Uncertainty at Temple Works Leeds

Uncertainty at Temple Works Leeds 22 June 2015

Uncertainty at Temple Works Leeds

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This book is a collection of images, video, writing and sound recordings by eleven participants who had spent a large part of Monday, 22nd June 2015, exploring “uncertainty� together at Temple Works, a former flax mill in Leeds, UK.

Front, back & above photo

by Edgar Gomez Cruz Designed by Yoko Akama & Dion Tuckwell

This workshop was facilitated by Tom Jackson and Yoko Akama. It was generously funded by Communities & Culture Network+ and supported by Design+Ethnography+Futures, RMIT University.

ISBN 978-0-9943330-2-5

Speculative Design Through Food workshop 2

Yoko Akama – An uncertain day at Temple Works

7-11

Simon Bowen – Trust, Action, and Openness

15-17

Rachel Clarke – Wandering arrivals

21-33

Edgar Gomez Cruz – On certain fear

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Oz Hardwick – Chase-Eject

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Oz Hardwick – Temporal Uncertainty

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Tom Jackson – Uncertainty workshop reflection

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Ann Light – The brightness of the black

53-55

Scott McLaughlin – Uncertain space

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Alex McLean & Erinma Ochu – Uncertainty

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Helen Thornton – Sensory ghosts and iterations

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Biography of participants

68-69 3

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Photo by Helen Thornham

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Photos by Yoko Akama

An uncertain day at Temple Works

By Yoko Akama The grey building, homage to an Egyptian temple, loomed around the corner. It had heavy, rain-pregnant clouds which, as if on cue, began to spit at Edgar and I as we walked up the steps of this former flax mill in the centre of Leeds, UK. The Director of the building, Susan Williams, greeted us and proudly gave a tour and introduction. Built by a prominent Victorian industrialist, John Marshall during 1936-1940, the façade of the building is modeled on the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Egypt, where flax originated from. The building is now better known for its innovative architecture, engineering the ‘largest room in the world’ where the main mill used to be, graced by large girded skylights. It is now called Temple Works, used as an arts and cultural space for residency, studio space, performance, exhibitions, events, festivals and workshops. Whilst the building is slowly being restored, large portions of the site are in need of major structural and cosmetic repair. This decay and precariousness made this a fertile place to explore uncertainty. Susan’s introduction around the 2acre site also included a lot of OH&S. We were instructed not to stand under, next to, or on top of specific parts of the building, and the crumbling, rusting, collapsing structure was visible to our unqualified eye.

As we entered the building, I felt like an archeologist when discovering a hallowed temple.

This cathedral worshipped gods of industry, progress and commerce. I can still feel its power - it resides in the heavy walls, the steel girders, broken glass and the volume of air. It speaks to us, through the paint that peels like sunburnt skin and the patchwork mold that decorates the brickwork. They have witnessed the mundane and the astonishing. If you tune out the distractions, you can hear their whispers.

The eleven participants are all researchers, gathered from near and far, who are curious about the theme of uncertainty. The theme is embellished by the facilitators of the day, Tom and myself, whose research interests and stories of our encounters of uncertainty are shared at the start. The group is here for six hours, and I suggest a rough road-map for the day – the idea of four moves – preparing, sensing, capturing and sharing uncertainty. In clusters of small groups, preparing involves murmurs of conversations. Some are brainstorming words on paper. The conversation in my group - Helen and I - circles around power. I hear evocative snippets in others; ‘giving over agency…’, ‘permission…’, ‘rehearsing to be open…’, ‘sensory is selective…’, ‘the sensing and action is coupled, not passive…’, ‘leave distractions behind…’. After sharing some of these thoughts, we are ready to step into uncertainty.

There was no plan for how to move into the stage of sensing uncertainty collectively or as individuals. No plan meant that anything was possible and the group was encouraged to move around the building, explore their encounters with uncertainty. The documentation in this booklet shares our experiences and encounters with uncertainty in creative, personal and visceral ways. It traces a wavering between two heightened poles of discomfort and excitement, trust and risk, real and imagined, dark and light.

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Ann entices the group with the idea of exploring an unknown space by forming a human chain.

Camaraderie develops spontaneously when we hold hands with strangers. I think its Alex, or is it Scott next to me? When the visual goes, other senses heighten. Discomfort turns into adventure, emboldened by each other’s touch, voices and closeness. I feel the uneven surfaces with my feet and notice a musty draft on my face.

Simon at the lead shouts out that there’s something above, so watch out.

Oh my god.

