3 LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN Aural Contract : The Freedom of Speech Itself
12 / insert ROSS PARFITT Rewriting an excerpt from John C age’s ‘Composition as Process’ (1958)
13 darren tesar where you go i go too
16 RACHEL LOWTHER Where on earth is Freddy?
18 SARAH TRIPP on hearing my name
22 CAMeron DEAS In search of new models: deterritorialisation & reterritorialisation
Lawrence Abu Hamdan Aural Contract: The Freedom of Speech Itself Presentation for “The Aesthetics of Evidence,� programmed as part of the UN Human Rights Council 14th Session in Geneva, June 2010. The presentation I am giving today is about the use of sound as evidence. It comprises fragments from a wider research, titled Aural Contract, into the law and auditory practices - a research that addresses the voice as a principal means of legal operation and the politics of listening that are constructed by the judicial process. Today I will be dealing with the judicial practices of listening that have implications for our human rights, particularly focusing on certain acts of listening that impinge upon our right to freedom of speech. I will highlight instances whereby we can see how the sonic disrupts certain visuallyinstilled conventions and how sound as an invisible, intangible medium has the capacity to implicate people in illicit activity in increasingly inconspicuous ways. A large part of my research into sound and the law so far
has been around the work of an independent forensic laboratory based in the United Kingdom called JP French Associates. JP French Associates specialize in the forensic analysis of speech, audio and language and work extensively in British, European and international law. They offer expert opinion on the authentication of recordings, speaker profiling, comparisons of language and the enhancement and interpretation of noisy recordings. The practice has been consulted on more than 5000 occasions, including several cases in the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. JP French Associates is one of the few laboratories of this kind in the world and understood to be a leader in the field of forensic audiology. Forensic Audiology Despite the prevalence of the
voice, speech, testimony, oaths and declarations throughout the history of law, the forensic practices of speech analysis and audiology are relatively new. In Britain the birth of what is now a well established, wide-reaching and ever expanding practice can be attributed to one piece of legislative reform passed by parliament in 1984, called the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. This piece of legislation marks an aesthetic shift in the production of evidence, and I shall devote the rest of this presentation to explaining
how this legislative act gave birth to the field of forensic audiology and in turn how this practice has developed widespread implications for the process of both criminal and international justice. Code E of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 states that from then on all police interviews are to be audio recorded and all police interview rooms should be equipped with audio recording machines. This legislation was seen as a solution to claims that the police were
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falsifying confessions and altering statements made during interviews. However, the significance of this legislation to the practice of forensic audiology was rather different, as this law had a direct impact on the capacity of speaker comparison and voice identification work, a dominant expertise of forensic audiology. This impact was due to the fact that, prior to the PACE act, if someone’s voice was suspected of being on a criminal recording - for example, a bugged telephone conversation in which they
were heard organizing an illicit act - then they were asked to go to the police station and give a voluntary voice sample. However, after the passing of the PACE act you gave a sample of your voice involuntarily. Whether you liked it or not, you were contributing to a growing police archive of voices that could at anytime be subject to investigation by forensic phoneticians and audiologists. The paradox of the PACE act, then, is that it is seemingly a governmental act to increase the transparency of the justice system, but in
doing so converts a previously voluntary act into a mandatory one and in turn provokes yet another program of investigation and surveillance. Today, sound as evidence and forensic audiology has vastly developed and is employed in three main ways: 1. the authentication of recordings; 2. the spatio-acoustic propagation of sound at crime scenes; 3. forensic speaker comparison and speaker profiling. Each of the facets of this work affect or have the capacity to affect the way we advocate human rights and conduct investigations into the violations of human rights. Yet I only have time to adequately discuss one example of forensic audiology with you today, namely the increasingly predominant application of forensic speech analyses in immigration law across the world. Listening in Defense of National Borders Since 2004 forensic speech analyses have been employed to help determine the validity of asylum claims and the
refugee status of thousands of people without travel and identity documents, particularly in Australia, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In these circumstances special interviews are arranged and recorded, between the immigration authorities and the asylum seeker. These interviews are often held in the mother tongue of the claimant, using an interpreter, but in some cases these interviews are held in English (which is especially the case in Germany). After the interview the recording of the voice of the claimant is analyzed by phoneticians, often in independent laboratories in the USA or Britain, who in turn contract the relevant regional phoneticians in order to assess whether the voice and accent correlate with the claim of national origin. The confidence in, and the increasing predominance of, this kind of investigation within immigration law is alarming, as the accuracy of this kind of work has been called into question by many forensic linguists, phoneticians and other practitioners all around the world. These forensic practitioners are de
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manding severe reforms to the techniques employed and raising concerns about the common errors that can often occur within such investigations. Diana Eades is one such practitioner in the field who expresses her concern in an essay on the subject.
