Elaborated Story
* 10-week project with brief set with British Library Oral History Collection * Created an interactive painting as a response to the sound archive about Bristol River Board to draw the public’s attention to the hidden history and to shed light on human labour and everyday life.
This project is a part of the elective 'The Other Voice' at the Royal College of Art 2020.
It is a response to a voice recording in the British Library and an attempt to revive underlying stories in our everyday life. This work mainly focuses on his young days as a junior at the Bristol River Avon Board. From running errands to drawing maps, his tasks were not something we can easily imagine when we think about the water industry in modern days. However, these are certainly necessary and important as a whole.
Everyday life is a constant subsequence of repetition. Many people are eager to disentangle themselves from these repetitions, yet, it is a very source of sustenance of life. In Bob’s story, past repeated chores, labour and endeavours are reconfigured in his voice and memory. Listening to this story reminds us of how much our daily routines occupy our lives and how much invisible efforts are being made to support us. Here, the first idea to make his voice visible was set out. As a respondent, I want to shed new light on his labour, his time, and his story by bringing my own physical energy and time into the work. A visual interpretation of Bob’s story should provoke different angles to see our everyday life and deliver his story which has much meaning for many of us to think about more intuitively.
Research: Everyday life
Everyday life is the backbone of human life at both individual and social levels. As daily life is repeated and feels tenuous, sometimes we think it weighs on us and often overlooks its importance. However, there is the sublime in our everyday life. All incidents happen in it. Education and discipline are practically revealing, an order and a hierarchy are situated in routines. This is a fierce and dynamic space for individuals to meet others, all relationships and society.
Many postmodern social and philosophical theories put everyday life as a key to understand or recovering human subjectivity. For Henri Lefevbre, everyday life is a ‘raw material’ to come to a holistic view of humans.(Rider, 1992) Agnes Heller said, “What we need is a revolution of life, of ‘everyday life.’ Life itself needs to be transcended, that was the important thing.”(Isaac et al., 2020) while she argued that everyday life is a network of society such as institutional framework, power relations. Heller mentioned that she ‘vehemently against the concept of Heidegger that one should leave everydayness behind to find an authentic self and she rather found it in her relation to her world and to herself(Rider, 1992). Unlike many postmodern philosophers did, she rather chose to be in everyday life by identifying it as the locus for defetishizing society instead of getting out of everydayness.
Resonating with Heller’s view, research on artworks about daily life has been conducted. Dansaekhwa, a Korean style monochrome painting, was outstanding as it conforms to the idea of repetition, endeavour and importance of everyday life. The fundamental of Dansaekhwa is repeated action and transcend and the root is based on Korean life in the 1970s. (한국의 단색화 展, 2020)
Research: Voice
Research about speech and sound have been done simultaneously in order to create the recording visible and intuitive since the way Bob Whitaker delivered his story years later he experienced felt remarkable. Speech has been understood as a significant characteristic of human communication departing from other species.
Vocal emotion expression in speech is also assumed to be biologically adaptive for social creatures and voice is a carrier signal of emotion effects. The speech itself has enormous amounts of information and sound patterns such as pitches, tremors and speed so that people can guess many things only with listening. (Bachorowski, 1999)
Perhaps because of this rich information and patterns, there have been many attempts to interpret the speech into different modes. Lacan argued that human speech can be decomposed into bits (Mills, 2010)and Saussure distinguished the sound pattern from the concept of language in speech(Baskin and De Saussure, n.d.).
Also, many practitioners conducted experiments to transform speech and sound into
different sensory experiences. and spectrography can be an example. Ash Koosha, the electronic artist, creates a multi-sensory experience using waveforms of sound with Virtual Reality. (Ash Koosha, 2020) Fillip Studios also designed a project ‘Vocode’ which can draw sound using pens and vibration. (Vocode - Fillip Studios, 2020)
The intentions of all these works aim at different goals, however, they all let people explore new concepts and somehow more fundamental form of voice.
Design Process
His voice is converted into numerical signals in Processing, Numeric signals move a motor attached with a brush. From researches and following experiments, the final outcome is designed as a Dansaekhwa style painting created by Bob’s voice. I chose to make something physically repeated to show the idea of everyday life. Also, the instrumental music is generated with the recording to explore another way to experience his memory and story.
Using ‘MusicAlgorithms’ which is a set of algorithms creating music from the data, this numeric data from Bob’s recording is converted into a pitch and duration. The numbers used within a designated musical range
after rounded up. The range is 1 to 88 representing the piano’s 88 keys. His voice is converted into numerical signals in Processing, Numeric signals move a motor attached with a brush.