It seems massive and cavernous, and I imagine stalactites, bats and pools of dank water where eye-less amphibians dwell. Did Susan say there was a resident ghost?

Lights come on and it’s just a narrow, bricked corridor.

Rachel spots an empty Quakers packet on the floor.

There’s a look of relief on Tom’s winsome face.

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Photo by Oz Hardwick

As we mulled over the ‘sensing’ stage over lunch and talked about ways of ‘capturing’ uncertainty through our practices, it shifted to the more processual notion of tracing uncertainty. This insight enabled us to step away from the impossibility of capturing the unknown, towards marking uncertainty’s emergent nature in a generative way. This constituted a transition from a closed to an open way of addressing uncertainty as we all brought our practices to bear in creating these traces – audio recordings, acoustic performances, photographs, rubbing texture of walls, poetry and video making.

Oz, the beguiling poet, shares how time seemed to have disappeared, bringing us to being in the present moment, so rare to be totally focused. We have surrendered to the space and to each other through that experience. He randomly gives us sentences snipped from his note-taking. I receive three scribbled on a post-it.

Photos by Yoko Akama

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Back on with the hard hat as we place ourselves away from decapitating metal girders. Scott is poised like a statue with a possum-tail shotgun mic. I speak out into the domed glass ceilings, ‘You rely too much on the senseesssssssssss’. Erinma over the other side says, ‘There are ways you can have your hands devising your ways of going downnnnnn’. A chain-reaction of reverb words travels through my body. The building join in our chorus. Something releases in me - I am air and I am light - giddy with pleasure and wonderment of this shared moment. It’s bloody awesome.

10 Photo by Simon Bowen

Simon puts blindfolds on us and invites us to find the round chair. Helen and I are in silent fits of laughter as we watch Ann walk into a wall. Yet, our clumsy groping and stumbling turns into a graceful movement of light through Simon’s camera. They are indeed beautiful traces of uncertainty.

We finish the day, led by DJ Alex’s performance in a liminal space in-between two doors. It’s a popup nightclub. Creativity reigns when we open up to contingency and let the emergent flow through.

Who would’ve thought we could have this much fun.

Susan is a proud custodian of ‘extreme performances’ in this building, and we all now know why.

Ann and I spot the Temple Works rooftop through the window of our train heading for London. I smile remembering the story about the lawn-mowing sheep. I feel like we’ve been changed by this encounter with the building and each other, but I can’t quite put a finger on how…

Photo by Tom Jackson

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12 Photo by Simon Bowen

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Essaying the Fabpod workshop 14 Photo by Simon Bowen 14

Trust, Action, and Openness

by Simon Bowen Uncertainty. An uncertain place: once a flax mill, a self-contained industrial community with homes down below, a field up above, and the largest room in the world between; then headquarters and warehouse, the looms replaced with desks, the cloth with cardboard; forgotten, then reinvented as art space. An uncertain time: crumbling, halfway between one owner and another, its future in the balance, £4million just to stop the ceiling falling down.

Temple Mills is all of these things. Layers of meaning revealed as the paint peels and the rust bubbles. The building “perdures” (Ingold, 2013) – always and already on its way to becoming something else. But, although inspirational, these uncertainties of place and time are not those I reflect upon most from that day. Mine are more personal: uncertainties of self.

Eleven of us introduced our interests, experience, and expertise. I described myself as interaction designer, participatory designer, researcher, and photographer. And I am each of these things, but how would I contribute to this collective endeavour when my recent design and research has largely involved facilitating and studying others’ work, and my photography has tended to be done on my own time?

Photo by Yoko Akama

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I enjoyed contributing to morning discussions and (mis) leading some adventures, but the crunch came in the afternoon. How would I creatively respond? A moment of intense personal uncertainty followed by an idea – a potentiality if not a certainty.

We had sought out and explored uncertainty, been open to the sensations that unfolded. How could I use photography to evoke our fumbling in the dark? (Evoke not capture, given our earlier discussion of and dissatisfaction with this term. Further, I think of making not taking photographs as did photographer Ansell Adams, recognising the multiple adjustments made in camera, exposure and development – although I think there is more to this making than these technical variables).

We discussed traces as a more apposite term. So long-exposure photography became a means of visualising the literal traces left by an iPhone light placed in the back pockets of blindfolded volunteers finding their way across a room. Would it work? Technically? – The matter of a little trial and error whilst everybody was busy elsewhere. Evocatively? – Certainly for the five volunteers and those watching, the resulting images evoked the characteristics of their individual blindfolded journeys, and (I hope) the stuttering, probing, misdirecting sensations of uncertainty more generally.