dialogue. This shift in dialect will be unknowingly detrimental and used against their claims for refugee status. Further concern is expressed that these speech analyses ignore four essential factors as to the conditions of refugees:
Although linguists would generally agree with the notion that the way a person speaks can contain clues about their origin, linguists have raised concerns [...] about the ways in which such clues can form the basis of a government determination about the truth or falsity of nationality claims. (Eades 2005)
1.The porosity of phonetic borders - ignoring the idea that the way people talk does not correlate precisely with the layout of national borders. Phonetic features spill across the borders due to the fact that the phonetics of a culture predate the national boundaries.
Eades was one of the large group of forensic linguists who, in reaction to the increase in these sorts of investigations, wrote the Guidelines For The Use Of Language Analysis In Relation To Questions Of National Origin In Refugee Cases. I feel it is important to this presentation that I summarise the concerns raised in this set of guidelines. One of the most common problems raised in the guidelines is that, in the case of the use of an interpreter of similar but not exactly the same dialect (which is often the case), for greater comprehension the claimant might shift dialects closer to that of the interpreter with whom they are in
2. The constant migratory lifestyle of many refugees - the long time spent away from a place of origin often shows its effects upon the voice, diluting a once highly regional parlance. 3. The often bilingual or multilingual abilities of those claiming asylum ignoring the commonly understood notion that one language can borrow from the other. 4. The diffusion of linguistic and phonetic features during time spent in refugee camps, and furthermore how in such camps one may want to conceal the origin of one’s voice because of the continual fear
of persecution. Eades notes one particularly troubling instance in her essay, from New Zealand, in which the immigration authorities were trying to determine whether the claimant was a Hazara from Afghanistan seeking asylum, as he said, or in fact an “economic refugee” from Pakistan (because it is internationally recognized that the Hazara face persecution in Afghanistan but not Pakistan). The claim of asylum was rejected in this case on the grounds of a single pattern of enunciation, “a hard pronunciation of the consonant T” (Eades, 2005) on the word patata, a word spoken once during his 15-minute interview. This single phonetic feature was prominently used in the rejection of his refugee status on the grounds that this proved residence in Pakistan over Afghanistan. Here we see the juridical ear evading the speech and finding in the voice another type of testimony. This example demonstrates to us how audio investigation and speech analysis unfairly inscribes borders, geography and cultural history onto the voice. Moreover, in the division made between the voice and speech, these tests show us how this phonetic evidence starts
to testify against us, against our own testimonies (our speech). Both testimonies (phonetic and semantic) are spoken at once by the same person, and through a manifold and precise exercise of listening the law designates from which one the “truth” can be heard. These forensic speech analyses provide us with the necessity to redefine a fundamentally understood democratic right, the right to the freedom of speech. By impinging upon our rights to freedom of speech, these investigations force us to extend the concept, from only concerning the freedom to say words without censorship to also including the freedom of the sonic quality of the speech itself. A fundamental paradox emerges in these speech analyses, as the very means by which you can secure and advocate your political and legal interests (the voice and speech) is turned into the means through which you are subject to investigation. An act of entrapment occurs in these circumstances, whereby “giving your voice” can no longer be understood as part of the democratic process and the rights of its subjects, but instead a process that supplies evidence, which in turn
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supplants and tightens juridical control (as with the passing of the PACE act). It illuminates the problem that the law stipulates that we have the right to free speech and with the same hand dictates the conditions under which that speech will be heard. This demonstrates how the law operates through practices and technologies of listening that determine the conditions of testimony, and furthermore stipulate what is able to testify and what can be legally heard. Through thinking about the law sonically, and theorizing through the sonic and vocalic practices of law, we see a series of paradoxes emerge that contest and challenge the fundamental rhetoric of democratic ideology.
