social networking and pseudo-reality television, a subject of self-censorship emerges. A media which openly encourages a seemingly relentless and opportunistic urge for wholehearted self-expression within a society observing our every move and storing the information indefinitely. We put in to, but have no control over, the profiles being built about us.

REPEAT AFTER ME addresses the fear of being closely monitored and places it firmly within a context of public exhibitionism.

Four 'shotgun' style, directional microphones are concealed in upper corners around the installation space, sitting upright and pointing down in a poise reminiscent of the iconic CCTV camera. Four discrete speakers are positioned at various other points around the room, between the microphones, in a quadraphonic or surround sound format.

The microphones are connected to a hidden mixing desk. Their signal is delayed variously by a period of seconds and returned to the speakers, creating a subtle echo of the installation environment, a blurring of the acoustics of the space.

At the centre of the space stands a *Rock Star* microphone on a boom stand, lit by a single spotlight. This dynamic microphone is not as sensitive as the border microphones and visitors to the installation are encouraged to use it for any noise or statement, song, poem or manifesto they care to step into the spotlight and share. At first, after speaking into this microphone, nothing will appear to happen other than the continued echo and fade, the ebb and flow provided by the ambient microphones.

What actually occurs is that the up-close and personal sounds collected by the *Rock Star* microphone become part of a repeating loop of sonic events which never fade away and continue to be broadcast back through the speakers once every few minutes, ad infinitum.

A one-off outburst thus becomes a permanent, repeating reminder of what we were for a few seconds, and grows for the duration of the installation into an aural profile of the visitors totalling no more than 2 minutes in length, but looping indefinitely.

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A brief history of repetition.

Digital repetition is comforting, monotonous, reliable - analog: edgy, prone to mistakes and distortions Of course, Soren Kierkegaard is writing about analog repetition. He seeks it in the city and at the theatre. He's not aware of digital forms or even recorded sound or film, which is still around the corner and which will create the possibility of sound and image being played over and over. Of course the analog either deteriorates or improves; the analog repetition changes over time, is degradable, whereas the digital is consistent and modern and used to lull, confuse, intimidate or persuade. Analog repetition is used to introduce the idea of gradual change, deliberate or, more usually, otherwise. Analog Repetition, or sustain, produces a feeling of uneasy anticipation, tension, rather than a comfortable at-homeness.

It is analog repetition, or the repetitious nature of analogous events, which take a young couple forward and turns them into a family and an extended family, or it turns them against each other in the animosity of familiarity until the repetition is broken and a longer-form or older repetition regains control or retains a hold. A return to repetition. Digital repetition has no such results. Evolution is not digital. It cannot be. Digital repetition leads only to repetition, leads only to stultification through lack of progress or indeed through regression.

The journey to entropy.

But the way we experience digital repetition changes it, for we are aging...for the apparatus of apprehension changes, ages. Gradually, distortion occurs, not because the media deteriorates, but because the perceiver does.

Repetition need not be regular; it may be arbitrary.

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I know something of repetition, having just watched 80 performances of the same Pantomime in 6 weeks. The scene in the Panto which is devised perhaps to be the most random or anarchic; the least scripted scene, the scene most prey to unforeseen eventuality, turns out to be the least funny upon repeated viewing, it starts to appear choreographed or staged, carefully contrived in its attempt at appearing random.

Whereas the scripted sequences slide into a comfortable framework where chance occurrence is, if not actively sought, then leapt upon immediately when it reveals itself, and devoured hungrily. This is repetition as a means of creative development, to be so complete and comfortable with a sequence or process and yet be open or alert to possible disturbance in the field, to stir into the mix of repeated flavours.

This is against digital repetition which is closed, unswerving. Even within theatre that does not allow for extemporisation, that restricts the performers to a rigid format, there is potential for reality to creep into the fiction and the performers may respond symbolically, with gesture, and not swerve from their concrete script. This reality will more than likely arise from the audience, the half of the theatre that is apparently balanced between these two spaces.

1 for sorrow, 2 for joy.

Singularity, a mysterious event. Uncomfortable.

If it happens again we may consider it confirmed.

If it happens again & again & again it becomes established, natural even, permanent & comfortable.

1st experience of repetition? Mother's heartbeat? Mother's voice?

Life is good when we know what is coming next.

Chris Cutler spoke of recognising the same landmarks the 2nd time you make a journey, making the journey seem quicker.

Until you no longer have to pay attention to landmarks.

Erik Satie - important Routine - important

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The fear & the fact of being closely observed plus the urge & opportunity to express oneself wholeheartedly (equals a media that glorifies our bad behaviour?). Self censoring. About leaving an immediately accessible legacy. About listening, ignorance & inspiration. About background & foreground. About distance & detail.

Repercussions of What we say. Self-control.

Repetition. Modern Music & After by Paul Griffiths, 1995, 2002 Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Pp53 - 'Change does not happen simply because time is moving on; change is deliberately engineered & motivated.' maybe repetition is the natural state of things - evolution - with tiny mistakes occuring to create gradual change, momentum.

Repetitive music in computer games reaffirm your need to play. Same with music in shops, same songs etc.

In perfect repetition there is no necessity of choice, there is simply an array of clones laid out for our pacification. No effort is required, for our mind goes into... What?

Mode 'Soundscape', Wallflower, London 2003 - Use of repetition Carter Burwell composing for the Coen brothers on Blood Simple pp197 Viv Corringham on repeated use of a walked route leading to feelings of nostalgia – if something changes in the soundscape or is removed then leads to feelings of loss or dislocation. Connection between repetition and nostalgia?

“Free & unrepeating, it could speak of a hope for freedom, in a personless voice.”

Pp43 on Nono modern music & after Page 44 'the future is in our lacks, etc..repetition expresses the negative' - relate to space between the leaves from Castenada & framing of John Cage - alienation of Huxley – listen to the space and not the notes.

Page 87 on repetition - possessing the means of recording allows one to monitor noises, to maintain them, & to control their repetition within a determined code.

Karl Popper …

Every word has previously been uttered, but understanding is unique to each of us when filtered through our own real-time experience.

Recording the space between myself and the voice ...

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PRAGMATICS AND PARALLELISM Hey Tanya – thanks for being interested in this, I hope we can help each other out.

I'm working with Laura Moody, a cellist and singer: http://lauramoodymusic.com/index https://www.reverbnation.com/lauramoody She is a fantastic musician/performer with an interest in physical theatre.

We have been discussing a collaboration which is developing as follows: Currently called 'The Parallelist', the concept is evolving around the obsolete philosophical idea of parallelism, which very basically states that the human mind runs in parallel with the body and the two do not affect each other. The theory rests on the idea that what the mind knows of the outside world, it only knows through information gained by the senses.

This has since been proved wrong.

There is however an interesting analogy written by Karl Pearson (in 1892, which I can send you if you're interested) which makes the mind into a telephone exchange operator and the senses become callers to the operator. The operator lives only at the exchange and never leaves, thus all they know about the outside world is what they get through information from the callers, or subscribers.

We are basing the piece on this analogy – Laura's songs (not yet written) will form the role of the mind and I am creating a 'soundscape' which will represent the outside world.

The idea that I am working on is to have a jumble of old speakers around the place (I'm referencing this: http://www.sensitivebrigade.com/untitled.htm) (but maybe 8 or 10speakers, and maybe some radios and tape machines) which are all connected and playing bits of the soundscape which is mostly created from 1930's film static, broken and rewinding tape noise with bursts of answerphone messages. Occasionally something will burst through into Laura's world which she will interpret.

Laura's world we envisage as a soundproofed booth, without the expense of a soundproof booth! Something which plays with the division from my half of the piece, but is intimate and claustrophobic. Laura is using 1930's telephone exchange girls as a reference (see pictures attached and also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDStLml4mYA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOEOM4S6vgA ) We would also like to work with the idea that the audience are not seated but can walk around the piece like an installation – they can walk up to any speaker and listen and perhaps even walk into Laura's world (one at a time?). But maybe there are a few chairs around if they want to sit....

So the main points are: Two separate worlds Telephone exchange Soundscape 1930's It must be interesting enough that when people walk in they want to move around and have a look.

The two 'worlds' are happening simultaneously but the focus will shift

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I could go on and on, but I'll leave it there for now.

Let me know if you have any ideas and if you'd like to work on it.

We're also thinking about funding, and if we have to apply for it then this probably won't happen until next year. But we are definitely in development.

Thanks for reading!

I am working very specifically with old telephones now, rotary dial ones – there will be a few of these around (maybe 5 – to signify the traditional senses) which people will be able to pick up and hear different things. Hopefully the phones will be able to ring as well if I can work it out!

I want there to be a solitary rotary dial fixed to the wall somewhere near the entrance to the space which is irresistible to audience members and they have to spin it. When someone spins the dial its “whirr” will be heard in the space quite heavily amplified (magnified as it were) and will trigger a mini series of other sounds.