Of course I was not alone in my uncertainty – everybody met at least one new person and encountered one new practice. But this meeting was fruitful (as these reflections attest), which makes me reflect on how we dealt with our uncertainties of self, and what this might say about creative collaboration more generally. My traces experiment offers an analogy of how I approached my personal uncertainty: the ‘blindfoldees’ trusted me (and others present), acted (walked, probed), and were open to the consequent experiences. Similarly, I placed my trust in my fellows, made photographs (and a rationale for their making), and was open to how others might use them (and I, their work).

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

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Photo by Oz Hardwick Top: photo by Oz Hardwick; Bottom: photo by Simon Bowen

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18 Photos by Erinma Ochu

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20 Photos by Rachel Clarke

Wandering arrivals

by Rachel Clarke Myself and Ann spent the first parts of the morning searching for a breakfast that was both going to be gluten free and satisfying for us, with the hope of a nice view in a city we didn’t really know.

We found somewhere to have a lovely breakfast by the canal. It took a bit of ingenuity to reach it, traversing locks and higgledy piggledy bridges.

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It was raining and windy once we left the cafÊ and wandered the streets with a damp printed map, trying to keep our phone map dry as we headed for an area of the city that still looked like a work in progress and pretty foreboding against the dark wet skies. We had both prepared for uncertainty in what ways we knew how. We’d had a look at the Temple Works website and the directions, we had brought our coats and jumpers to make sure we could stay warm and dry.

The building as we arrived did look like a temple, and a car park, but what was this place? It looked more like a masonic lodge than a flax mill and it was behind bars. We were greeted with a reassuring hug and introductions from Helen and we were ushered into the back of the building for warming teas and coffees.

22 Photos by Rachel Clarke

A series of followings The cold, the rain, the morning coffee, the breakfast juice and the second coffee at the workshop joined forces and conspired against my bladder. I asked Tom if I could go and he said he would take me as it was easy to get lost. Back out in the rain we headed for a door, which was locked and had to go the long way round, back out towards the front of the building and then through a series of long, twisty windy corridors of almost derelict rooms, through a board room and down stairs into the basement. To get back out I only had to head towards a set of doors next to the toilet and I would be back with the team again. I was glad I didn’t have to find my way back the long way round.

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24 Photo by Rachel Clarke

Photo by Yoko Akama

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Sue greeted us with hard hats and introductions and showed us areas of the building, highlighting the health and safety issues, peppering these with historical and engineering stories of the prior use of the building.

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Photos by Rachel Clarke

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28 Photos by Rachel Clarke

People were interested in some of the darker hidden parts of the site. We held hands and followed each other in moving towards the darkness, shuffling as our visual senses were diminished and the silhouette of Tom against the light, disappeared from our view.

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Myths of the Near Future workshop 30 Photos by Rachel Clarke 30

Material traces and layers The building was flaking and changing, its form and materials had started to embody the uncertainty of its own future. Ecologies of species, spiders, flies, birds and mould had moved in to share the space.

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32 Videos by Rachel Clarke

Photo by Simon Bowen, audio by Rachel Clarke

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Essaying the Fabpod workshop 34 Photo by Edgar Gomez Cruz 34

On certain fear

by Edgar Gomez Cruz Hello, my name is Edgar and I’m ornithophobic.

There, I said it. I should probably be writing about the relationship between uncertainty and responsibility. I should probably be writing about those moments of uncertainty while responsible for the organisation of this event, hosting someone who had travelled thousands of kilometres to come to Leeds. I should probably comment on the uncertainty I felt when I didn’t know who was going to participate in the event or the uncertainty about how the unpredictable English weather was going to behave and how we were going to react to it in a space with no heating. I should probably be discussing, at length, the relationship between uncertainty and safety when organising an event in such an uncertain space, with lethal cables hanging from the ceiling, oceans of dust waiting to drown us, or ghosts of sheep and workers behind every dark and unknown corner.

Yes, I know, I should be engaging with an academic dissertation on the social construction of the uncertain…but I can’t. I have to be honest. I have a terrible phobia: I’m afraid of birds. And why is this important or related to the subject matter? Easy, because the biggest uncertainty I can face is not knowing if I will encounter my flapping nemesis, my flying nightmare. When fear appears as a possibility, uncertainty turns into a virtual danger. Temple Works is full of pigeons; you can see their presence everywhere, feathers, carcasses, excrement. You can hear that nerve-racking sound, “coo coo, coo, coo”. They are everywhere, waiting for me to lower my defences and surprise me.