Photographs : Audio infrastructure of Room XXVI of the UN Human Rights council (through which this presentation was broadcast, translated and heard). Lawrence Abu Hamdan 2010
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n n i i i
o o o ot n ot n ot n t
n ne ne ne ne r ne r e r
o op op op p p p
b b e e e e e
s s s s s
t r u c t i o n at r u c t i o n at rt u t i o nn at n t d u t i o nn a n t d ur t i nn a t ur a t i nn n e t r a t i o n
darren tesar where you go i go too
They say cats consume thirty percent more energy than any other mammal when enacting a set of movements. This extra thirty percent is what we commonly see as their grace. The same could be said for the Foley Artist, who seeks to attain a certain type of grace when squeezing – with an incrementally perfect succession of pressure – a T-shirt crammed with Jell-O. The Jell-O in this instance is the muse used to evoke the light sound of scuttling made by Stephen Spielberg’s 1981 extraterrestrial creation E.T. Out of Jell-O, or, better yet, in Jell-O, the sound effect is found and, if successful, lost again through an effacement brought about by the consummate pairing between sound and image. His hands twist, knead, and jerk with an almost animalistic economy synchronized to the mute steps of a legless dwarf in a rubber suit waddling through a southern
Californian suburb. However, what we often confuse as grace in “catlike” reflexes is actually the absorbed state of tracking and hunting prey. Each paw is picked up, pushed forward, and laid back down in a perfectly fluid response to its target. Such a restrained motion indeed for an impetus ultimately abandoned to the turbulence of chance found within wilderness survival. Again, the Foley Artist is often up against a relatable type of contradiction. In the case of sound production, the movement and machinery utilized to invoke a desired sound can become evermore calculated and rationalized, whereas the inspirational object (in this case Jell-O) continually emerges arbitrarily. A gnawing potentiality opens up to a hyper-receptivity in the search for sound origins. This speculative nature develops into an “Aesthetics
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of Appearance”; transforming the sudden crinkle of a candy bar wrapper into the first weak crackling flames of a fire or the low octave squeal of a perspiring ass against a leather seat into the necessary partner of a heavy winter coat unzipping. It is nothing more than a place where the methodical restricts the infinite flow of the possible. This restriction, aided less by our imposition than the perceptual friction offered by objects, renders that haltingly vast reservoir into a finite and immediate moment to ponder. Furthermore, it is a moment that postulates a temporary name and reason for such a honed in adjustment to perception. It is in this – adjusting - that we have always rekindled a continued receptivity towards intimacy. Basically, anything can work and there are innumerable situations where anything did. Still, many of these sound effects have successfully slipped out of their
own generative origin and ended up simply being a blaster shot, a sound of a shattered kneecap, or a crack of manicured thunder. Forgotten are the chance encounters with stretching Slinkys, hammering frozen pork loins, or undulating sheets of aluminium. Maybe not forgotten, most likely never meant to be known in the first place. Unlike the confident presentation of jumble found in the sound art enjoyed by so many today, the Foley Artist restricts that transformative action to the windowless seclusion of Foley Rooms. Success is measured by the erasure of an explicit in praise of the hallucinatory association found between sound and image. Nevertheless, today’s fascination with watching “making of ” featurettes on DVDs or reading comprehensive production titbits around any film, via IMDB or Wikipedia, resurfaces these vivid auditory accidents, illuminating their way back into the scenes of our favourite
films. The curious aspect of this split impulse (to simultaneously consume the illusion and its production) is that any apparent incongruence does not necessarily result in the removal of intensity from the illusion. As this writing can testify, these revelations re-imbue the source material with an altogether different type of illusion. It would be going too far to use “making of ” featurettes as a metaphor for our consistent tangle between the scientific and the theological, but there is something wonderfully grey in their overlapping participation. If anything, such findings illuminate a tolerance towards the falsification of our fictions, their lack of any discernable lack, and our reflex to reify experience. The object is sound, yet the subject has been a musing on once hidden sound effects, which, due to an increased intake of documentary-related entertainment, are no longer
immune to being confronted by their visual origins. The particular displacement taken into consideration here is the waddling sound made by the famous creature, E.T. and how his familiar presence in our collective cultural memory is still volatile. The criteria of “alien” found within this little alien, now over thirty years old, is far from being emptied of mystery. It was only ten years ago that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg agreed to go back into the film and insert additional computer generated images. It was only four years ago that artist Miranda July hosted a user-created video on her website of a person re-enacting the final scenes of E.T. in some Brooklyn bathroom. It was only three months ago that I discovered the image of a T-shirt stuffed with Jell-O was responsible for E.T.’s shuffle. That fragment of information cut across my once stable understanding, providing just one more sustaining illusion.