There will still be a collection of speakers scattered about with various parts of the soundscape being diffused. This will consist of static and communications related recordings of various qualities, mostly answerphone recordings, authentic and also recorded by actors probably.

We have a series of authentic answerphone recordings from one particular person, which Laura is using as source material for her songs – this is our connection (between mind and self) – this is the mind interpreting the outside world.

We still have the main dilemma which is: how to use the space most effectively and uphold the perception that Laura is detached from everything else in the space. She will probably have (aside from the cello – she must have sufficient space to play) a 1930's operator headset and various patchbay/communications equipment around her... Although we'd like to project the impression of constraint, restrictedness, claustrophobia and intimacy for her space, and the opposite (agoraphobic?) for the sound installation part, demonstrating the liberation of communication as opposed to Laura's insular experience of it! * The dials would be a very attractive way of making communication a tangible thing. I suddenly thought, when re-reading about the theme of parallelism, of the image of an old telephone (candlestick style) signifying a human body and its constraints of communication, and having someone taking a receiver from them in order to be able to hear them.

I've attached a list of practitioners we looked at for our recent production at college, some of the references might be very appropriate for the themes, sounds and the visuals of this.

Let me know if you want to know more about some of them, I still have some the books on loan.

This is all for now, but it will be on my mind and I'll surely be back in touch shortly with some more ideas.

Tx

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“Parallelism is a protest against the interactionist's tendency to materialize the mind.”

An Introduction to Philosophy (George Stuart Fullerton) “The philosopher is the man to whom is committed what is left when we have taken away what has been definitely established or is undergoing investigation according to approved scientific methods.

He is Lord of the Uncleared Ground, and may wander through it in his compassless, irresponsible way, never feeling that he is lost, for he has never had any definite bearings to lose.”

Peter Blegvad – doppelgangers 2 impulses in nature, cell division – centripetal (to unite or combine) and centrifugal (split apart) “Je est un autre.” - Rimbaud. “the world inside my head has always been a far richer place than the world outside it” - Alan Moore “I'm lost. This isn't where I'm meant to be.”

“You might very well be right. But this is where you are...This is where you gravitate towards.”

WITH A SMILE IN MY VOICE – I love this expression from the telephone exchange girls training in the American video.

I want to create a soundscape which begins with celluloid crackle including broken recordings and rewinding tapes (representing memory) with explosions of coherent answerphone messages (through a speaker which is in Laura's 'world') – the static may develop to include organic sounds of frying and fire, along with contact mic recordings of sand and a music will emerge using reverb here and there on single spikes of static, to give those atoms of time and space-representation a unique space of their own.

Atoms of space detached and set afloat.

The static also refers to the dated nature of the parallelist philosophy.

The static represents a fog which is momentarily cleared every time we hear Laura's voice. This references the early talking films of the 1930's where celluloid static rises to fill silences between dialogue, and ducks down to reveal the clarity of speech. This is before the introduction of Dolby sound which now allows for analysis, in the words of Michel Chion, giving greater space and a sense of importance to the voice. Room tone has replaced static as a means of framing the voice in cinema.

The voice as metaphor for the mind, separated, and yet emerging from, the body.

The fog represents lack of information but behaves in early film as an atmosphere, as it is silence unavoidably portrayed with sound, an off-white noise, it creates a different response in the mind of the listener to, for eg, digital silence. Static is now synonymous with nostalgia, but to the 1930's cinemagoer or gramophone listener, it was transparent. Music from a gramophone was described/sold as being like having the orchestra in the room (where is this quote from? I'll source it) But it's all crackle.

The reason for this is that the listener had no sense of high-fidelity … they listened through the artifact of the recording to the music itself; they were able to ignore the flawed medium.

The crackle was not apparent to those who had never experienced acousmatic music.

So, the static represents place, a space; but it also alludes to a time. Another duality.

I also want to play with detaching Laura's voice (sampling) and placing it in the real world of the

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soundscape, outside of the mindspace which she inhabits.

I see my part of the 'stage' as being full of old speakers, maybe 8 or 10, through which come the different sounds as I outlined above. Maybe some old tape reels etc. Laura's part quite enclosed and claustrophobic as we discussed, with maybe some exchange paraphernalia, an old looking mic There could be a visible, old-fashioned type of speaker in Laura's world through which she hears the clear rendered answerphone messages, as opposed to the garbled messages...

Like a foreign language this music of static and tape-play moves among the speakers onstage representing the many opportunities and definitions, multiplicities of information from the world until, a message pops up in Laura's single speaker, in her separate existence – clear, in our language, defined, interpretable. A message from the universe.

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there ” Karl Popper the self and its brain.

Laura, I think this character of the telephone exchange clerk is an interesting one for you to assume... what do you think? Alone in the exchange (the cello perhaps taking the role of the switchboard?) with the only information you gain being what each caller tends to share – you barely have time to engage because you are just there to receive information, but you have time to ponder upon what comes across the wire.

I think this would work nicely in a mono space, a single speaker, confining you; a very dry, unprocessed recording of voice and cello...

For my part, I could represent the system of wires between you and each caller, moving in sympathy with your acquisition, understanding, misunderstanding of information.

We could possibly have sounds from my speaker breaking into your speaker... perhaps leading to a complete amalgamation – this is not something I had thought would happen but it might be interesting to consider, as a conclusion.

Other things to consider are dualism and constant play of centripetal/centrifugal forces in nature, uniting and dividing, ying yang etc.

Most importantly, what the mind is in relation to the body and what is beyond that and whether any thoughts that a human being has in relation to this are actually valid, actually anything more than the simple responses of an insect or any other apparently conscious being – guesswork, or purely subjective opinion. Does the mind matter or does the mind purely analyse what the body is up to as the body goes about its evolutionary business?

Beginning to see myself in other people.

Beginning to lose myself.

It's almost as though I am living inside my self..

Artaud wanted to (but never did) put the audience in the middle of the 'spectacle' (his term for the play), so they would be 'engulfed and physically affected by it'. He referred to this layout as being like a 'vortex' - a constantly shifting shape - 'to be trapped and powerless'.

Repetition. Modern Music & After by Paul Griffiths, 1995, 2002 Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Pp53 - 'Change does not happen simply because time is moving on; change is deliberately engineered & motivated.' maybe repetition is the natural state of things - evolution - with tiny mistakes occurring to create gradual change, momentum.

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Inspiration from An Introduction to Philosophy (George Stuart Fullerton)

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"How elegant spoken language might be, how fluid, were it not for the containment of the phonetic alphabet and the prison of the written word."

Oh, to know the pre-literate inner monologue!

What did our ancestors think about before language?

There is a possibility. I sometimes experience a smell which I do not associate with any physical thing. It seems to be a memory, but I have no language associated with it. It is just a smell and a nameless emotion. * I rarely paid attention to the sound of my bathroom until I had to take the curtains down. Suddenly my bathroom was a naked, foreign space. Bigger, though visually the same as ever. I felt observed, under the microscope, whenever I was in there.

And then I got used to it. And when the curtains went back up, I didn't notice any change to the sonic space. * Replace the first letter of each word with a noise. * If there is such a thing as the collective unconscious, or genetic memory, it does not recall how it feels to be wrong. Several generations it took, to prove fully that the Sun was not in orbit around the Earth, for it had been a theory which suited humanity. Down to the ground. But, although human beings may know, they do not always believe. For on some level we do not feel it to be the case that we are not the centre of everything. And sometimes we believe, when we do not know. And it's confusing for us to be caught on the horns of this particular dilemma.

An Ames room is a distorted room, to create an optical illusion, invented by Adelbert Ames Jr, American ophthalmologist in 1934. “I was so shaken that I could barely cross the street. I was not sure that the oncoming cars were really where they seemed to be from moment to moment.� Gregory Bateson

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I am working on a new series of radiophonic pieces, currently living under the label 'Vocumentary' works, for want of something more original. I present a segment of recorded spoken word, from a speech or an outburst of some kind, from a real-world situation, and offer it up, un-analysed, in a journalistic style, with out-of-context repetitions and...

“4. Documentary, as we know it today, began with Nanook of The North , made by Robert Flaherty in 1922. In fact the word ‘documentary’ was invented by John Grierson to describe this film.

Nanook was the first feature length factual film and the first to use what Grierson described as ‘the creative interpretation of reality’ . This meant that Flaherty had staged most of the scenes for the camera in order to make the film more dramatic and exciting for the audience. ” I make – the creative distortion of reality “Pragmatics is an aspect of how language generates meaning - and as such, it falls under the 'umbrella' of semantics, which is the study of meaning. Semantics is often, simplistically, said to be the the study of surface 'sentence meaning' and pragmatics to be the study of the deeper, inferred 'social force' of language.