When Yoko asked us to think about a moment of uncertainty, I thought about a moment of panic.

When entering the darkness, holding hands with people stepping on unstable ground, there was only one thought in my mind: pigeons. Many thoughts crossed my mind: “What if this is their headquarters? Can pigeons live in the dark? Wait…bats can do that. What if there are bats here that will be confused with pigeons? A wing is a wing after all. What would happen if we accidentally step on a nest? Damn you, Hitchcock!!”. When we reached the end, in total darkness, I was relieved.

“I think it is safe to say that there will be no pigeons here. Wait…what about rats”, “I don’t have a phobia of rats!!!! No, but they are not pleasant and they can bite, you, right?” And then, Yoko mentioned a draught in her face. “Draught? Like wings’ draught?”.

After we got out I thought that the worst possible uncertainty doesn’t necessarily come from the outside but resides in the way we react to it. The unknown, the unexpected, turns into anxiety when we project our deepest fears on it. The worst possible uncertainty, in our adventurous academic workshop, was not related to the success of it but to the fact that there, sitting on those lethal cables, resting in the darkness or camouflaged with that dust, a pigeon will be waiting for me to say “coo coo, coo coo”.

Hello, my name is Edgar and I’m ornithophobic.

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36 Videos by Edgar Gomez Cruz

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38 Photo by Edgar Gomez Cruz

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40 Photo by Oz Hardwick

Chase - Eject

by Oz Hardwick There are ways you can have your hands devise, your ways of going down; a breadcrumb trail as a way to explore, so we just touch. It’s more interesting to be on the far end and know where the door is. We’re talking about a mask everyone can follow, to take away your sight, a sensory deprivation device. It’s a beautiful idea.

See what it’s like now. We need the dark spaces, the completely dark spaces, without seeing or talking: it’s a new uncertainty. We met at the subway station and she was right, her visual cues found just enough shelter.

You remember that it’s not just eye contact, but the point at which you have to do it.

So, they’ve made art at the end of it, over the branch of a tree. What that means is that you rely too much on the senses.

It was lost only because they rolled it into the middle, but when you come out, the light hits you like insects. I’m pretty desperate to ask about frogs in a new way, so where should we set up the equipment?

Put it right here. Then they can decide their gender. I used to work in a fruit shop, and learnt design through talking, recording, and manual tweaking. You can look around the relationships within this spiral to explore physical strength. In sunflowers, we elaborate

edges, with people from around the world who inscribe their memories in this place, this half-way space on a different scale.

That space is always configuring itself, sliding time. If the dream happens, you can go back in time: slightly different histories can have slightly different continual lines, but at some point there is always a change of behaviour. Looking at a species of dog is the best way of looking at it. It’s like myths meeting. Paper regenerates doubly, but is disappointed in the experience, as technology promises one thing and delivers another. You never step into the ceiling but, if you’re very inventive, come the autumn, there are things going on. Just think about the dinosaurs with flaming red hair: they’re just hiding, capturing the captured, pacing up and down. Their preparation was for a much bigger space, on and on …

That moral ambiguity is part of the attraction: You can have a look but you can’t go down.

What we think we are certain of, is what we see, like algae and stuff, like an ice rink. The security of that chain is the riskiest thing we could do to our own bodies. The modern city is so desensitised, there are things you don’t see in the practices you bring. I can’t do it because I’ve only got one hand. Does it matter?

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Photo by Oz Hardwick

Temporal Uncertainty

by Oz Hardwick In a new environment, one often finds what one brings, and I came to Temple Works thinking about the uncertainty of my perceptions of the historical past. However, deciding to capture my experience in real time, in longhand, my focus shifted to the uncertainty of my perceptions of the present.

My intention to listen to the ‘voice’ of the building soon became more specifically attuned to the way in which it transformed the voices of other workshop participants into an unintelligibly distorted murmur, above which sentences, phrases or single words would rise to clarity, sometimes discretely, at other times overlapping. The effect was of the architectural space translating a shared experience into a fragmentary, unstable monologue in, as it were, a single voice.

The slightly awkward act of transcribing this monologue in real time, in a hand-held notebook as I walked around the room, meant that often I would be writing one thing while listening to something else. Both listening and writing require degrees of attention that are not sustainable simultaneously, and negotiating unfamiliar space added a further demand upon my attention.

Consequently, the partially-written phrases would often remain incomplete as my attention was caught by something else and I forgot what I was writing. I am fairly sure – though, of course, it is impossible to check – that within these shifts of attention I will have slipped in misapprehended homophones and, I expect, words that I just thought ought to have been there. This caused both frustration and intrigue in roughly equal measures.