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Someone shouts my name in the street, but it is not me they want The sequence of sounds my name makes is not easily confused with other words. Perhaps that’s as well or I’d often be looking up when I’m not wanted. In the street, I hear my name above the acceleration of the traffic and beyond the company of my thoughts. I probably wouldn’t notice another name over the din unless it belonged to someone I have strong feelings for. I don’t recognise the voice shouting, a part of me is suspicious, guarding against the male voice. He shouts my name as if he were standing across a river, each syllable lobbed up and over, landing uncertainly with the vague emotional frequency of a long distance phone call, where enunciation counts for more than intonation. This emphasis also implies that I’m in a daydream, as if the distance between us was not only geographical. On unexpectedly hearing my name I simultaneously respond to the pattern of sounds and the tonal range of the voice. Does one take precedence over the other? Perhaps any word shouted by someone I like would work as well as my name – ‘You!’ ‘She!’ My name is common; the commonest name for a girl in the year I was born, and as I turn to look behind me, in the direction of the shout, I have doubts that it’s me who’s wanted. If I were alone, in another city, somewhere I’m not known, my doubts would be amplified. If I heard my name called out in a foreign street I’d assume I wasn’t who was wanted but I’d turn around anyway, just to take a look at another person with my name. I turn to look over my shoulder. In the distance, I see a man in a yellow anorak with a dog and in the middle distance a woman looking back over her shoulder, also towards the man, repeating my backwards glance like an echo. The dog is also standing to attention. The street keeps moving around us. We are stationary. Now, I see that as well as the anorak the man wears walking boots and a rucksack; he looks like he often has to shout across rivers at friends. I don’t recognise the man. The other woman, on hearing her name and recognising the man, and perhaps also his dog, continues the rotation of her head with her shoulders completing it with her body and begins to walk in his direction, doing the thing I don’t do. Now, with her face turned completely away from me I continue to wait a moment for her to reach him, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sarah’s profile if she greets him with an embrace.
My name is called on a register There is nothing about the way I look that suggests my name. Rarely do my namesakes look like me, even in a superficial way. Were I the aberration, the character of the other faces that answer to my name would have some consistency but they don’t. I feel a strong affinity with my name: its cadence among other English words, its slow start and abrupt end, its asymmetry, its typographic form and its lineage, can this affection render my surface? In a room, with a group of strangers, a register is called. Any one of the women might share my name. We might all share one name. Will we all look up at once? Each name is pronounced as a question. The calling out of a register is an abbreviated demand for individual presence and attention. We are obviously here but we are required to stand apart from the group and listen independently, concentrating outwardly. In between the call and response the names hang for a moment, separate, ornamental. Some names go unclaimed creating an awkward pause. In this moment, any of us who have not already answered might be he or she, until the pause becomes definitive. On hearing my name I feel an obligation to collect it. Yes, it’s mine. This is in the split second before I speak. Then, as I speak, joining in with the call and response my utterance becomes bound to the name, a consecutive sound, part of a vocal pattern moving around the room. My utterance replaces my name, supersedes it, the yes takes over and draws attention to my mouth, my face, to the me that speaks my mind, to the me that is beyond a name. The name remains, but as a sign of personal history, and the voice charges ahead, only going back for a name if need be.
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I say my name over and over What is the aural equivalent of a mirror?
My name is mispronounced ardently.