The clearest way we can communicate our ideas and thoughts is through language. To achieve this, the ideas and thoughts we want to communicate become 'encoded' either phonologically (by the sound of spoken words) or graphically (through marks on a handwritten or printed page). When this meaning is conveyed semantically, the encoded meaning - the words, phrases and sentences we create - can be easily de-coded without particular thought of the context. Sometimes, however, a deeper, inferred meaning is also encoded within language, and this creates a pragmatic force within the text. Thus, pragmatics operates whenever we write or say one thing semantically but mean to infer extra force to our text or utterance.“

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A Proposal for the Sound Wall – by Clay Gold I would like to propose a language-based, multi-channel sound installation piece, with the working title 'Overt Ambiguity', for the Sound Wall Residency opportunity at The Collection in Lincoln.

Inspired by the line “Every view you see has been seen differently by others”, taken from the archaeology-at-the-collection page of the museum website, I have attempted to apply this new way of seeing to language and the sense of hearing.

“Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said” (George Yule, 1996). This is not about body-language, but about contextual meaning, vocal delivery, inference and implication. This is the “invisible meaning” of the aforementioned seeing differently, or hearing beyond words.

I would like to use the research time at The Collection to unearth a text, preferably one which has an original sound recording already associated with it; a work of fiction or non-fiction, a speech or a monologue, or any relevant piece of writing or discourse, whether related somehow to an exhibit or period, or suggestive in some way of an appropriate time (the Horological collections) or space. The text would be something highly relevant to The Collection, and also to the local area.

The text would then be recorded in many different forms; read aloud by students and children, or members of the public in the street or at the museum; it could be recorded as a performance by actors, like a newscast for example, and turned into song by musicians and singers; it may be chanted, shouted or whispered...but using only the words of the original text and no others. Every effort would be taken to have the recordings made with local people. This could perhaps be workshopped with students if applicable and if there is some access to portable recording equipment.

The recordings would then all be edited, along with field recordings, sound effects (I'd love to record all those clocks and incorporate that into a section of the soundscape), and atmospheres (appropriate to the existing acoustic environment in the entrance hall), compiling a multi-channel radiophonic piece of work which operates like a magazine programme or a restricted-vocabulary conversation, enabling the listener to find new meaning in words from the way in which they are spoken, and diffused throughout the space.

Every word has previously been uttered, but understanding is unique to each of us when filtered through our own experience.

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'REPENT' by Clay Gold - a proposal for E.C.A.S. Network I would like to propose 'REPENT', a piece of multi-channel radiophonica by Clay Gold, a sound artist from Canterbury, England and featuring live performance

by Laura Moody, who explores the world of sounds and words with an eighteenth century cello and her four octave vocal range.

The source material and foundation for the piece, is a 90 second recording I made of a fierce, fundamental Christian preacher on the streets of New York. By deconstructing her “fire and brimstone�, in terms of language and symbolism, as well as the acoustic environment, we aim to re-present her evangelism, remove its context, and raise questions pertaining to truth, distortion and the communication of ideas.

Pragmatics is the study of how more is communicated than is said. I intend to take the preacher's words and re-record them as poetry, news reporting, political broadcast, song, fact and fiction. Using many different voice recordings, by men, women and children, some well-rehearsed, professional voice-over artists or actors, and others simply reading straight from the sheet, in the street, we will re-present these words, with no addition to their actual meaning other than that which can be read into the sound of each new voice that is repeating them.

Radio is the art of transmitting acoustic space. Its audience may be geographically dispersed, but they are united in their reception of a signal, a location.

I will take the voice recordings and play them back individually through a speaker in various acoustic spaces which are at odds with the character of each rendition, and rerecord them to be positioned as a part of the finished piece. What technology affects our understanding of language more than environment and architecture? A church or a cathedral is so designed as to present the words of a preacher as omnipresent. The

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atmosphere is conducive to silence, reflectiveness. But what happens when you repeat these words in the street, or in a police cell, on a train (where we do not expect to be preached to or entertained), or for a single listener, or for an audience at the theatre, (where entertainment is expected rather than evangelism)? By re-recording out-of-context voices and locations I will articulate a collection of locations and group them together to be diffused in a single performance space.

Performance is the art of transcending acoustic space. What work of art is more ubiquitous, or has more attention paid to it than the human voice? Laura Moody will present a live score to accompany the acousmatic piece, in the form of different styles of hymn or folk song, again using no more than the words from the original sound recording as her lyric. The piece will begin with Laura and, incorporating the various recordings and renditions, work back to the authentic original recording, presenting a series of acoustic spaces and interpretation of a single authentic, spontaneous text.

Clay Gold 2013

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A = Red B = Black C = Sun 4 D = Turquoise 5 E = Blue 8 F = Brown 3 G = Blue 2 H= Brown 1 I = Yellow 4 J = Magenta 8 K = Blue 5 L = Green 6 M = Magenta

N = Orange 1 O = Yellow 2 P = Green Q = Blue 3 R = Light Red S = Light Magenta T = Orange 3 U = Orange 4 V = Green 7 W = Blue 1 X = Gray 40% Y = Red 3 Z = Orange 2

0 = White 1 = Black 2 = Blue 3 = Green 4 = Light Red 5 = Orange 2 6 = Yellow 7 = Magenta 1 8 = Brown 2 9 = Blue 6

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TEXT: If you die without Jesus, to Hell you'll go. And in Hell you'll burn forever.

Don't let that happen.

Repent. Get right with God. Repent. Receive Jesus as your Saviour and do it now.

It's not party time. It's not Miller time.

But it's time for you to repent of your sin and receive Jesus into your heart.

Whether Jew or Gentile.

Whether black or white.

Whether male or female.

You need to repent of your sin and turn to Jesus.

Some people say “well at least I'm no drunkard.”

Thank God you're not. But you're still a sinner who needs to repent and believe in Jesus.

Others say “well, at least I take care of my family. At least I'm not on Welfare.”

Thank God you're not. But you're still a sinner who needs to repent and believe in Jesus.

In fact, Jesus said “Except you repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

The president will go to Hell as quick as the pimp, if he does not repent and receive Jesus as his Saviour.

The housewife will go to Hell as quick as the harlot, if she does not repent and receive Jesus as her Saviour.

The business man will go to Hell as quick as the drug dealer, if he does not repent and receive Jesus as his Saviour.

For what the Lord said to one he said to all.

Repent, and believe the Gospel.

We're urging you.

Repent. Believe in Jesus.

Don't go to Hell.

Go to Heaven. * Person Deixis Temporal Deixis Spatial Deixis Object Deixis

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'Distortion 1' by C l ay Gold 'Di stortion 1' is the first in a series of pieces which explore the idea that 'all history is the history of man', as Allen Wheelis puts it, and that, to quote Nietzsche, 'there are no facts, only interpretations.' All information is distorted, filtered by the mind.

In 2012, Rupert Murdoch was interviewed by the Leveson Inquiry.

The questions related to a period of 30 years. The QC used a method for the major part of the interview in which he would make a suggestion regarding some speculation, rumour or implication and ask for Murdoch's opinion of whether or not it was true, false, possibly true, may have happened, etc. Rupert Murdoch was essentially being asked to give an opinion of other people's opinions of himself. He was being asked to further distort a distortion.

What the Inquiry wanted to get at was whether Murdoch had used social pragmatics to manipulate a kind of courtship with several governments, to orchestrate a mutually beneficial situation. The analogy was made that this came about like a pirouette; that there were no negotiations, but rather an understanding was reached which meant that Murdoch and each successive Prime Minister would help one another. They looked after his business interests while he made their policies palatable for the public, via 'The Sun' newspaper.

I recorded all 10 hours of this interview and broke parts of it out into 180 samples, which I spread over the notes of two keyboards. I then composed the piece, orchestrating Murdoch's disconnected language as sound. A pirouette did eventually emerge.

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OPINION S U P E R HIGHWAY Information gained by witnesses to an actual event should be kept private since witness reports have proved to be unreliable or inconsistent.

Such is the finding of a leaked government report.

The report goes on to state that any information gained through the use of language, whether written or spoken, as opposed to actual experience, is to be disregarded by individuals.

Information of Human Origin is to be forthwith considered as Opinion, rather than Fact. From 'The Bible' to 'The Sun on Sunday', all accumulated information must be processed as Human Invention and not as Acquired Knowledge. This mass of Opinion is therefore to be considered not relevant to an individual's experience of life and must no longer be the focus of the Education System.

The government say that there is too much contradiction associated with what is essentially subjective Knowledge or Information, and that the accumulation of such Opinion needs to be reconsidered in such a way as to better benefit the individual and therefore society.

The Education System needs to be re-addressed to focus on Self-schooling.

The only information which should be processed as Factual is that which is witnessed with ones own eyes. Even then, it is said, the information gained by an eye-witness has become immediately contaminated by Human Thought and should not be further communicated to non eye-witnesses in case the details of the event have now become confused, unreliable and, therefore, potentially untrue.

