Angus came for a visiting practitioner lecture and it was fascinating. His lecture was on field notes and something he called.
“field notes against sonic exceptionalism”
Now this sentence has stuck with me since the lecture, field notes against sonic exceptionalism are a bold statement but also perhaps a good thought process. Sound arts and the whole canon do have this idea of sonic exceptionalism that sound is everything. If only we closed our eyes and listened maybe we’d understand more is what we say. But also as Angus discussed, the ecological issues with recorders that take these sounds into captured material is terrible for the environment. Capturing sounds with plastic recorders that have mined lithium for their batteries and cobalt for the chips. It destroys jungles, dangerous for the communities that work for little to no pay with no safety equipment. Perhaps the field note is a response to this.
Also field notes as, he believes that they can exist as of themselves, such as the work for Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, Radical Practice of art. Field notes as the specific piece of their own things, Field Notes as Voice (the Horror) He vocalises them, he took them too far he says, he started speaking his notes in the spaces that influenced them.
He finds field notes as a way of representing the environment he hears, he worked on a project with Simon James, translated by KYRIN Chen 2022,
He now will play us field recordings he considers field notes,
I think this whole field note process is super interesting towards my project, as a counter-argument and counter source of representation of environments, and also a response to my dissertation that doesn’t sound. Could the field recording be written, could the field recording be a drawing, a photo, or a captured sound. What is a field recording? Again big questions, but I want to take a small notepad with me when I field record and see the difference between the notepad and the recording through sound.
I should also do some research into field recordings and field notes?