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CAmeron deas In search of new models: deterritorialisation & reterritorialisation in music I. Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation Deterritorialisation is the act of taking any process or event and decoding it as a set of relations and values, decontextualised and autonomous from its source. You can deterritorialise anything, be it animal behaviour, chemical processes or mathematics - the possibilities are infinite. An excellent example of deterritorialisation is Olivier Messiaen’s use of birdsong, his act of transcribing birdsongs into sets of note values. Of course it is of little use to have these decontextualised relations and values only recorded - they must be reterritorialised elsewhere, they must create something new, they must be released. So why not release them sonorously? This is precisely what Messiaen did. Take one of his earliest pieces using birdsong, Le Merle Noir (1952), a piece for flute and piano accompaniment: here
the deterritorialised song of a blackbird is reterritorialised onto the flute. Deterritorialisation can be the starting point of a composition, of many compositions, but it is not the composition. It is a stage, a practice, in which one positively employs a source devoid of one’s own self as a means of discovering new musical forms - architectonic forms otherwise undiscovered, unemployed - to then be released into compositions; it is a means of escaping habitual composing. The potential discoveries are limitless. As Messiaen once declared in a lecture: “nature is the supreme resource!” There are no rules in musical deterritorialisation, no constraints; the composer
can deterritorialise anything and take from it as they choose, then they can reterritorialise it as they wish. Furthermore they can go on to take from the result as they wish: why not turn to the microscopic elements of a reterritorialisation and enlarge them, recycle them, use them for the basis of a new work? Reterritorialisations can be as simple or complex as a composer sees fit; it depends what one has chosen to deterritorialise and to what degree of precision and depth, but the concept is simple, anyone can do it. As Deleuze and Guattari state in relation to Paul Klee, “the artist opens up to the Cosmos in order to harness forces in a “work”... this work requires very simple, pure, almost childish means”.1 In many aspects indeterminacy is another strategy with
similar aspirations. Take Christian Wolff ’s admirable view of chance as “a way of discovering things...a heuristic device”. Or William Burroughs’ tape cut-up technique, destroying previous semantic coherence in a piece of recorded literature so as to attribute entirely new, unforeseen meanings: discovery. II. Olivier Messiaen Although Messiaen employed birdsong above any other territory, he acknowledged the significance of nature as a whole, as is made clear in his statement that a composer must be sensitive to the various “time-scales, superimposed on each other, which surround us: the endlessly long time of the 23
stars, the very long time of the mountains, the middling one of the human being, the short one of insects, the very short one of atoms”.2 Messiaen’s use of birdsong is at its most effective in Réveil des oiseaux (1953) and Chronochromie (1959-60). Although it is often said that these pieces are largely, if not entirely, made from natural material, this view is very shortsighted. Take Réveil des oiseaux, a piece based on a dawn chorus, compiled of 38 birdsongs from midnight to midday. In performance Réveil des oiseaux lasts about 20 minutes. Messiaen has transfigured the dawn chorus. However the actual relationships between the birds, the order of the ritual, is in many ways upheld, from the opening song of the nightingale through to the 38 part counterpoint at daybreak. Messiaen has thus deterritorialised the structure of the ritual and reterritorialised it in a different time-scale for a performative work. The individual songs are also adapted for performance. Messiaen transposes the songs down in octaves, uses ratios to augment the intervals inside the
songs and slows them down in order to make them performable. He even occasionally alters individual songs to his own musical language. A clear example of this is the nightingale in Réveil des oiseaux which is singing in Messiaen’s second mode of limited transposition, as compiled in his 1944 book La technique de mon langage musical (‘The technique of my musical language’). Through Messiaen’s deterritorialisation of the values and relations of birds in a dawn chorus, and his creative reterritorialisation as an orchestral work, he has effectuated new musical models, not least an entirely new approach to counterpoint. III. Iannis Xenakis While Messiaen found “a state of grace” in birdsong through his devotion to the Catholic faith and his wish to express the glory of God’s creation, Xenakis initially sought to express worldly sonic events, what he called
sonic phenomena, on a more abstract level and “separated from their political or moral context”.3 Contrary to Messiaen, Xenakis did not directly deterritorialise events as he heard them. Instead he saw events in relation to mathematics; he recognised the stochastic laws that sonic phenomena must follow: The collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as a totality, is a new sonic event. This mass event is articulated and forms a plastic mould of time, which itself follows aleatory and stochastic laws.4 It was from this perspective that he became interested in using theories of mathematics and physics to discover new sonic events; theories surrounding stochastic processes, set theory, game theory and numerous others. Xenakis deterritorialised theoretical laws rather than actual events, or perhaps rather the theoretical laws are already abstract
deterritorialisations of events - either way it is not important, it is the creative act of reterritorialising these sources that matters here. In one of Xenakis’ earliest pieces utilising such theories, Pithoprakta (1956), he employed Boltzmann’s Kinetic Gas Theory. The theory allowed Xenakis to generate numerous characteristic statistical values of gas molecule movement through varying temperatures and pressures, to be thereby reterritorialised on to 46 string instruments, each instrument analogous to the movement of a single gas molecule. Although the characteristic statistical values that Xenakis generated could in principle have been created by deterritorialising actualities like Messiaen’s birdsongs, in practice this was impossible. Unlike birds which we can all hear, which the ornithologist-musician can transcribe, there was no way to record the speeds of gas molecules. Thus Xenakis
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Previous pages: A graph plotting the hypothetical gas molecule movement used for Pithoprakta
had to implement theory, it had to remain hypothetical. Furthermore, Pithoprakta also employed Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers, a notion that if the same event is repeated a great number of times, the average outcome will be recognised, and as such, the aggregate of all the events can be viewed as the event. Pithoprakta is the event: the multitude of 46 autonomous string parts, performing from thousands of possible isolated sounds, is a new sonic event - a mass event. Through reterritorialising Boltzmann’s Kinetic Gas Theory with Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers, Xenakis sonically represents averages of gas molecule movement through varying temperatures and pressures, thereby discovering a new approach to constructing sound as masses and determining the mass movement, with principles established from natural
processes.