“Truth is at the heart of this,” said a government spokesperson. And recommendations include a period of Social Silence, wherein, thought is to be harboured by individuals and a kind of Personal Knowledge developed to override the Opinion already acquired. This Personal Knowledge should not be shared, as it immediately becomes Opinion when it is converted into language, and may therefore prove incorrect.

The so-called 'Irrigation System' of Education, currently practised, will be replaced as part of Prime Minister Grey's 'Jigsaw Society' philosophy: “Each to his own mind and to each his place” where everybody believes what they see but knows not to believe anything that they read or hear. As PM Grey says, “a schooling that will leave our children with the same fundamental physical understanding of the world as each of his brothers and sisters around him. Lessons will be learned out in society and not within a classroom and certainly not from a book.”

The spokesperson went on to say that “Information is only concrete Fact up until the point when it reaches the Human Mind. From there it is filtered into something which began with Fact, but concludes in something which is Fact plus Prejudice and Opinion. Not to mention the editing and interpreting which happens by rote as each of us dissect and prioritise Opinion to suit our private purpose. Once released

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again as language, whether written or spoken, the Information is no longer Knowledge, but pure Speculation and dangerous, therefore, to our citizens.”

Prime Minister Grey issued the following statement: “For years we taught our kids about a god that was not there. For years, society believed that the Earth was flat, and then suddenly, that it was a globe. Now that we know neither of these to be the case, we are wondering 'What next? What is the next so-called Fact to be dismantled and withdrawn. There is no gravity? The moon is a machine?' It seems to me that we are feeding our children with Speculation, Tabloid Knowledge; Infopinion. What we have to realise is that we are all explorers and our Human Brain is at its best when problem-solving, and not so good when being shovelled full of data to process. By ignoring the opinion of others we are free to go into the world where we may all be adventurers and explorers and together formulate our own solid theories from experience. We are then free to keep that knowledge gained to ourselves, and act upon it, safe in our self-knowledge that our brothers and sisters around us have acquired the same basic information and that we all carry the same picture of the universe in our minds. A picture within which we are a tiny, but essential, well-fitted piece.

“It's time to forget the Irrigation System. It's no longer appropriate to drip-feed our History into the heart of our Future. It is time to step into the Present. The glorious Unknown Now. A new birth.”

“But some would say that with a new birth, comes a new parent. A new parent offers the infant a series of lessons-learned. Acquired Knowledge. Some would say we progress as a species by passing on the Information that we already have accumulated to the next generation...”

“And I would say that, in return, that system has tried and failed. Just because it is what we do, does not mean it is the best practice. We are moving at a snails pace.

One step forward, two steps back. Passing opinion down the line, retracting it, offering something else in place and then arguing about authenticity and authorship. And with population growth comes additional opinion. More false prophets. Misinformation and wrong moves. Forget what we think we know. Let the scientists keep their speculations to themselves. Let's all be scientists. Inherent knowledge first, followed by personally acquired, experiential knowledge.

“I'm not talking about burning books. Not yet. I'm talking about removing some of the Opinion from the internet, for example. Photographic evidence should remain.

Let's make the internet a Picture Gallery. Remove the Opinion. We'd still like to see what is happening in the rest of the world. We just don't want to have Our Opinion influenced by Your Opinion. The Human Brain is a filter and it should filter experience, not data.”

Anything that is worth knowing, may be demonstrated and need not be spoken or written. Knowledge may only be objective when gained by observation. " Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act. "

- Orwell

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Filmgruppe Chaos -

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collaboration

I began collaborating with Filmgruppe Chaos in March 2013. They are a co-operative of Super-8/projection enthusiasts, formed in the 1970's and based in Berlin. I contacted them after discovering their work on the net and we have now made 7 short films together.

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'Flutterm an' by Filmgruppe C h ao s and C l ay Gold The visual aspect of 'F lutterm an', the film itself, by Filmgruppe C h ao s , acted as the score for the soundtrack, and this is how it works for nearly all the films we have made together.

Before I began composing audio I watched the piece several times, making notes. What emerged was a film of human beings stretching themselves to achieve what nature does effortlessly, both physically and spiritually.

I made a collection of recordings, spoken quotations from various sources and media, which all related in some way to man's rising ambitions, and also, to some extent, the eventual mundane application of his achievements.

This, in turn, produced the idea of making a piece of music from a secular item, which could never be identified from simply listening to the finished piece.

I recorded and re-recorded the spoken words at various speeds and mapped them to images in the film. The source of the accompanying music is a curtain ring, something which enables another thing to hang and glide whilst doing little by itself, other than cling to a third object. The ring has been processed in several different ways but originally played a warm note when plucked.

The music of the ring makes a nice field for the chorus of quotation.

Clay Gold

M.V. : As a multimedia artist, you have cooperated with artists in film too. Tell us how your collaboration started with Filmgruppe Chaos. Is the sound also based on experimental, acoustic improvisation ?

CG: I got in touch with Chaos about a year ago, after discovering some of their work online. They are based in Berlin and have been operating for some 40 years. They eventually started sending me short films in February and I think the collaboration will continue until someone dies because we're all very happy with the results. My process is different for each film, but I always watch the piece in silence several times, without bias, like I would approach an improvisation, like listening to a space before recording in it. I listen to what is going on in my mind at first, get a feel for the rhythm of the images or a particular frequency range. Then I start to think about it conceptually and decide what sort of sounds I might use. There is one piece for instance, 'Zeitgeister', the footage of which was shot in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, it reminded me of an old recording I'd made many years before, in Brighton,

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UK, along the promenade, beside the sea; this recording contains a version of 'Everytime We Say Goodbye' which was being played in some bar, and the song drifts in and out as I am walking up and down. I used this, not just for the lyrical content but for the juxtapositions: the happy sound of the seaside with the melancholy song, sitting with the statue and stone of the cemetery. The piece also contains a recording of some children running across a bridge which I thought provided some nice “sonic imagery�, as a cemetery is one side of a bridge between life and death.

From an interview with composer Marina Vesic, which appeared in the September 2013 issue of 'The Arts'

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sportfilm Hi Clay, I got the sportfilm double projection on youtube now, as usual in poor technical quality. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FycTnpV94fQ Originally we have made this 2010 for an invitation of the Goethe Institute to the EXPO in Shanghai.

We were really pissed off with how the Goethe institute was treating us, so we didn't go to Shanghai.

2012 we have re-edited it to make it more interesting. But we didn't manage to do a screening that year.

Just recently we started to re-edit it again an filled in some more footage. Some cool local musicians want to play to it live.

I have to check the reason, why one is 2 min shorter than the orher. It could be a problem of the running speed of the old projectors.

Doing the telecine of the wall, I got some serious doubts about the total length. The footage itself is quite beautiful and convincing.

It is loaded up with cultural, political and sexual ideas and expressions. But it is not a feature film which tells a story. I am afraid this kind of a concept is good for a screening of 45 min and not much more, without boring the audience.

I believe version No.4 should be shortened 10 min. But I am afraid I will be able to cut out maximum 5 min with a bleeding heart. I really love the material (selected out of shitloads of sportfilms) and it is more than hard to get rid of some scenes.

I want your honest thoughts about the material and suggestions for the last re-edit. I will talk to the others of our group and the local musicians a well. Version #4 should be finished by mid january.

The major local Filmfestival showed interest in this project, so it might get its premiere in march 2014.

A few days ago the boss of the local film institution went in pension. He is a gtreat guy who always supported us. It was a big official event with a few hundred guests out of politics and the

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German film scene. 15 filmmakers made shortfilms for him and ours was one of the coolest. And we have made some projectioninstallation for this event, which was quite nice and well recieved.

All this is pretty good news. But all this doesn't solve the nagging financial problems.

We are doing ok though and alway have new projects in the pipeline. A new short with a soundtrack by a serbian musician: https://vimeo.com/81795034 By the way, if no.w.here has problems with rooms/venue, we could think about a collaboration with the Goethe Institute London (no.w.here could be the organizer of that).

Waiting for your thoughts on the sports material Karsten and regards from Martina Where to begin?

Firstly, the footage and the editing is beautiful. The piece evolves not just with a sense of childhood moving to adulthood (and still retaining a sense of the child in the adult), but also in a sense of collaboration and cooperation moving towards competition - the group and the individual. It gives me so many ideas. I have only spent 20 minutes looking through it as I am currently working full-time and in a rush this morning, so I cannot yet comment on edits, but it is inspirational. I have recently read a book about Auguste Rodin who was obssessed with the human body and natural movement in his sculptures - I was thinking about making a sound piece that paid tribute to his way of portraying human culture emerging from nature (such as in the piece 'Thought' where the original rock is still present, as the human head emerges) and I think this film might be the perfect opportunity!

