Fever Dream

Copied from handwritten notes found in a copy of "Phylogenesis of the Ear" by Louis Guggenheim MD. Author unknown.

*Tropical – S.E Asia, Borneo, Sumatra etc. Consult Howard. Re. cases in urban centres. Europe.…

[The parasite] insinuates itself between two of the tiny bones that connect the tympanic membrane and the cochlea by latching onto the ligament connecting two of the bones with its mouth parts, and consuming the ligament tissue - eventually substituting itself. In placing itself interstitially within the ossicular chain, it becomes an integral part of the hearing process – a sensorial mediator and gatekeeper.Verto Parbulus’s exoskeleton is telescopically articulated, with a powerful cartilage / muscle composite girdle connecting [the] segments, which sit in a naturally contracted state. [The muscle] acts to keep the cartilage with which it is intertwined under intense compression… When the parasite detects a sudden transient vibration of above a certain amplitude threshold, it responds with an almost instant relaxation of its exoskeletal muscle system, thereby increasing its length by typically 170% (check figure). This acts to restore the integrity of the ossicle chain in an almost perfect inverse of the tympanic reflex, which has evolved to protect the inner ear from damage due to sudden loud events. It then winds back (wrong term.?) the muscles after a few milliseconds, thereby dislocating the stapes from the oval window in the cochlea, and attenuating the transmitted vibrations by as much as 98%. This entity, like many parasites (?), seeks to maximise its own chances of survival and reproduction by modifying its host’s behaviour (supposition? Check). In an attempt to mitigate the traumatising gunshot dynamics bestowed upon him / her by the parasite, the host will eventually gravitate toward dynamically bland sonic environments – where he or she may make contact with similarly afflicted individuals. The mating processes of Verto Parbulus are as yet undiscovered - due in part to its rarity but also to its size and location within the body. Removal would bring on certain and irreversible deafness and studied specimens have all been acquired post mortem – usually following suicide.
*talk to tropical deseases in Dulwich. h.o.d may have some data on epidemiology. also cochlear implants...can we get output?

Also, for further reading see:

Cattermole-Tally, F (1995) The Intrusion of Animals into the Human Body: Fantasy and Reality. Folklore, Vol. 106, pp. 89-92.

The Haptic Optic

How do you record an object properly? Is it always pertinent to photograph, or draw something, for example? How about something which is similar to both, but is really neither?
A while back I began to explore the possibilities of making rubbings of three dimensional objects. These images are of one I made of the adapted cabinet that Daphne Oram used to house the oscillators and wave-shaping units in the Oramics system, working on it with the lid and doors open, and as carefully as I could to avoid any damage of the circuitry. I developed my own materials which would mark without the need for graphite etc, so that I could use just my fingernails and a specially made tool. The finished piece is painted black on the reverse to bring out the marks...






For some time I've been mulling over the sort of world the Atomist/Epicurian theory of vision conjures up - where seeing consists of the apprehension of a succession of 'skins' which fly lightning fast from the surfaces of objects and into the eye - ancient cinema. As I've mentioned previously, this fantastical space seems to me to somehow articulate the in-between-ness, or irrationality of transcribing light into sound. So I've begun to make 'spectres' (eidola, simulacra) from machines which deal with light and sound as materials. You could even call them wave-fronts perhaps...
The finished piece is redolent of a technical drawing, dislocated and contaminated with noise, or a map of a war-torn installation produced by proto-photographic means. Every fold in the material shows up as a white mark as it is manipulated into position, so an odd record of movement and registration is generated, all by intimate touch.
Next, will be the contact printer that used to belong to the London Filmmakers' Co-op.

Light Traps

It's all been done before in all sorts of ways you know - by the structuralist/materialist film makers in the '70's, people like Guy Sherwin and Liz Rhodes (not that I'd compare myself to them of course), and using video, the Vasulkas amongst others. Nonetheless, it can be satisfying to discover you've made a video that has the camera in it as an explicit and essential ingredient.
I was attempting to synthesize some audio by pumping it through an LED, and then burning some wood to produce smoke and heat-haze noise in the sonified signal (see a much earlier post below). Of course, there was a breeze and it just drifted either onto me, or in fact anywhere but in between the LED and the lens. But then I noticed this as I was fiddling with the tripod...interference patterns generated by the high speed flicker of the LED heterodyning with the scan rate of the CCD chip in the camera. At least that's the best explanation I can come up with. I ought to (will) try this with a few different cameras, and eventually come up with an installation.