The uncertainty here is apparent: what would I hear and how accurately could I transcribe it?

What has particularly stayed with me so far about the experience, though, is an awareness of that temporal slip between thought and inscription. It’s something that, through more than half a century of practice – particularly as my sense of myself is, to a significant degree, as a writer – has long since acquired the appearance of being akin to reflex; yet intense focus on process within the moment has paradoxically led to an acute awareness of the uncertainty of what that moment actually bears. ‘Now’ becomes a point of both infinite accumulation and infinite dispersal, and inscription becomes an uncertain act of remembrance of uncertainty, a tentative elegy for something impossible to have known.

On reflection, I am not certain what I took into Temple Works, what I carried away, or what I left behind. But there are words – captured on paper, in photographs, on-line, and in sound recordings – that, like the light traces in Simon Bowen’s photographs, the ambient sounds in Scott McLaughlin and Tom Jackson’s recordings, or the lost wholes around Rachel Clarke’s assembled fragments, attest simultaneously to both presence and absence in fixed, yet inescapably uncertain, acts of false memory.

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44 Photo by Erinma Ochu

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46 Photos by Tom Jackson

Uncertainty workshop reflection

by Tom Jackson During this workshop in which we explored the theme of uncertainty, several opportunities were created to experience, capture and reflect upon the ways in which psychological feelings of uncertainty presented themselves as bodily movement and the ways in which these somatic responses may have impacted upon our shared experiences of the activities.

As one of the organisers of the event, I felt uncertain that the unconventional format and location would be well received. When the time came for everyone to start participating in practical activities, my movement around the space revealed that uncertainty. During the initial discussions and setup, I felt motivated to repeatedly reorientate my perception, adopting different vantage points and attempting to assess the response to the task. However, I also positioned myself alongside friends and colleagues attending the event, undoubtedly seeking the familiarity and reassurance associated with those relationships. These somatic responses were captured in a panning timelapse video I created (see below). The temporal compression of this format is helpful in revealing patterns of activity, as long periods of time can be examined quickly, allowing relationships to be more easily identified.

After the activities had successfully commenced, I remember wondering if the physical manifestation of my uncertainty had been recognised by other participants and if it had impacted upon their perception of the event?

Video by Tom Jackson

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During an activity in which we explored a potentially dangerous part of the building, I found myself pacing up and down, unable to control a very strong somatic response to my uncertainty regarding the safety of all participants. Whilst this type of reaction is unsurprising and welldocumented, it is interesting to reflect upon the impact it may have had on our shared experience of the activity. In a dark space, where visual information was very limited, the auditory stimuli resulting from my pacing may have become one of the most persuasive cues in the perception of the activity. As auditory information has the potential to dominate our perception of time, did my pacing significantly alter the perceived length of the activity? Also, given the lack of visual information, was a repetitive auditory cue used to maintain spatial orientation?

One of the final activities of the event involved blindfolding participants and asking them to find their way to a chair using their other senses. Feelings of uncertainty were created by the lack of visual information so commonly dominant in tasks involving spatial orientation. This time long exposure photography was used as the method of capture. Attaching a source of light to each participant produced a spectal trace of their uncertain movement through the space. As a photographer, I found it interesting to experiment with the use of long exposure photography as a method of producing data rather than an aesthetic effect, for which its use is more commonly associated. The results of my participation in the activity made me reflect upon my own spatial awareness and I also wondered if those who found the task particularly challenging were left feeling uncertain about their reliance on visual perception?

48 Photo by Simon Bowen Photo by Simon Bowen

Photo by Tom Jackson

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50 Photo by Tom Jackson

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52 Photo by Edgar Gomez Cruz

The brightness of the black

by Ann Light The brightness of the black stays with me. My eyes sting from the masonry dust and I am glad to have stopped, because, despite my calmness, I am sure that somewhere is the lump of brick or stone that will trip me or Simon, who is leading us, and I will get out OK, but not without some serious scuffing.

Simon walks in without another thought, reaching out his hand and saying ‘I need a hand, somebody’ and equally impulsively I take it and become his shadow, or as we get darker, his comrade at the front of the pack, trusting and intrepid, with no hands of my own, one being possessed by him and the other grabbed by the next in the chain, who is Edgar, who I do not really know. Is this why I do not talk to him or is it that to look back down the line is to look into the light where we can see ourselves and the impression of total vivid black is lost to us? I am forward looking even though I cannot see.