I have also been studying repetition in recent years and the difference between natural repetition, analog repetition and digital repetition - this film made me consider the act of physical repetition in terms of exercising the body leading to a gradual improvement, which is like evolution and analog repetition where small changes take place, despite a constant repeating of the same information - different of course to digital repetition where no development occurs, no change.

I think this could progress almost like a feature, with elements of dialogue, music, effects and Foley - repetition leading to an

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evolution - I could maybe find some text relating to something boring or monotonous, something relating to a dull human existence, to challenge the view of physical human potentiality represented in the film...

I have to go, but I will write more. I very much want to work on this film!

Hello Martina!

Regards, Clay Karsten, I have also previously worked in dual mono, such as this: https:// soundcloud.com/yourperceptionisdistorted/distortion-2-collateral and I think that this method might be suitable for bits of this film, because of the split screen, but not all the way through as it could be a bit tiring for an audience.

I think that rather than "feature" treatment as I mentioned, the approach would be more like experimental documentary, using all the expected sound elements to present something which discusses or alludes to ideas of human repetition, evolution, survival, culture from nature, etc ... I'll start pulling material together for it and hope I can do justice to your amazing work. You obviously care very much for the work so I hope we can make it exceptional.

Do you think you can get me a version where the two sides match in time? Do you want me to incorporate any sounds from you? You mentioned a band, would that be an alternative soundtrack or should I use it?

Cheers, Clay Hey Clay, thanks for your response.

I have to give you some more infos about the technical side to this project. Of course there is some concept behind the editing, but both rolls of film were handled individually. This also is a dual mono project in its own way. (Collateral Happiness - That's great. It works so well with these unmixed mono tracks!) In our case the images on both sides seem to comment each other, but all this is out of coincidence and not planned, as it would be with editing the 2 images on a computer.

As I said, it is analogue technology and the projections are made with old projectors. This means a perfect sychronity is impossible. The speed of both may vary over such a long time so there is no guarantee that you always have the some match of the right and left image. Also the ending might not be exactly at he same moment as on the master video you are doing the soundtrack

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to. We can vary the speed a little by hand by swithing the filmspeed from 24 frames per sec to 18f/s to make sure that both projections end the same time or close to it. It would be approprate if you follow the rough idea and mood on what's happening on the left or right screen and don't work exacly scene to scene. Then it would create new sound-image interaction out of coincidence.

As I understood your comments, you wouldn't suggest to shorten the material. You may be right, with sounds, that really give the whole thing an extra level and some deeper meaning, it might work for one hour.

But I still intend to cut out something like 5 min. This would make the whole thing better and tighter. It might fuck up some brilliant left-right coherences, but it will create interesting new ones. And there is another very simple technical reason: We only have 3 of these XXL spools for 60 min of film. So one pickup-reel is smaller than the amount of film. It still works somehow, but I see it to be too dodgy for a live situation with an audience.

You were asking about the German musicians alternative soundtrack.

This led us to the idea to possibly bring a DVD out, where you can switch between the German and the British interpretion in sound of these images. I guess, it would be best if both sides don't know what the other is doing.

Karsten

The film, which will ultimately be presented as a 45-60 minute dual projection work with accompanying 5.1 sound, offers me an opportunity to explore a number of my interests in one piece; these are: repetition, dual mono & other multi-channel formats, distortion, nature vs culture, human behaviour & social cybernetics, language (specifically pragmatics), dvd commentary tracks, the sculptures of Auguste Rodin and experimental documentary.

Simply put, the imagery in the film depicts various sporting activities, mostly in the form of athletics and gymnastics. I'm not sure about the origins of the black and white footage but it appears to be documentary film stock, probably from the 1950's and 60's, which begins with a group of schoolchildren, all dressed identically in white t-shirt and shorts performing repetitive physical education exercises in some kind of synchronisation, in a natural setting, presumably a country school or holiday camp, probably in Germany. As the film progresses the edit leads us gradually into giant sports arenas, of the same era, with adult athletes

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competing individually for reward, prestige and the eager attentions of an audience. This at once appealed to me; the youthful collaboration, the fun of repetitious exercise, or any activity, for young children, distorted into the perceived contentious individualism of adulthood - the striving to prove oneself strong and worthwhile in the herd - the development of play and the body into something both heroic and also grotesque.

The approach I intend to take is radiophonic documentary, something that will stand up on its own but is designed to attend these visual images. The sound cannot be synchronous as the piece will eventually be presented with dual analogue projectors, so even the combinations of images will not be the same as I am working to, although my finished piece will be in digital video format. I intend to present a documentary, the subject of which will be metaphorical, comparing issues such as evolution, with information, and how they develop or decay through analog repetition. I will have voice-over artists providing a narrative and sections where the voice-overs fade and are replaced by the artists discussing the process or approach to the recording of the voice-over, as on a DVD commentary. I will also record the film-makers discussing the edit, etc. The film sound will begin as though authentic, turn into a documentary about the film and proceed as a retrospective take on the making of a documentary about a film. Within this I will include sections of pragmatic works (the study of how more is said with language than is actually present in the specific definitions of words) by this I mean I will include sections which repeat words already heard, spoken in different ways and by different people. Or indeed sung or performed as well as straight or authentic.

Long form repetition, as in returning to a gag or a metaphor in a different context much later, and double entendre will also play a part, as well as short or fast repetition, such as that which is utilised in minimalist music works. All the usual documentary sound spaces will be represented (music, voice-over, field recording, etc) but they will often be presented in a surreal, Dada-esque way, distorting reality or distorting distortions.

Auguste Rodin said that "Nothing should be copied except nature." Many of his sculptures left part of the original stone unmarked, thus a perfect human head emerges from rock in the work Thought, as a tribute to Nature, the original artist and the original inspiration to human

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artists. I have been thinking about the possibility of creating a sound work which emulates, or at least pays tribute to this method, and I hope that the centrepiece of my work on this film will provide opportunity to make that happen. Rodin was obsessed with movement in human beings and made hundreds of observational studies of models moving and contorting until he found the position he wanted to sculpt and he then made the model hold that pose. I have an interest in language and information and I hope to work in a similar way, studying flows of words and holding onto positions which appeal to me, not necessarily for rhythmic reasons such as in Steve Reich's early tape work, but for the meaning or the double meaning, or for new meaning created in combination with the imagery. The way in which meaning is also created by different combinations of images within the dual projection format.

This occurs to me in watching children collaborate, practising together in order that they may eventually separate into competing individuals.

Influence: Arthur Lipsett was a documentary editor with the National Film Board of Canada in the late 1950's to mid 1960's. He was also a creative sound-collage artist. In 1960 he created a piece assembling discarded documentary sound edits and applying some of his own recordings in a montage. His superiors at the Film Board encouraged this personal creativity at the time and he was urged to add visual imagery to his sound piece. He did so, using the same method, that of utilising found footage and the result was titled 'Very Nice, Very Nice'. It's a deeply influential piece of work with a narrative which skips between the visual and the audio information creating wonderful combinations, phrases and metaphors and is an interesting document of the changing decade without using direct opinion or influence. It's a bunch of audio clips and film footage found on the edit room floor which is put together in such a way as to tell a story.

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The Future Born and the Undead We are slaves to the so-called dead.

We live in their houses, eating their food. We follow the paths they forged in space, going where the dead decided, only faster, for fear they flog us.

We go by their design, following ideas the so-called dead divulged; pursue, we do, assuming that they knew what they were doing when they wrestled nature for the future.

We live according to laws and persevere in politics, devised and then adhered to, by the dead.

We succumb to their diseases and binge upon their remedies. We read their poetry and stories to our children as they lie awake in bed, learning how to fear the dead. We talk full-throat, mouths open as they made us, in tongues they gave us, giving voice to speculation they contended, made contagious.

The dead inject their ideology, directly to our memory, they force themselves upon our logical capacity, making certain that we know for them alone it's immortality.

We are slaves to the so-called dead, faithful to the tribes they formed, fearful of the translocation.

We spend their money and carry out their last requests obligingly.

We obey their gods unthinkingly, un-heroically, until such time as they divine to call for us to stay behind, observe the bonding torrent eager to be chained in line, and guilty, up we rise, relieved of flesh, mass, responsibility and time, we go ahead. And die.

We are slaves. To the so-called dead.

And masters are we of the unborn, gods in chains are we, breathing and breeding, a twinkle in your father's eye, how I made your mother cry, to life, determine as we do, consistency and constitution, almost thoughtlessly we write the guides they'll love and learn, we'll lead them and leave them to the mortal yarn.

Cut loose and spoon-fed, gods are we to the future born and the undead.