The audio being pumped is itself from light signals - emanations from a shop window on Regent Street (I forget which), which rather oddly, was covered in lacewings...

Spectra (Signalling Hut component)

They were hot there, and cold there, and some had been born, and most had died. Their houses were boxes, tents, scooped out dogs, brick towers, and actual houses. Some dug into grass; others camped in shadow; many worked in the house dispersing rice and books and were not permitted to sleep on the floor. There was to be no unfolding of blankets or spreading of sheets. Never could a barrier or blind or corner be erected in the house, nor could cloth be clipped or crimped or hung. They sheltered off of one another and slept in heated chains of body. No one could sleep for more than one dream. The dream happened during the day, and the dream was the storm, and the storm was whatever you could name.

MARCUS, B. 1998. The Age of Wire and String. London: Flamingo. pp.81

Two Machines: 2 - Oramics

The Oramics system is currently residing in my workshop, until it gets moved to a permanent home. As you can see, it's in a bit of a sorry state, having had several owners since the passing of Daphne Oram, and having spent the last few years in a barn. My reason for posting these images was partly so that I could talk about patina; and I use this word in its broadest sense. The Oramics system (it is in fact two machines, a rack of amplifiers and two speakers) wasn't designed in the normal sense of the word, it is an agglomeration of small inspirations and problem solving, tweaks and bodges. As such it has an aura of endeavour and complexity which is impossible to fake or design - a patina of many, many meaningful decisions and actions effected over years.
This patina is not about surface and age (as the dictionary would have it), but rather it is a composite of visual noise, manifest functionality and guessed-at heuristics; a personality transmitted as though a radio signal, or more pertinently, modulated light.

As with the ANS, there were things going on with Oramics which will most probably remain unsolved - small modifications, planned but never realised features. Amongst the odds and ends that have accompanied the main instrument is a rather mashed up Ondioline. Why was Oram planning on adding a keyboard element? It's been retro-fitted with a lot of wiring, terminating in multi-pin sockets, so this part of the project got to a reasonably advanced stage. Odd, considering the incredible amount of ingenuity and resources directed toward producing a sound who's every parameter could supposedly be altered with a paint brush. Perhaps Oram got bored with having to define pitches with carefully placed little squares of electrical tape stuck to film, and just wanted to tickle some ivories... We may never know.

Two Machines: 1 - The ANS

Of all of the one-off electronic musical instruments I've seen (either in the flesh, or photographed), the ANS is simply the most beautiful. It's now resident in the Glinka Museum in Moscow, probably for good, and when I made some recordings on it recently, needed considerable maintenance work - the lowest tonewheel is out of action and there is a lot of 100Hz bleeding into the audio. Stanislav Kreitchi (who has looked after the machine for many years) tells me he'll get it up and running properly - but I don't think even he can solve the small matter of the Velvet Rope...














Apologies for the phone camera. Sadly it was all I had with me...

xxxxx_09

Images: (cc) Danja Vassiliev & Will Scrimshaw

Last week I had the good fortune to be invited by Derek Holzer and Martin Howse to participate in the xxxxx_09 workshop - part of Club Transmediale in Berlin. Provisionally themed 'Structures', this turned out to be an intense week of activity with some very talented people. Anyone glancing through this blog will quickly grasp that coding and digital control/instrumentation systems don't enter into my work - I have a GUI-level relationship with an aging Macintosh, and that's normally as far as my interests lead. What I enjoyed about the workshop was some peoples' ability to work across the soft and hardware genres in order to get what they needed done, regardless of the type of laptop or platform being used.

So in response to all this digital activity, after a week, I produced what amounts to a piece of 2 by 1 leaning against the wall with a copper wire stretched down its length, one wooden bridge, and a small speaker acting as the other. That was the orientation the piece of wood was in when I arrived, and I thought it best not to upset it.