IV. Politics One of the earliest sound poems, F. T. Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1912), is a deterritorialisation of the sounds of a battle in the Balkan war, of guns and machinery, reterritorialised on solo voice. Zang Tumb Tumb also exemplifies the potential politicisation of a work, both in what one chooses to deterritorialise and through how one goes about reterritorialising it. Similarly, Catholicism was always at the centre of Messiaen’s music. In contrast, Xenakis was concerned with mathematics and physics, politically neutral sources, sonic events “separated from their political or moral context”. That he fully recognised this political potential is evident in one of his earliest sources of interest in sonic phenomena, a demonstration march: The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head
of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition, the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death.5 Reterritorialisation can preserve the religious or political context of the material that is its source, or it can attempt to move the material to a neutral setting where only the art is important. Whether one wishes to politicise their art is their choice and responsibility. I am promoting the method as a source of new musical models which anyone can grasp. It does not matter
that Marinetti used it almost a century ago, for it is inexhaustible. To reterritorialise Messiaen:
“Nature is the supreme resource!”
1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 337. 2 Almut Rößler, Contributions to the Spiritual Word of Olivier Messiaen trans. Barbara Dagg and Nancy Poland (Duisburg: Gilles & Francke, 1986), p. 40. 3 Iannis Xenakis, Formalized music: thought and mathematics in composition (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 1992), p. 9. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.
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Contributors LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN Born in Amman, the London based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work is chiefly concerned with the politics of listening and the relationship between sound and urbanity. Abu Hamdan has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including the ongoing Aural Contract project at the Showroom, Marches for Artangel Interaction, his co-curated exhibition Model Court at CCA Glasgow and The Aural Contract Audio Archive evenings, a touring platform for performance and collective listening that has been presented at sites including Space London, Delfina Foundation London, 98 Weeks Beirut and the Reanimation Library New York. In addition to this Abu Hamdan is an active facilitator of music and art events both as part of the group that inhabit and run the space at 113 Dalston Lane in London and the forthcoming Batroun Art Proposal in Lebanon, both of which are hubs of self-organized (DIY) musical and art practice. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
cameron deas Cameron Deas is a musician. He releases on his own label, Present Time Exercises. www.presenttimeexercises.com
rachel lowther Rachel Lowther is an artist based in Glasgow. She wants to stop hurtling toward death and make art for pure bloody pleasure, and make objects that are emissaries from another place, that might be hard, shiny, cruel, brightly-coloured or flimsy, ephemeral, pathetic, big, heavy, dead, obscene, dumb, sexless, rampantly aggressive, slow and full of love. She studied art at Chelsea College of Art, London, Staedelschule, Frankfurt aM. and Hunter College, NYC. Her favourite places to show her work have been Participant Inc, NYC, Thread Waxing Space, NYC, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and Maschenmode, Berlin.
ROSS parfitt When writing this piece Ross Parfitt was interested in simultaneity. Since writing it he has been interested in running, counting, light and lino. http://rossparfitt.wordpress.com
DARREN TESAR Darren Tesar (born 1984) is an American artist currently based in Glasgow. He was born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin and later received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 2008. He recently received his MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2010 and is currently a committee member for David Dale Gallery & Studios. Darren utilises indiscriminate materials, objects, and information taken from daily activity to explore concepts centred around heterogeneous cultural acceleration and the obsolescence therein.
SARAH TRIPP Sarah Tripp’s works include: Horse in a Mirror (Rong-Wrong), Being a character (Glasgow Project Room), The equivalent of snow is blossom (Transmission Gallery), Aide-mémoires (The Happy Hypocrite), Sim-po-zeum (The Glasgow Festival of Visual Art), Why I disappeared (Cove Park), Why I can’t eat at Asia Style (2HB), The labour you love (Notre Dame Centre), The inside of an ambulance (Fruitmarket Gallery), Why work?(Camden Arts Centre) and Anti-prophet (CCA, Glasgow).
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