Clay Gold 2013 - poem written for Filmgruppe Chaos short film 'Death a-Go-Go'

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THE FUTURE BORN AND THE UNDEAD (2) I was lucky enough to be one of 1.5 billion people chosen to take part in the Flow program of 2668. I returned to the Old Earth to spend the majority of my life understanding, and cleaning up, what my distant ancestors had created, developed and deserted over the several thousand years they had fully inhabited the place. This was the planet that had given birth to my species and provided my forebears with an environment in which to evolve from near-nothing to possessing the technical ability to uproot a population of more than 15 billion, and scatter to four other worlds. This was the planet that mankind literally deserted in order to continue multiplying at extraordinary rates. Ironically, although they were not morally prepared to sterilise the people 900 years ago, we members of Flow were now sterilised for our return. I suppose now it seems less barbaric, more, it would seem...essential? We, the people, are now approaching 50 billion and we will rip past that milestone without pausing to celebrate. We are looking now, and always have been, for further homes, planets to inhabit, as we have been very successful with the four 'New Earths' Air, Fire, Stone and Clay. It's getting serious, however, hence Flow Back To Earth...

And this is all I know. I have been told that life was very different pre-2055 when the Flow program began, in the opposite direction.

1st 2068 2nd 2118 3rd 2168 In 2168 Flow's Director at the time returned to Earth and made a statement: I am not here to fulfil a prophecy, I am here to make one. If we don't give up religion, patriotism and tribalism, the human race is doomed to disappear.

There probably was a man named Jesus, he certainly had an enormous impact on a small, but crucially literate group of people in a mostly illiterate society, some 2.5 thousand years ago. There was probably a Mohammed and a Gautama Buddha who had similar influence at a time when writers needed something to write about.

Religion had a purpose in illiterate society: to prevent chaos. The people were thankful to have a belief, to believe that God provided food, justified their politics and guided them with reward and punishment with regard to good and bad deeds in life. Their imaginations allowed them to progress in the dark. They were in the dark and religion was a light. Their searching minds were granted an answer. Enough now.

We live in the light. Religion has no place for scientific, literate, technological man.

We know now that it is our actions which affect our environment. We have ruined a planet finding that out. Now is the time to move on. This planet is shrinking. In a million years we will have given this planet up to the creatures of the sea. The whales will be the most intelligent species on Earth and they will be bound to the planet like

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prisoners as they are bound to the sea. Science has answered all of our questions.

After years of searching we have to now believe that we are the most intelligent life in the universe. The most technological. We do not have the right to waste that. We have to run with that, take it forward. We are a flow of human beings, unrolling like an endless carpet across the universe. There are 15 more human beings in the universe every second, and rising. Our knowledge is passed on as new human beings mix with the old generations...this is a great and beautiful part of our progress, a gift, but it is also a hindrance... we pass on false information as well as the truth. We pass on speculation and opinion, as well as fact. It's time for that to end. We need to progress faster. We are not progressing as fast as we are destroying. It is time for every generation to begin on the same page. Knowledge is paramount to the future of the human race. Religion, patriotism and tribalism must leave us now. We have noone in the universe to fight with. We have no enemy, no predator. We are killing each other without purpose, just to see which religion, which philosophy, which belief or political doctrine is the victor. Which tribe is stronger. Well, what happens next?

When we have one strong tribe and a lot of reluctant slaves. Conquering by force does not alter opinions, it simply inflicts new opinion on the conquered. That's not good enough. That leaves gates open for revolution, for civil uprising. That does not make for a united humanity. Enough. We are moving on.

We are starting a programme, a Flow Away From The Earth. This will begin as a voluntary process and eventually via selection committee. We begin with single mothers with one child below the age of one year. We need volunteers who fit that demographic. We proceed with any boy under the age of 14 who is prepared to volunteer to leave Earth and live and be educated in a new system on planet Air. The children will be taught a new system of knowledge, science-based. Fact-based.

The system will not include any history, except for the history of the Flow movement.

Education will be planet Air-based. The history of Earth will be stored and not forgotten. It will just not be taught, at first. A new history will emerge. The new generation will be encouraged to express themselves, their creativity, in any way that they wish. We would like to study the creativity that emerges in human beings with no dominant culture. With no influence. We will see what evolves. But all children will be taught to be scientists, because scientists are what is needed. If some do not appear to have the innate ability, then their abilities, such as they are, will be assimilated without judgement, but there will be no tolerance for belief which cannot be supported by scientific evidence. There will be no patriotism, there will be no tribes. There will be a single goal, a single species. And there will be no God. There will be humanity, moving in the universe. And this will be the future. Or there will be no future at all. *

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PUSH PAUSE Dear Adbusters, I am a sound recording artist based in the UK. I am currently preparing a Crowdfunder pitch to raise £25,000,000 to produce an anti-advertising advertising campaign. Yes, that's 25 million pounds.

The idea is to consider using the money to position advertisements in the prime time TV schedule that use very simple imagery and sound, to advise viewers to 'raise their head above the water', take a deep breath of air and to think. Like a simple public information broadcast.

The Crowdfunder system demands that the pitch incorporate incentives or rewards for its backers. I intend to offer the reward of participation in the creative process to everyone that backs the project, increasing in scale according to the size of the donation.

To position a 30 second commercial costs between £8000 and £250,000 in the UK, depending on the time that it goes to air, plus the cost of making the ad, for which I intend to use student filmmakers. The idea is of course to make a very minimalist advertisement which would impact most dramatically with its use of silence and blank, or mono-colour screen, followed by simple words spoken slowly, suggesting ways to counter the repetitious flow of seductive imagery that is pumped daily into the homes of millions of people.

But, ultimately the content of the piece will come from discussion with the backers.

Of course I am not certain of raising £25M, but my foremost objective is an attempt at raising discourse around this issue and to draw media attention to the problem.

I am hoping that Adbusters will be interested in supporting this project and I welcome any advice or promotion that you can offer. I am just at the start of putting together the pitch and I would ideally like to 'go live' with it next week, assuming I do not get any negative responses from the Crowdfunder site itself.

I very much look forward to having you support me in this venture.

Many thanks, Clay Gold claygold@post.com www.claygold.co.uk

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Push Pause.

I'm Clay Gold and I'm an artist who works with sound.

I lived abroad for about 8 years, in several different countries. I mostly didn't understand the languages. I didn't watch a lot of TV – the programmes appeared to be poorly acted with cheap-looking scenery and low production values. And I didn't understand them so there seemed no point. Until the football! Football matches around the world are presented on TV like blockbuster movies, because they are heavily backed by advertising companies. They have way more money ploughed into them than a risky soap or drama. They are moments of real life, actually happening before your eyes and often attract large viewing figures around the world. So they are given great build-up, tension mounts before the game, a whole lot of adverts appear. The first half of the game is followed by an orgy of advertising, and at the end of the game we are reminded to keep drinking beer until the next match.

Actually football now seems to be sponsored by betting companies and the adverts in between are mostly for payday loans and credit cards...

Returning to the UK a couple of years ago I saw that TV is terrible here too.

Bad acting, bad scenery, poor productions, chummy presenters. Until, the adverts... which are louder, brighter, more concise, better filmed, better acted...

And why is this?

Adverts appear to offer us a subliminal glimpse of what we are missing in life as we are slumped in front of the telly. Family values, down the pub with our mates, being sporty, being witty and charming, having sex, socialising...

Adverts present all the aspects of being human, in miniature, so that part of our brain is satisfied – we return to the repetitive storylines or the carefully selected news items feeling that we have had fun, run a marathon, visited our parents, joined a club and seen a hot girl take a shower.

Advertising dominates our culture.

And of course, advertising is not just revealing the potential of being human to us. If that was the case, we would only need to use it once or twice and we'd be out visiting family, drinking heavily but remaining sober and charming; we'd be doing extreme sports and smelling amazing...No. Advertising associates all of these life-affirming human potentials with products. Instead of doing these things, we can just buy these products, and it will amount to the same thing.

Because at the end of the day what matters is how you feel in your mind and if you can feel just as good from buying a product as you can from making the effort to get up and go do something... it's all good.

But of course, this is a short term fix, isn't it? We start to feel guilty about not being an active part of human society. We start to realise that we shouldn't have bought all the stuff that sits in the cupboard and doesn't get used...We start to think we have to do something about this...

But then the next day, those adverts are there again, when we are most vulnerable, tired in front of the TV, not paying attention. And they are there when we go out. In the shop, at work, on the internet. Everywhere, we are being reminded that buying a product will buy us the same satisfaction that we would get from playing with our kids.

Advertising reflects what is truly important about our lives, but fools us into thinking that products are essential in supporting that.

It is not the appeal of advertising, but the solution offered that is false.

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Companies spend millions and millions of pounds to keep up this façade. Day in and day out, every day since the first commercial TV broadcast, these messages have been in our homes. At first they were truly packed with information about the quality of a product. Now they just mess with our minds presenting stories and cryptic dream imagery. All they appear to say is “remember our brand because we care about you.”