We are not in there long. Tom is pacing in the lit area. Someone suggests we drop our hands so that the chain disappears and we can feel the things that we can only sense now (in my case, a wall just moments from my nose) and someone starts to count down to zero from three and some of us drop our hands before the counting has gained purchase on the group. It is higgledy-piggledy.

Then instead of coming out as we went in, linked, interdependent and tentative, we talk about putting on our phones, our back-up in the immediate black, but possibly useless in the depths because no one knew how many thick arches stretched back into the 2 acre space but their thickness is daunting, and then someone lights their phone before anyone is ready and there we are in a dank space full of brick and breezeblock with a rough concrete floor beneath us but no mystery.

Though some of the chain were now looking round them to see whose hands they had been holding, since it was all a little random and fast and some people had used the chain to progress along it to see a little further into the dark. Simon and me, as vanguard, had pushed on slowly, turning a wall and stopping, pulling everyone out of the lit zone and making the experiment count. But it had not been dark enough at the far end of the chain for everyone.

So we all light up our phones and there we all are. Tom is alive with relief ahead of us, walking us out of the bunker area and only then really revealing how much it has cost him to let us go to a depth where we cannot see us, though we can see him. As the day goes on, the extent of the risk emerges: people have (allegedly) died lost; several hours of searching by the emergency services was necessary to extract earlier investigators‌ But these are the stories which both seemed to fuel our Pandora-complex and make us more sure that we can go and come back safely by virtue of making a human chain. No, the edge of dereliction is stimulating, as we hear about the future regeneration work mooted, all in hard hats and carefully not standing near pillars or connecting joints.

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Where does the day begin? With Rachel and I finding breakfast by the canal and catching our first glimpse of the factories of south Leeds? Or when we locate the strange Egyptian frontage and know we’ve arrived? Or as Susan shows us the cavernous loading bay with domed skylight and mural collages by Jamie Reid? We parade through film set corridors being used as film sets.

We pass stage toilets that cannot be used, to be shown finally the actual toilet and third of three accessible spaces in which a strange circular chair sits host to fortune.

We go on the roof, which was grazed by sheep in its first incarnation, now boasting safety glass (and asphalt over the worst of the joints that cannot be stood on). Nonetheless, there are drips in the great hall, which come from time and ruin, not the carefully managed conditions to keep flax warm and moist.

We must not tread on the wet parts of the root, for they are slippery as ice. We have passed the toy train association headquarters. The rows of skylights look like stupas and the far off hydraulic lift, the first of its kind, is said to have been put there to get sheep on and off the roof. If they did live up there it must have been cold. We were there for midsummer and it was not nice. The grass kept things drawing water and some mechanism fed this into the hall. The sheep were kept for the grass and sacrificed at parties for the staff. If there were sheep, Tom is skeptical about this.

10 of us. Then Yoko tells us about the day’s exercise: prepare for uncertainty, sense uncertainty, capture uncertainty, share uncertainty.

We have lunch and that emboldens us to challenge the capturing… we need traces and layers.

The building is full of traces and layers, some dripping from the brickwork like lace ectoplasm. A pigeon. A patch of pink brick dust over white, broken by black smudges.

We are soon back in the hall with recording equipment. Later we find out that it is only a mono microphone, but we spread round as far as we are allowed and form a big 4 point star, all standing clear of the overhanging joists and little knowing how powerful the might of one snapping might be. (Bricks fired 250 feet.) We are in a safe uncertainty and we are interpreting and shaping, sounding and making. It is not a plan, but again two sets of discussions have converged on a course of action that involves us all. We clap in an unpredictable sequence.

Our last note, incorporating these same contradictions, is sounded in squeezing into the antechamber between the two sets of doors that open into the remaining reception area. I stumble impromptu upon the session, to fill the last gap of air in this cupboard-like space. Boomy noises are being tried out. They are being tried where there is no echo. …and now no air, just at least six absorbent bodies tightly squeezed. We are pushing the uncertainty into another dimension. Boomy noises in a tiny space, the smallest space to be found in a building that hosts the room that was once, and maybe yet, the biggest room in the whole of Britain.

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Photo by Simon Bowen

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56 Photo by Edgar Gomez Cruz

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58 Photo by Simon Bowen

Uncertain space

by Scott Mc Laughlin One of several experiments to give us a varied experience of Temple Works’ main space involved ‘sounding’ the space, with the whole group spreading as far around the room as was allowed by health-and-safety, and the microphone in the centre of the group. One by one, each person made a single loud hand-clap, with the next person allowing the sound to decay fully before they made their own sound. This is documented on the ‘templeWorks_claps.mp3’ file. Unfortunately, on this day we only had a mono recording kit available, so the recordings have no stereo spatiality, however, the depth of the space is clearly audible from the long reverberation. The broadband noise spectrum of each single clap fills the space like a shockwave. Dulled by the energy-sapping distance of the reflections, the sound roars and recedes in time like a tide-wave, as though squeezed by the far-off concrete surfaces.