Pointing at the wire is a small red laser and directly the other side a photodiode feeding a tiny amplifier, which drives the speaker. This generates a feedback loop which has slightly chaotic tendencies, as the string is very slack, so you hear a slowly shifting drone, with occasional Tourette's. The thing has two outputs - the acoustic of the wire, and the laser being modulated by the wire (the second photo - notice the diffraction pattern, which I was, er, rather pleased about). This recording drifts between the two; you can tell the photophonic output by the fact that it cuts out occasionally as people wander in front of it. At the beginning one can also discern the irrepressible Derek Holzer kvetching about his hair, and lasers...

Spectra

This is a project I've been working on for a little while with Mick Grierson, whom I first met in the guts of the great organ at Goldsmiths college in London's New Cross (on Watling Street for all you psychogeographers). Anyway, we discovered shared research interests, and began following some of them up practically, eventually resulting in this method of what Mick terms audio-visual phase distortion. You'll find a video of it here.
'Spectra' and 'specter' are both rooted in the Latin for 'apparition' or 'vision', and most importantly for my purposes here, the Epicurian or Atomist theory of vision, which stated that images were atom-thin 'skins' (simulacra) which flew off of objects and entered the eye. Ghosts were errant simulacra, cut loose from their natural paths. I first came across this in Dario Gamboni's extraordinary book on visual ambiguity, 'Potential Images', and later on in David Park's 'A Fire Within The Eye' - both of which I can recommend.
Anomalous theories about perception can sometimes seem to provide us with the right instruments to examine experiences created by media, which might seem irreconcilable in the rationalist domain...

The Auditory Camera

As I think I mentioned before, some natural sources of modulated light, when sonified, sound remarkably like their normal sonic correlates. This is both slightly disappointing and oddly comforting, in so far as it's a sort of confirmation of what our ears are already able to tell us - a kind of belt-and-braces school of information gathering. And so it is with flying insects. So far I've succeeded in recording honey bees, a cloud of midges, and short snatches of assorted unidentified bugs. The midges recording is remarkable for several reasons, which I won't go into - the reason being that the recording is too poor for public consumption, and so I'd be pontificating on something nobody can get to hear.
One of the problems with recording flying insects is getting the little sods to stay still enough, or at least to predict where they might be going next. With bees, you know where they come and go from. This recording is of bees leaving and entering a hive that I made in 2006, which currently rests on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall on the south bank of the Thames in London. The reason it's there, and is also the same shape as the R.F.H can be found at the Royal Festival Hive blog.
Listening to this recording, I'm struck by how nicely it describes one of the peculiarities of photophonic sound capture - that there is a very sharply defined zone of events. A volume of space in front of the photocell acts as an area of influence, or an event space defined by the characteristics of the light source and the angle of incidence that the photocell's lens dictates. With this recording, it's the sun, who's rays are effectively parallel, and probably a 120 degree capture angle. The bees pass through this volume and modulate the sun's rays with their beating wings; anything going on elsewhere is inaudible because it's out of the frame. I avoid the term 'image' here because that's not what it is - any images generated are mental. But we still have an auditory frame, or, optical properties shunted into the auditory sphere; an 'auditory camera' if you will.
I'm reminded of the discoveries made by the early Concréte exponents in the truncating of sonic events, and what this did to the raw materials. These bees have become natural oscillators, triggered by the existence of their bodies within the frame of influence generated by the photocell. Outside of this frame they become simply bees again...

Update - Since writing this post, I've been pointed in the direction or Eric Archer's sound cameras, which are just beautiful. There are some fantastic photophonic recordings on his site; particularly ingenious is one of an oscilloscope feedback system. Wonderful idea...

November 5th 2007, Crystal Palace, London

In anticipation of the coming season. Recorded with the usual kit: a solar battery charger from Maplins and a Sony MZR35 minidisc, which I find has a very forgiving mic pre-amp.

The stuff you might expect is there - harsh spikes from exploding rockets, noise and crackles from the flares...but when I played it back I wasn't expecting to hear what sounded like ghosts groaning in the distance...