Advertising is a thin layer between us and genuine living experiences. Because, honestly, who on their deathbed is going to value their possessions over their experiences? Only a consumer who has been completely consumed by the mythmakers.

In association with the website Kickstarter.com I will be trying to raise money to buy advertising space during prime-time commercial UK TV, in order to place a PAUSE; A PAUSE in the flood of advertising messages.

I wish to place a silence, or simple-sounding single message to encourage viewers to 'raise their head above the water' and breathe again. And it's going to cost 25 million pounds.

A 30 second commercial costs between £8000 and £250,000, depending on the time that it goes to air, plus the cost of making the ad. I want to make a minimalist advertisement which would impact most dramatically with its use of silence and blank screen, and I'm offering funders the opportunity to help me make it.

The amount of funding I am asking for is shocking and it won't buy us much time.

It should act as a wake-up to the amount of money that is spent daily to sustain this flow of messages into our homes. I hope to raise awareness and to question the deeper motives behind advertising and our role as consumers within that.

I intend to offer funders the opportunity to become deeply involved in the campaign at various levels, including decisions on the creation of the PUSH PAUSE commercial. We need to counter the repetitious flow of seductive imagery.

We need a break from the ad-break.

Beneath the surface of this daily reminder to spend ourselves poor to make the rich even richer, is the real humanity, the caring society that advertisers seduce us with whilst offering the false solution of their products.

And don't worry, it's OK to like football. Advertisers like it for the same reason we do, it's a bunch of sporty, successful men competing with one another for massive rewards. And it's real life, it's actually happening right before our eyes.

* happy – accumulation of commodities exhaustion of planet control in our heads compete with the stories of the media capitalism has to repeat its message day after day, in our homes, and unless it does that it will all fall apart.

It's unnatural. The capitalist system has to remind us every day to play the game, to do our bit. But below the surface of that is something more human and compassionate and connected.

Held down by the relentless propaganda system. Sut Jhally Media was Developed as a delivery system to advertisers. To deliver Us to Advertisers.

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Captive audience – cinema Art, sport, bidding for corporate sponsorship The outrageous inventiveness of where ads are placed all that is solid melts into air the immense collection of commodities - Marx the amount of Stuff defines capitalism consumption is central – to convert production back into money to make the dead world of things come alive with human possibilities – Marx make things as important to ppl as ppl are unrivalled in the amount of resources invested in advertising TV is made to draw your attention to ads – me we don't know who discovered water but we know that it wasn't a fish – Marshall McLuhan culture – stories about itself, about good and evil, etc. advertising dominates culture ask what are the values of advertising - - what stories does it tell us Happiness. Things will make us happy. The fetishism of commodities – Marx Why do we need to make the economy grow? More stuff will make us more happy..wrong.

Images of family, adventure excitement, linked to products advertising is a window on what really matters, but gives the illusion that the glue which links us to those prized human achievements, is stuff.

Not the appeal but the answers, which are false addicts will do anything – we ignore what is done to produce the stuff we desire dynamic- democratic socialism or barbarism – the two possible futures offered by Marx Step 1 is to stop believing that you are not influenced by advertising Look how much they spend. You are influenced by advertising and it's making you addicted to the accumulation of Stuff Step 2 is to allow yourself to have your own thoughts about what you want or don't want in your life Step 3 is to “pull the syringe out of your arm”. We can help with that by introducing Stop Consuming, Start Thinking.

Raise your head.

The rich are getting rich and the poor are getting further into debt.

Sports programs are sponsored by betting corporations, and every advertisement between the ads for the betting company are ads for loans and credit cards.

Think about what is being advertised to you as you watch your favourite shows. Do not just absorb.

We need to get out of the slide into The idea is to use the money to position advertisements in the prime time schedule, preferably the first of the break, that use very simple imagery and sound to advise viewers to 'raise their head above the water', take a deep breath of air and think. Like a simple public information broadcast.

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A 30 second commercial costs between £8000 and £250,000, depending on the time that it goes to air, plus the cost of making the ad, for which I intend to use student film-makers. The idea is of course to make a very minimalist advertisement which would impact most dramatically with its use of silence and blank screen, followed by simple words spoken slowly, suggesting ways to counter the repetitious flow of seductive imagery.

We must stop comparing ourselves to celebrities. We must stop living beyond our means for the sake of jealousy or ambition. We must be who we are and not be persuaded otherwise.

The companies that try to persuade us with advertising are the same companies that financially support all political parties in their efforts to get elected. The politicians are indebted to these companies and will not help us out of this hole. We can only help ourselves. to consider perhaps the enormous pile of Stuff that we have each created; Stuff which remains unused, discarded, broken, unnecessary... a waste of money...

We must stop comparing ourselves to celebrities. We must stop living beyond our means for the sake of jealousy or ambition. We must be who we are and not be persuaded otherwise.

The only thing that Dove are committed to is making you feel good about their brand. Advertisers spend millions on reconstructing what the majority of people already feel into a Hollywood production to make us connect with them. They are using what you already know to make you care about them. ...the only way you can appreciate what Dove are trying to do here is if you appreciate that they want you to buy their soap! They are not trying to offer you a new way of thinking, they are trying to connect with how you already feel and make you think that they put your own thoughts into words more beautifully than you ever could, so you feel good about their company. They do it to men too, only it's easier to do it to men... you know what I'm talking about. It's funny, if they came to your door with this BS I bet they wouldn't get 10 seconds of your time; yet they splash it on TV and everyone's talking about it.

Let me put it this way – and then I'll shut up - and I know I sound like a nut – but by talking about issues that are raised in advertising, (and don't you think that there are enough issues to be talked about in real life?) you are playing into the hands of the capitalist system; you are justifying the use of advertising as having a role to play in society. Dove probably decided a very long time ago that there are a bunch of minority and/or majority groups that don't buy their products, so they don't advertise to them. Why should they? This really isn't a social experiment, it's a bunch of actors telling a story, to play with our emotions and promote their brand. I can't tell you how many millions this campaign has cost, but I'm sure you can imagine. You think they do that to raise social issues? The government don't even do that to raise social issues. The best thing we can do with any advert, any advert at all, is to question what it wants, privately, and then completely ignore it. And it will go away.

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"They have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air - or of the money to buy it - even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless they had the money to pay for it."

Robert Tressel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

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Advertising dominates our culture.

Advertising reflects what is truly important about our lives, but fools us into thinking that products are essential in supporting that.

It is not the appeal of advertising, but the solution offered that is false.

We need to stop believing that we are not influenced by

advertising.

Companies spend millions and millions of pounds on advertising and then dare to suggest that their campaigns have no influence on children or the vulnerable.

There is a discrepancy there.

We need to stop allowing advertising into our homes.

We need to allow ourselves to have our own thoughts about what we our lives.

We should use the internet to investigate the companies that regularly supporting. We are so heavily addicted to the system consistently ignore some of the inhumane activities used to produce these goods.

want in we are that we some of

We should stop borrowing money to buy 'Stuff'.

We need to stop mindlessly consuming.

The companies that try to persuade us with advertising are the same companies that financially support governments. The politicians are indebted to these companies and will not help us out of this hole. We can only help ourselves.

I am raising money to buy advertising space during prime-time commercial UK TV, in order to place a PAUSE; A PAUSE in the flood of advertising messages.

I wish to place a silence, or simple-sounding single message to encourage viewers to 'raise their head above the water' and breathe again.

Below the surface of this daily reminder to spend ourselves poor to make the rich even richer, is the real humanity, the caring society that advertisers seduce us with whilst offering the false solution of their products.

A 30 second commercial costs between ÂŁ8000 and ÂŁ250,000, depending on the time that it goes to air, plus the cost of making the ad, for which I intend to use student film-makers. The idea is of course to make a very minimalist advertisement which would impact most dramatically with its use of silence and blank screen, followed by simple words spoken slowly, suggesting ways to counter the repetitious flow of seductive imagery.

The amount of funding I am asking for is shocking and offers a wake-up to the amount of money that is spent daily to sustain the flow of messages into our homes. I hope to raise awareness and to question the deeper motives behind advertising and our role as consumers within that.

I intend to offer funders the opportunity to become deeply involved in the campaign at various levels, including decisions on the creation of the PUSH PAUSE commercial. *

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Dear Stephanie Rowe, Please excuse me for contacting you in this manner.

I have a query which relates to my research into television advertising.

My question is: Approximately how much would it cost to purchase all of the available advertising space on ITV for one week, and is this theoretically possible or not? Is there a rule that could prevent this from happening?

I apologise if you are not the right person to ask about this and I wonder if you might forward me an appropriate name and email address if it's relevant.

Many thanks for your time, Clay Gold Hello Clay, Unfortunately, I am not the right person to answer this question and I am not sure of the relevant person to pass your query onto.