Each clap in the recording reports a person and a space. Each is an action that energises the contained air and allows the room to describe itself. The people sound variously near and far, weaker and stronger claps, and each clap alternates with the voice of the space for several seconds after. At 0:24 there is a change, as we hear for the first time a clap from a member of the group who has faced away from the microphone and into the space.

I recall seeing her, and knowing that she was not particularly remote: relatively at least, she was no nearer the walls than anyone else. But she sounds like she has disappeared into another place, removed from the plane occupied by the other members of group who face me, and pulled into an inverse space. On the recording, the clap immediately before hers is made by a man standing only three feet to her right, and no further from the microphone than she is. His clap (re)presents him, while she is absented by hers.

Her clap is shielded from the microphone by her body, which blocks much of the high frequency components that tell us about space and position. The ear-brain uses high frequency to deduce spatial position because these sounds decay more quickly (so carry more information when close to us), and are absorbed or reflected more easily by other objects. In turning away from the microphone, she creates a shadow. This shadow becomes multiple as it propagates across the space. Reflections piled upon reflections accentuate the loss of spatial cues. Directionality is erased by space.

Spaces such as Temple Works are rare — for their emptiness and stillness as much as their size — and as such they have a rare quality. They allow us to explore how sound can read space overtly, to step outside our sound’s usually passive role in space, allowing sound to make space ‘unknown’.

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60 Photo by Erinma Ochu

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62 Photo by Oz Hardwick

Uncertainty

by Alex McLean and Erinma Ochu Arriving, late and lost and apprehensive about what was on the other side of the door.

Is this it? It must be it.

Faced with uncertainty, I feel myself looking for reassuring roles. Talking with Erinma, we wanted the visceral feeling of a small room, feeling the space with our ears and bodies, using loud, low frequencies. We found a small space between two sets of double doors between outside and inside.

I took the controls, the technology was all mine, Erinma seemed to take the role of curator, directing the sound (literally finding the right position for the speakers for the best physical effect), and the sound (listening and suggesting). Others joined and encouraged us along, and the low frequencies demanded a rushing breakbeat on top, then vocals, until we were experiencing a very small, broken rave. I introduced the uncertainty through applying random numbers to different levels of the sonic pattern, it felt experimental, uncertain, searching... Pushing the speakers into distortion and crackling felt dangerous. Then the rest of the group returned through the doorway, I killed the sound and they were encouraged to stay to join the experience. Suddenly the exploration turned into a performance, and our exploration transformed post-hoc into a rehearsal. The code I had been exploring with Erinma became a sequence or score for playback. I went straight into the broken rave, the code felt dead, it felt awkward, predetermined, out of context.

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64 Photos by Alex McLean

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66 Photos by Helen Thornham

Sensory ghosts and iterations

by Helen Thornham I find it unnerving – and uncertain – to be asked to think about this in a place like Temple Works.

My epistemological and ontological frameworks have become blurry.

I’m not sure about the object of my enquiry or the frameworks that might offer alternative routes to it. I think instead about the possibilities of imagining, who gets to imagine and the power relations of imagining.

In the end though, uncertainty is a provocation I think, to not imagine. Or at least, to locate imagining into sensory and tactile, temporally specific and conditioned moments and actions.

But then that doesn’t happen – I find in the moment of complete darkness, holding hands (whose hands?) that the experience of not knowing whether my eyes were open or closed was actually a familiar one. I find that there have been previous iterations of this moment – differently framed, differently positioned. Where is the ghost of sensory memory in notions of imagining?

I find that I am enjoying myself. There is also something about the griminess, the dirt, the pigeon smell from under arches in the rain, the provocation to do something -that I am really enjoying. It feels decadent and indulgent. This is also a sensory ghost I didn’t know about until that moment.

At the same time, I can reach the chair, blindfolded, in a room I have seen only briefly.

When we turn on our lights in a moment of reveal, to disrupt the experience and make known the otherwise known, it was already known. There was a flag, a marker and an echo of a past presence that made us repetitive. I think we were the iterations.