Sorry I can't be of more help, Stephanie Stephanie Rowe Commercial Research Assistant | stephanie.rowe@itv.com | 0207 156 6727 ITV Network Centre | 200 Gray's Inn Road | London | WC1X 8HF

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TELEPHONES & TYPEWRITERS McLuhan: “The telephone … is like the typewriter that fuses the functions of composition and publication.”

“The telephone demands complete participation, unlike the written and printed page. Any literate man resents such a heavy demand for his total attention, because he has long been accustomed to fragmentary attention.

“Why should the phone create an intense feeling of loneliness? Why should we feel compelled to answer a ringing public phone when we know the call cannot concern us? Why does a phone ringing on the stage create instant tension? Why is that tension so very much less for an unanswered phone in a movie scene? The answer to all of these questions is simply that the phone is a participant form that demands a partner, with all the intensity of electric polarity. It simply will not act as a background instrument like radio.”

“The mouthpiece of the telephone was a direct outgrowth of a prolonged attempt beginning in the seventeenth century to mimic human physiology by mechanical means. It is very much in the nature of the electric telephone, therefore, that it has such natural congruity with the organic. On the advice of a Boston surgeon, Dr. C. J. Blake, the receiver of the phone was directly modeled on the bone and diaphragm structure of the human ear.”

“An army needs more typewriters than medium and light artillery pieces, even in the field, suggesting that the typewriter now fuses the functions of the pen and sword.”

“The poet or novelist now composes on the typewriter. The typewriter fuses composition and publication.”

Understanding Media – Marshall McLuhan

I am making a series of sculptures using the classic 1960's rotary dial handset shape.

Telephone Sculpture 1 will consist of 4 handsets linked in a square, ear to mouthpiece. This represents the enclosed loop of information which is humankind – devising, accumulating, spreading – never to leave the loop or be understood by any other living being. Inspired by the Ouroboros ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail, referencing cyclical systems, re-creation, circularity and returning. First seen in Ancient Egypt the symbol has been interpreted by Carl Jung as being significant in relating to the human psyche.

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The other sculptures, all single handsets, will be defined by various protuberances at both the ear and mouthpiece. For example:

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These sculptures all relate back to the original idea behind 'The Opposite of Wilderness' and other works of mine: that gossip, opinion and reaction is actively encouraged in contemporary society, to the extent that we feel comfortable offering up information about ourselves; information which is then taken and sold on to advertisers, who wish to sell products back to us. We are “happy” to give away the information necessary for manufacturers to target us with their products.

At the same time, we are being whispered to. Advertising is everywhere, and we assimilate its message.

Organizational or Systematic silence (“the collective sense-making dynamic that can create the shared perception that speaking up is unwise.” Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison and Frances J. Milliken quoted in 'Storytelling' by Christian Salmon, Verso 2010, Paris 2007) in factories and in the workplace in general, encouraged by the British (stiff upper lip, mum's the word, say no more) from the army days, imperial days; supplemented with gossip, behind closed doors, in private, which is eventually (now) encouraged, to replace the silence in order to better understand and therefore control the people.

Social Media gossip is openly used to manipulate.

The fear & the fact of being closely observed plus the urge & opportunity to express oneself wholeheartedly (equals a media that glorifies our bad behaviour?). Self censoring. About leaving an immediately accessible legacy. About listening, ignorance & inspiration. About background & foreground. About distance & detail. Repercussions of What we say. Selfcontrol.

In a world of cctv & phone hacking, social networks & reali-tainment, we are heavily encouraged to express ourselves wholeheartedly in public & yet, should we overstep the boundaries of what is currently acceptable for our opinions to be, we risk media persecution or even legal prosecution for our ideas. We are encouraged to display, then we are judged, ignored or praised.

In our online social networking we may find our close friends, family, colleagues, friends of friends, employers all having access to the same set of information, our history, our thoughts, our interests. In the real world we usually wear a mask for each of our relationships. Online, the temptation is to release our secrets to everyone in some kind of misconceived bulk confessional. And yet we are fearful of privacy settings & who owns the information. Still we go ahead & offer it up.

We are now self-censoring on a global scale. Social networking can bring down governments.

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Above: Telephone experiments Below: Prop for 'The Parallelist'

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Listen first to the environment.

I'm going to ask you to hum a comfortable tone at a level which means you can still hear the environment. I want you to start humming and try and hold the note you hit. Don't let anyone around influence you with their note. Hold your own. Breathe comfortably. Don't hold the note too long. Don't get out of breath. Breathe in again and hum.

Focus on the hum. Don't think. Don't analyse. Ignore the voice in you head.

This isn't a meditation.

It's a common belief these days that human beings are apes, descended from chimplike creatures. I'm not saying that this is or is not the case. We choose what to believe. Not so long ago it was common for human beings to believe the Earth to be flat. We choose and we are also led in what we believe. We are susceptible to imagination, opinion, conviction, and also persuasion.

But if we are apes, then there was a time when we had no language. Our ancestors had no words, no complexity. Life was hard. But it was simple. Imagine now ‌ try to think like an ape, a chimpanzee. A primate. They have no spoken, thinking language that we know of. Forget words. Listen to the sound in the room only and think with pictures or with emotional drive. There is no inner dialogue. And if there is, it is a dialogue only of necessity and desire. Of wants and needs. There is no critical thought. There is only this moment and its relationship to your survival in this environment.

Raise the pitch of your hum by a semi-tone. In a moment I will ask you to block your ears.

While you hum, imagine thought without language. This will bring you much closer to nature. There are no longer any nouns in your thinking. Nothing has a name. No one has a name. There are just things and people, and emotional or physical responses.

Now block your ears and hum.

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From 'Neuroarthistory' by Professor John Onians, Yale University Press 2007 Man is "doing nothing by nature except crying." Pliny the Elder pp31 "only fifty per cent of our brain is formed at birth...As a result we are indeed likely to be more individualised." pp32 "by looking at a shape or object we activate neural networks which become progressively reinforced the more we repeat the activity. Often such reinforcement then strengthens our inclination to look for such an object even when we are only presented with a random configuration, such as a cloud." pp36 "earliest Paleolithic art was indeed suggested by markings and reliefs on the walls of caves." pp43 "the making of the sculpture begins with a chance recognition of a resemblance and leads only to the maker feeling pleasure." pp43 "his study is not of words but of the phenomena they describe." pp66 on Edmund Burke "The roots of genius lie in nature." pp81 "one has to devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality....Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love." Marx. Also - criticise the conceptual systems of priests, philosophers, lawyers by attending to the way things really are pp85 "consciousness takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one" pp86 plus pp87 Read Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy, Marx "It is literally true that looking with attention stimulates the growth of neurons involved on a particular perceptual act, while looking without attention may allow connections that have formed by earlier exposure to die back." pp89 "steamboat lines and train routes" pp93 grew around the world like the paths forged by neurons through the body to the brain (my words) Walter Pater

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Hippolyte Taine "analogy between natural history and human history." pp99 "unity is nothing more than a harmony and an effect." pp100 Taine - De l'intelligence 1870 Reason, intelligence and will are literary metaphors. Pp99 The products of the human spirit, like those of live nature, can only be explained by their milieu. Pp101 Taine is looking for an equivalent system in the field of culture.

Montesquieu 's original argument that culture was strongly influenced by climate and terrain...pp101/2 "It is the physical structure of the land that has left on the intelligence of the race the imprint that we find in its works and in its history...The eye grasps effortlessly the shapes of objects and takes from them a clear image." pp103

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2 + 2 = 4 is a way of describing a physical phenomena, making it abstract and transferable among people, it may be demonstrated on the fingers, with arms and legs and anything found on the ground. By producing a problem 2 + 2 and offering the solution "green", we provide a distorted conundrum which needs deliberate and lateral thought in order to extract meaning. “1 + 3 = green� may be rationalised by thinking that 1 is equal to blue and 3 is equal to yellow, for example, but 2 + 2? For a pair of exact items to equal green we need to know first what is half of green. We stop blandly accepting and begin to be frustrated by language and the problems presented. This can lead to annoyance, we are conditioned to read the formula as nonsense, but it is ultimately liberating and offers the brain an opportunity to explore unknown areas of cognition.

Dadaism and surrealism attempt to highlight the broadly accepted "truisms" of human life, by distorting the distortions, ridiculing bland acceptance of symbolic language description.

Everything sensed has symbolic weight and emotional significance. If you are alert to your natural self, if you are sensitive, you will feel meaning in everything that disturbs your interface. Combinations of sensations vibrating in your vicinity, transcribed by neurons and interpreted according to your unique agenda, your personal history, reveal new choices, new pathways based upon emotion and response. Input and output.

Everything to do with human culture seems more important than it is. This is because of the huge populations now found in societies around the world. Small cultural steps are magnified by millions and appear to carry more weight in the world than is actually the case. *