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Biography of participants Yoko Akama is an Associate Professor in communication design at RMIT University, Australia. Her design practice is informed by various Japanese philosophy to consider how and what futures can be created together. She has won several awards for her research with communities to strengthen their adaptive capacity for disaster resilience in Australia. Her current work contributes towards the efforts of Indigenous Nations enact self-determination and governance. She also co-leads the Design+Ethnography+Futures research program with Sarah Pink. www.rmit.edu.au/staff/yokoakama Simon Bowen is an interaction designer, researcher and photographer. As Knowledge Exchange Associate at Newcastle University’s Open Lab he is investigating the value of making in academicindustrial collaborations having previously worked in health service design and media technology.

His broader design research combines participatory and speculative design strategies to explore human-sensitive applications of technology. simon.bowen@newcastle.ac.uk Rachel Clarke is a Research Associate at Open Lab, Newcastle University. Her research focuses on socially engaged arts approaches to enquire into the design and use of everyday technology with communities. Recent work includes co-investigation of the role of technology in celebrating identities and place with older citizens working between cultural institutions, city planners and urban developers. rachel.clarke@ncl.ac.uk Edgar Gómez Cruz is a Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne. He has published widely on a number of topics relating to digital culture, ethnography, and photography. His recent publications include From Kodak Culture to Networked Image. An Ethnography of Digital Photography Practices (2012) and Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical Studies in Material Visual Practices (2016, with Asko Lehmuskallio). Current research investigates screen cultures and creative practice, which is funded through RCUK and Vice Chancellor research grants. edgar.gomez@rmit.edu.au Oz Hardwick is a York-based poet, photographer and occasional musician. Widely published in international journals, anthologies and other media, Oz’s most recent poetry collection is The Ringmaster’s Apprentice (Valley Press, 2014), and he is co-author, with Amina Alyal, of the Saboteur-shortlisted Close as Second Skins (IDP, 2015). He is Professor of English and Programme Leader for English and Writing at Leeds Trinity University. p.hardwick@leedstrinity.ac.uk Tom Jackson is a Research Associate in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. After a highly successful commercial career working for creative agencies across Yorkshire, he started teaching in higher education in 2004. His primary area of research is sensory ethnography. Bringing together interests in cross-modal perception, anthropology, cultural geography and digital media, he proposes new sensory research methods. Through the design 68

and development of digital tools, such as multisensory, spatial and participatory virtual archives and immersive and embodied audiovisual recordings, his work aims to explore the relationships between sensory experience and cultural phenomena. Tom’s commercial experience in graphic design, photography and interactive programming have informed his largely practice-led approach to research. http://media.leeds.ac.uk/people/tom-jackson/ Ann Light is Professor of Design and Creative Technology, specializing in design for social wellbeing and the politics of participation, and publishing on design of social process, social innovation and cross-cultural methodology. She has worked with grass-roots organizations and marginalized groups across five continents, in local, transnational and international development settings. ann.light@sussex.ac.uk Erinma Ochu is Creative Director and co-founder of Squirrel Nation. Squirrel Nation make and curate memorable experiences that punctuate everyday life, from pop up urban farms, to gallery pieces and games. www.squirrelnation.co.uk Scott Mc Laughlin is a composer and improviser based in Huddersfield, UK. Born in Ireland (Co. Clare) in 1975. He lectures in composition and music technology at the University of Leeds.

His research focuses on contingency and indeterminacy in the physical materiality of sound and performance, combining approaches from spectral music and experimental music with dynamical systems theory to explore autopoiesis and recursive feedback systems in constraint-based openform composition. His debut CD “There are neither wholes nor parts” was recently released on Ergodos Records. s.mclaughlin@leeds.ac.uk Alex McLean is a live coder based in Yorkshire, making code to make music. He researches ways of making with code at the University of Leeds and FoAM Kernow, including running the AHRC Weaving Codes project with Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Dave Griffiths. He’s currently Sound Artist in Residence at the ODI London, making an interactive live coded album for release on the Computer Club label, and co-editing the Oxford Handbook on Algorithmic Music with Roger Dean. http://slab.org/ Helen Thornham is an Associate Professor at the University of Leeds. She is involved in a number of research projects investigating practices in digital media that are funded by the EPSRC, ESRC and British Academy is the author of Ethnographies of the Videogame: Narrative, Gender and Praxis (2011) and co-editor of Renewing Feminisms (2013) and Content Cultures (2014). Her research focuses on gender and technological mediations, data and digital inequalities, embodiment, youth, space, place, and communities. h.thornham@leeds.ac.uk

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70 Photo

by Simon Bowen ISBN 978-0-9943330-2-5